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The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.

Note that “they’re not currently doing harm” is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won’t be satisfied by “don’t worry I’m not currently using it”.

Absolutely this. I’m glad you were able to convey it in a way people understand.

Steam is a blackhole for PC gaming/gamers from a marketing perspective. They’ve capitalized on so much of the market, that once a person buys a game on Steam they are unlikely to buy the same game and/or even future games from a different but similar platform. It is in a sense, locking the consumer in and so many consumers are locked in. Nobody competed with Steam in the PC gaming market for an eternity and it’s not Steams fault at all.

Even if Steam went to absolute shit in the next 20 odd years they’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be coming back to play all the games I’ve ever bought on there. Even if EGS or GoG improves their interface to compete with Steam, I’ve no reason to buy elsewhere (though do support GoG please).

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architect@thelemmy.club ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I’d sooner sell my pc than give a penny to egs. I won’t even take their free games. EGS will 109% become the evil monopoly you are all so scared of if it gets a chance at all. Fuck that they already have a weird monopoly on game engines (which is making gaming boring as it is).

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- MortUS@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Maybe, but EGS is also the driving force behind Unreal Engine 5, which despite everyone hating it really is a good engine.
  
  Valve doesn’t even lease it’s engine out to other devs. I don’t even know if they’re developing their game engine.
  
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tomkatt@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform.

I strongly disagree. I quit consoles because of the exclusivity nonsense, and EGS guaranteed I will never buy anything from them by doing that shit. I won’t even redeem free games on their platform via Prime Gaming, just on principle.

You compete by giving devs and publishers a better cut, or convincing them to do deeper sales on your platform. You compete by providing a better service to users. You do not compete by literally not competing.

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- MortUS@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You’re describing how you would compete in a normal competition, but Steam has already had a decade to lock in it’s following. The competition is/was over.
  
  I say that as a Steam user, there’s absolutely nothing a competitor can do to convince me to start buying / keeping my games on a platform outside Steam. Steam just has it all AND that’s where all my existing games already are. No amount of UI/UX improvements will convince me. No amount of sales will convince me because Steam will have the same game. Better cuts to developers doesn’t bring in repeat customers.
  
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- architect@thelemmy.club ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I’ve turned around and bought games there were giving out for free on egs. I won’t even install that bs.
  
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- Railcar8095@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Well, exclusive games is the only thing Nintendo really has going for, and it’s working. And those games being first or third party isn’t really making much difference for the final user.
  
  Only real difference is hardware lock in.
  
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  - Nikelui@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I don’t particularly like the direction that Nintendo has taken in recent years, but are you willing to ignore that they were the only company in the market for handheld gaming until very recently? It’s not just game exclusives.
    
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    Railcar8095@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    They were not. They killed the PSP and the Vita. Even before the N64 and the GCube had massive exclusives.
    
    The only “recent” failure was the Wii U, which had only one or two great exclusives.
    
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  - tomkatt@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    I quit consoles because of the exclusivity nonsense
    
    Nintendo was included in that statement.
    
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    Railcar8095@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    But you’re not the market. So this not working for you doesn’t mean it’s a bad strategy, and Nintendo is an example of a company who pulled this off.
    
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Grail@multiverse.soulism.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The EGS app is so poorly built that Heroic, a third party app made by volunteers, runs faster, has a nicer UI, and has more features. EGS are not a serious competitor.

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Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given.

OK. With you, there.

That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route

…and, you lost me.

I work in UI, outside the game industry. It’s plain to me very, very few publishers care about developing good UI or community tools. Epic is no exception. Perhaps that wasn’t what you meant, but if it’s a venue they intentionally ignore, it fits the OP picture perfectly.

I also think there are other features on which Steam has failed to compete, and an inventive competitor could investigate. Things like better game integration, better curation, promises against censorship to publishers of adult content, or creative uses of AI to improve player experiences, are all options. But I think that between the attempts of Google, Amazon, and Epic, it’s seemed that simply throwing money at the game industry without knowledge of what’s valuable to gamers, has not worked well.

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- MortUS@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think those points are valid, but do you really think having better UI/UX is going to win them over customers when compared to Steam? Like, Steam is such a behemoth. Hypothetical, but if I was still a kid, and my brother had his whole library on Steam, where do you think I’d end up buying most my games? I think good UI/UX is only half the battle in this kind of competition.
  
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  - Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    You’re right, in that you do need a “hook” - but that needs to be on top of nailing the absolute basics. UI is definitely one of the more basic elements. The key here is, good UI is not something that needs millions of dollars of investment - it’s generally sort of the opposite. It needs fewer managers over-designing things and finding the best ways to “marketing push” all the high-value product items.
    
    To webpage developers, this motherfucking website is the best site in the world. It loads instantly, and barely requires any coding experience to make. Launchers are not websites (unless you want to bundle 800 MB of Chromium, as many sadly do) but some of the same principles of basicness apply.
    
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