Comment on Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 5 months agoAnd you’d lose all of that.
Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
misk@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
You don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. Having some small competition that’s not ever going to threaten you because you can leverage your dominant position is also a case of a monopoly.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it. How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on? This is why they need to be broken up or brought to order via regulations. Companies are not your friends.
rtxn@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Success is not illegal. Valve isn’t buying up smaller competing storefronts, or paying off developers for exclusivity, or burying competition in legal fees and prepared 80-page lawsuits. The only thing holding back real competition is the competing platforms being dogshit.
misk@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Leveraging dominant position to keep your monopoly is illegal even in the US.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Allegations of leveraging a dominant market position doesn’t mean its actually happening.
Kedly@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Valve had nothing to do with its competitors being garbage
tyler@programming.dev 5 months ago
What are they doing to leverage their dominant position?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They could offer their games DRM-free, guarantee that their multiplayer games have LAN or provide servers and/or at least provide that information clearly the consumer, write an open source drop-in replacement for Steam Input and Workshop, guarantee more uptime on their matchmaking/friends servers, retain old versions of games that they distribute, and allow for user-customized or open source clients to fit all sorts of UI preferences, off the top of my head.
misk@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Those things are up to developers / publishers, not the marketplace.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 months ago
GOG mandates that all games must be DRM-free, so when I shop there, I know what I’m getting. Valve has tags that tell me if a game supports LAN, but developers aren’t required to report that, so I can’t tell if a multiplayer game I’m buying is built to last if the developer didn’t think to list it; if they were required to, that would be different. People lean on Steam Input and Workshop because those features are made easy for them, but using them means you don’t get those benefits outside of Steam, so there should be an open, third party alternative that developers can easily switch to if they’re familiar with developing for Steam; a company running a non-Steam store has an incentive to develop this. Matchmaking and friends servers, as they exist today, are frequently provided by the storefront, so when Steam servers go down for maintenance and I’m in the middle of an online match of Skullgirls, we get disconnected, and we have to wait until they come back up; there are ways to increase uptime and prevent this interruption, but Valve hasn’t improved the situation in at least 15 years.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that’s why they failed to make a steam competitor.
misk@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Those free games weren’t actually free, Epic paid for them, you know.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Oh, I know. I got exactly 1 free game from EGS, which I promptly bought on stream myself once I realized that EGS had no offline mode (so the game I had been playing refused to launch during an Internet outage).
And that’s one of the many reasons EGS isn’t able to get a significant market share, because as I said initially, EGS fucking sucks. If they spent half as much on improving the store as they do for timed exclusives and trying to lure people in with free games, they might actually get somewhere.
Kedly@lemm.ee 5 months ago
You dont seem to understand what a monopoly is either since steam isnt one