Comment on Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal

• rtxn@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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  • misk@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Leveraging dominant position to keep your monopoly is illegal even in the US.

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    • Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Allegations of leveraging a dominant market position doesn’t mean its actually happening.

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    • Kedly@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Valve had nothing to do with its competitors being garbage

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    • tyler@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What are they doing to leverage their dominant position?

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      • misk@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        At some point you’re so entrenched in the market you don’t have to do anything anymore. I was quite surprised that Valve somehow evaded EU Digital Markets Act gatekeeper criteria. That would mean they’d have to ensure interoperability with its competitors which would restart competition, similar to how we got rid of telecom monopolies.

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• ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on?

  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.

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  • misk@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Those things are up to developers / publishers, not the marketplace.

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    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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      • PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Honestly, even those are pretty overkill to make a competing storefront. All you’d have to do is to offer lower prices and/or take a smaller percentage while matching at least a fraction of Steam’s functionality (unlike Epic) or actively working to screw over customers (also unlike Epic). If a store sold games consistantly 10% cheaper than Steam, even without controller options, good support, a built-in forum, explicit Linux support, ect., I’m confident it would be reasonably successful. Just lool at Humble and Fanatical. While they do (mostly) sell Steam keys, their prices are arguably what made them a success, not the features you get after redeaming the Steam keys.

        Even beside that, the ideas you provided are all pretty minor. If you’re willing to throw more significant amounts of money at the platform, like many before have, you can go a lot further than that even. For example, seeing as Steam’s discovery algorithm is one of the bigger benifits Steam provides, you could one-up them by providing off-platform marketing for games launching on your platform. This would be a way to incentive devlopers and players alike to use your platform without screwing over either. Similarly, you could take a page out of Epic’s book and do giveaways regularly. Alternatively, you could use a less generous system such as “buy anything and get x game free” or “every $10 spent gives you a chance to win x game bundle” to make it more sustainable, and/or allow you to market specific underperforming games. It isn’t that hard to come up with ideas that would allow a competitor to do well. You just have to that rather than putting all your resources into trying to take games away from players, and harvest their data.

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      • misk@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        If EGS mandated those things it would be as successful as GOG. Which is irrelevant compared to Steam.

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• Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it.

  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.

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  • misk@sopuli.xyz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Those free games weren’t actually free, Epic paid for them, you know.

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    • Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

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• Kedly@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You dont seem to understand what a monopoly is either since steam isnt one

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