Steam lawsuits in a nutshell
One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.
Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.
Submitted 16 hours ago by RickyRigatoni@piefed.zip to [deleted]
https://media.piefed.zip/posts/yp/MU/ypMUrBmqLkHNC28.png
Comments
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 15 hours ago
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
it doesn’t just do nothing, it sticks to its core idea : we can’t do as much as the community can when it comes to making games, how do we maximise the community’s possible output?
People love to shit on valve working on lootboxes, but I was there to see how it developed. It was there as part of a way of getting money back to the people making stuff, which is why a shitload of the TF2 hats came from the community and steam workshop. The system came from a left wing greek economist, before , you know, he BECAME Minister of Finance for greece (for half a year)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
This is why they have steam OS, steam greenlight, SFM, etc etc.
Valve doesn’t make games anymore, because they know hobbyists can make shitloads of more games than them, they need a platform to shove them into.
Also, the other goal is to improve and extend the PC gaming space, which is why they are working on SteamOS, the deck, and all the other shit they are working on. Because of the work they put into making steam work to make game distrobution better than piracy (LITERALLY said by Gabe), PC releases became synonymous with “Steam”, which is why whenever you have a game announcement, you get “New game : Available on (XboxLogo : PS5Logo : SteamLogo)”
Valve is doing stuff. Just not, you know, making HL3 or nothing.
hayvan@piefed.world 15 hours ago
In a service business, if you do things right, people think you’re doing nothing.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
TIL a greek minister of finance is responsible for TF2 hats. Fucking wild.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I’m baffled that I didn’t already know that lootboxes were created by the husband of the woman that the Pulp hit Common People was most likely written about.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 10 hours ago
it doesn’t just do nothing,
Valve is a for profit company, one of their main goals is to make money and they work daily to do that. There are people at Valve who work 8h a day on how to boost profits.
People love to shit on valve working on lootboxes, but I was there to see how it developed. It was there as part of a way of getting money back to the people making stuff, which is why a shitload of the TF2 hats came from the community and steam workshop. The system came from a left wing greek economist, before , you know, he BECAME Minister of Finance for greece (for half a year)
I think you are confusing lootboxes with the items market which was there mainly to compensate the free to play model. If you were there i hope you remember too no DRMs and no third party software launchers to run games.
This is why they have steam OS
They have steam OS because microsoft become one of their competitors
Mozingo@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
We don’t have Steam Greenlight anymore, but otherwise 100% agree.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
red_tomato@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Valve is winning because they don’t enshittify
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 10 hours ago
Valve is winning because the average gamer doesn’t care much about owning his videogames.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 13 hours ago
Steam is a great example of how a privately held company can out compete publicly traded and venture capital funded corps.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
These comments…
Some day, Steam is going to enshittify fast, eat game devs for breakfast, and people will ask how they could have possibly seen this coming.
Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.
vapeloki@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Hearing those arguments for how many years now? Right …
The day Gabe is bo longer there things may get ugly, may.
But, Valve is not publicly traded, or has to cater to shareholders in any way. That is the reason they are still who they are.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 9 hours ago
They run a good service platform and aren’t as greedy as they could be, but they’re still not safe.
Use them, but no fangirling. They’re a business.
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
They already take 30% on each game. It’s huge, considering they didn’t spent a dime on these games. That means they will take most of the profit margin on a game, if any, while a studio has to pay for dozens or hundreds of employees, tons of hardware, workspaces, etc.
vapeloki@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Also, valve is giving massive contributions to open source from those 30%
carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
There definitely is some amount of expenditure by valve. I don’t know if its 30% worth. For multiplayer games they provide a server/client DDOS protection and traffic optomization service though it is opt in by the developer through an api. The opther option for this tends to be a “contact sales” priced option from cloudflare. There is also some of proton’s development, some linux graphics driber work, and workshop support though I suspect hosting and content moderation expenditure there is fairly minimal.
ericwdhs@discuss.online 11 hours ago
30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contribution of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
Brick and mortar stores take 50% of revenue usually. The profit margin for the manufacturer applies after that
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Those studios are paying Valve how much for tailored marketing throughout the game’s lifespan?
metakrakalaka@lemmychan.org 1 hour ago
It really puts into perspective the importance of supporting free software. Even after Valve goes to shit, their contributions to the ecosystem will live on.
It’s why the average sheep can never see the value in free software; it keeps them dependent on corporations.
AeonFelis@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
So… what? Hate them in advance, so that if they ever turn evil we’d be prepared?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Be prepared.
Don’t hate, but don’t trust Valve. Treat your Steam library like you don’t own it, and it could be enshittified at any time, because you don’t, and it could.
In practice, prioritize DRM-free stores when convenient. Or better yet, 1st party game dev stores. Archive any games or saves you actually want to go back to, just in case.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Exactly. And unlike many other companies there isn’t even any indication they would want to enshittify anyways. Why would they destroy the foundation of their platform? They have actual paying customers paying the bills, not some force-feed ad slop machine.
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 9 hours ago
Amazon was toxic from day one, anticompetitive, borderline illegal, definitely corrupt as hell. It is what Epic Games Store would have been if it had been long before steam lol. The amount of shit that they bankrupted into the ground with cheap Chinese copies off the backs of VC funds while making tons of loss and then removing their storefronts…
But as soon as GabeN dies, steam will become shit probably as the vultures close in.
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Amazon enshittified with their one-click-shopping patent, though. They were never good.
wpb@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Mandatory preface to prevent angry fanboys stinking up the replies: I like Steam. I use Steam.
