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Regulation isn’t just about breaking them up. I was more thinking along the line of applying the DMA and DSA to Steam proper, which would only lead to benefits for us. The presence of the speculation casino that is the Steam Market into the hands of kids without any regulation is nuts, and that’s not saying anything about the current hypertoxic state of the Steam Community forums. That’s not okay, and Valve seems reluctant to fix that (the former becausr it brings them a metric ton of money, and the latter probably to avoid pissing off the gamergate libertarian crowd). Regulation could force them to do so.
That’s a good point. The number of Switches sold does nearly match Steam’s MAU.
Every Switch is handheld, but how many people are they capturing, or will they soon capture, that care very little about Nintendo games and just want to play games handheld?
Every Switch owner I know has bought at least one Nintendo game over its lifetime, and often several. According to the best selling Switch games list, it’s safe to assume at least one in every two Switch owner has bought Nintendo games for it. Is it due to the marketing and advertisement coming from the fact they own the platform, or that they’re still the kings of both casual and family friendly couch gaming? I suppose indie is strongly catching up, at least on the former but the latter might be more difficult.
I have a feeling that the “port everything to the Switch” crowd won’t really exist anymore in a world where that game already plays on a similarly-priced PC handheld without having to beg the developers first.
Wouldn’t that be nice? Given that PS and Xbox exclusives now all make their way onto PC to the point we barely have to ask anymore. Though if we were to reach that point, I’d seriously worry about the centralisation of the Steam market. Hopefully regulation will catch up soon.
Nintendo’s unbeatable advantage will always be its first-party games, but the Switch 2 — a device rumored to be a fairly light improvement over its predecessor — doesn’t quite feel like it’ll be as culturally dominant as the Switch was in 2017.
That remains to be seen. Back in 2016-2017, every gaming media was skeptical that the Switch would be anywhere near as much of a success like the DS or the GameBoy had been, or if it was going to be another failure like the Wii U.
Why buy a game on PS5 when you can get it on Steam and have access to it on any number of devices?
That has been one of the arguments for PC gaming in a long time, but it never quite reached the console players’ mindset. Not to mention that, despite its dominance in game distribution, Valve and the Steam brand are nowhere near as recognizable as any of the other ‘big 3’. The Steam Deck may have sold a few million copies (four or five from what I hear?), but it’s nowhere near the hundreds of millions of Switches, even in sale pace nowadays. I can’t see it take less than a decade for that mindset to start changing change and competitors and regulation to get interested, and even that’s an optimistic estimate.
Still, it’s good to hear the platform exlusivity walls are finally breaking down.
The transitions between these eras will offer the chance to select a fresh civilization, with a range of options determined by your previous choices.
Wait a minute. I feel like I’ve seen that one before…
Oh well, fair enough. Humankind drew heavily on Civ in its design anyway.
Thank you for the link! It helped putting things into proper nuance and context (indcluding throwing away that ridiculous notion that the ‘Steam Store’ and the ‘Steam Gaming Platform’ are two completly different things in different markets).
However, reading the whole thing, it sounds to me like while the court dismissed some of the claims (1 to 4 and 7 apparently), they agreed that Wolfire and the other plaitiffs had the right to ‘plausibly allege unlawful conduct’ about the ‘Most-favored-nations restraints’ (the part where Steam forces publishers to set prices on all stores without steam keys being involved) without mentioning anything more on the subject.
I’m not americain so I’m not sure if I understand correctly, but that means the ruling isn’t over and it’ll go into an appeal court, right?
Um, I’ve read the complaint from top to bottom and it claims way more than just ‘Valve wouldn’t give them keys to resell’ if they’re not at the same price as on steam. It also claims Valve puts a ‘Price Veto’ clause which allows them to delist games from Steam if the publisher gives bigger sales on other platforms, even if they do not using steam keys, which does sound super uncompetitive to me.
Although I’ll agree the evidence listed in the complaint seem a bit on the light side. Do you know if the trial happened yet? And if so, do you know where I can find what resolution they reached?
I feel like that’s just a very loud minority among those who play games. As you’ve so stated, the majority of people who play these games either do not care for politics in video games, and another subset prefer it that way.
If even the greediest of companies in the video game industry keep doing that, that means they’ve analyzed the market and having politics in video games might have between no to a positive impact on sales.
I think the issue is the same as Apple being anti-competitive about the AppStore. Sure, techically, both Steam and the PSN are platforms for selling games, but they’re each restricted to specific non-overlapping platforms (respictively PC and PlayStation) where there they have a (near for Steam, absolute for PSN) monopoly. Hence, anticompetitive behavior.
You are completely right. What I meant, is that since PC Gaming is only considered a subset of PC & Console gaming market (as opposed to, say, Mobile gaming), if it were to grow in share within said market, it will likely attract the eyes of regulators who could improve the current situation.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear before.