I agree with almost all of your viewpoints , however I believe that steam has engaged in monopolistic practices. The difference in market share between Steam and any other game launcher is night and day, it is the online game store. That being said that’s not always a bad thing as they have shown
They have a higher than average fees that is for sure, but they also have a significantly bigger feature set than any other store out there. Like when you launch a game on Steam you have a game publishing with built-in DLC support, you have a built-in mod Workshop, you have the review system, you have a built-in DRM if that’s something that you wanted to do, you also have access to a community forum for bug reporting and discussions, not to mention you have the entire steam proton system and the VR system at your disposal both of which are Super complicated to set up stand alone.
Their Workshop, while it takes a 75% cut, is mostly for the Cosmetic items or the trading items were steam does almost exclusively all of the work for it. Basically the only thing the dev team has to do for it is upload the image for the item and the cost that it thinks that item is worth and then steam does the rest. At that point the 75% cut while steep, makes sense to me
Every other reason that they provided in that video, seemed to either hyperbolize the impact of it or disregard what is concidered standard. like for example pricing parity that’s an industry standard, any reputable shop has the same system, and if there is any place that’s different, they actively try to have similar pricing. Hell Walmart hires people strictly to go to their competitors to make sure that their pricing is the same as their competitors. The attribution agreement while I don’t believe should be legal, isn’t anti-competitive, it is anti-consumer but not anti-competitive. I am also super against the fact that technically every game is a license but again that’s not anti-competitive that’s anti-consumer.
I firmly believe that if a game competitor decided to have an equal feature set to the steam launcher, eventually they would be able to give steam a run for their money. Which is not something I can say the same of with companies such as Google which has been proven to actively manipulate the market and use their position of power as a way to keep competitors out, be it by making it so third-party browsers can’t use DRM, or doing things such as manipulating your web results that way your competitors do not appear. I have never seen steam do this
toynbee@lemmy.world 3 months ago
You have convinced me to investigate The Thaumaturge.
Also … Everyone points, all.