Some folks in this thread are using American case law to argue that Steam is not a monopoly, or that Steam is a good (??@#!?!?) monopoly. They look at other cases, like Microsoft, and point out how far Microsoft had to go before it was considered a monopoly by American judges, and then point out that Steam is not as bad. There are two problems with that line of reasoning.
The first is that monopoly law has been absolutely gutted by Reagan, and worsened by every administration (dem and rep alike) up until Biden. In the Biden admin, Lina Khan has made some very small steps to tighten up monopoly laws a bit, but obviously Trump happened (although Harris was pretty much the same as the dems before Biden, so not much hope there either). The bar for being a monopoly is unreasonably high, and American monopoly law is an absolute joke.
Secondly, this line of thinking conflates legality with morality, or being good (enough) for society. I hope I don’t need to convince you that this idea is false. Slavery was legal.
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”.
MortUS@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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).
Katana314@lemmy.world 3 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.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Let me ask you this. What are steam doing to try to be a monopoly?
Because the way I see it, Nintendo at one time took distinctive actions to ENSURE they remained a monopoly. Then Sega threatened that.
Then Sega a few years later shot themselves in the foot with confusing console stratagy. 32X, and the SegaCD were absolute failures because everyone knew the Saturn was around the corner. Then they shot themselves in the foot AGAIN by just dumping the Saturn on retailers doorsteps, in some cases at 3AM when nobody was even at the stores, with no prior warning. Just dump it at their door and hope for the best. Well, CONSUMERS didn’t even know they were in stores. And even people with preorders didn’t know. This was just in the early days of the internet, and long before social media. So it’s not like if this happened today, everyone would know when they check their social media. Nope. It was said that some customers just didn’t know for months, simply because if you weren’t physically in the store, you didn’t know. Some stores took phone numbers for the preorders, the majority did not. A lot of pre-orders were cancelled over this.
Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by partering up with Sony to create the Nintendo Play Station. (Two words). It was to use Sonys CD technology, and be a massive upgrade in storage. Well after reading the contract, Nintendo lawyers discovered that Sony could not only create their own games, but they could liscense the technology to other 3rd parties with zero control over who gets to release software for it. Worst of all, Sony, not Nintendo, would recieve all money from software sold on the Nintendo Play Station. So they backstabbed Sony, and tried again with Phillips. Phillips was to create a Super Nintendo addon. Sega had the SegaCD, and Nintendo felt left out. So they tried creating the Super Nintendo version of the SegaCD. It went very poorly. The end result of this ended up being the Phillips CD-i, which was less of a Nintendo console, and more of a Phillips console liscensing Nintendo characters. To this day, Nintendo has never reclaimed their monopoly, due to trying to kill Sega, they created Sony’s Playstation.
Sony created a monopoly by including a dvd player in the PS2 during a time nobody had a dvd player. It worked. But that was the only thing they did to create the monopoly. It’s not like Nintendo in the 80s, when they told 3rd parties they could either put a game on Atari, or they could put one on the NES. Sony lost their dominance with the PS3 by charging $700, at a time the Xbox360 was charging $400.
And Microsoft lost their dominance by just not having anything exclusive worth playing. Then they had the “everything is an xbox” campaign, which totally backfired.
But Steam? I don’t see them as doing anything to create a monopoly. I see them as a simple software store that sells all PC games. They’ve entered the console space in recent years with the steamdeck. But it’s nothing that creates a monopoly. Personally I find the steamdeck to be overpriced. The thing that gives them a monopoly is that they offer crazy deep sales, but publishers have to agree to those sales. Steam can’t mark Factorio down to $2.00 without the publishers consent (which in that case they do NOT consent to sales).
All I see Steam doing is offering quality products, at reasonable prices, without bullshit.
Epic games is FULL of bullshit in their customer service.
And GOG isn’t full of bullshit, but their library is limited, and always will be limited to publishers who consent to them selling drm-free games. For this reason alone, gog can never compete with steam.
So, yes, Steam HAS a monopoly, but I see it as a result of two things.
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Everybody else keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
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On consoles you keep the game for that console. When a new console comes out, MAYBE you get backwards compatibility for 1-2 generations. Usually 1 more. With Steam, you could have bought a game 20 years ago, and bought 20 new PC’s since then. Your purchases will still work.
In either event, I don’t see this as Valve being malicious at any point to create a monopoly. It can easily be taken away from them by someone else doing the same things they did. Offer a generous library, complete with modern releases, regular sales, and supurb customer service. It just so happens that everybody else is too greedy and/or stupid to attempt this.
So in your words, what is Valve doing wrong that makes you think they’re creating an unfair monopoly?
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
There have been reports of Valve telling developers they can’t sell their game cheaper elsewhere (such as on a platform with a smaller cut than Steam’s 30%). But I think that was refuted.
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JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I think the point is they’re not trying to be a monopoly. It just ended up that way naturally because all their competitors killed themselves.
YaGirlAutumn@leminal.space 4 hours ago
yeah its like if you were in a race and you said your opponent cheated because you broke your leg and they didn’t
Donkter@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
The reason I’m not crazy worried about steam, and I don’t even think it’s a monopoly per-se (although I’m not referring to any definition, just a vibe) is that steam has a lot of the “market share” of video game purchases, sure, but if steam shut down tomorrow, or did something heinous enough to warrant a boycott, I am able to move. The epic games store and GoG both exist at the very least.
It would be a pain for me because I have a lot of money poured into steam, but not for anyone just getting into gaming who doesn’t have cache with steam. I didn’t pour it into steam because it was the only place for me to go, it was the best place for me to go. Idk, a big difference in Steam’s “monopoly” is that they don’t own a scarce physical commodity like oil or land, and they don’t have anything exclusive except maybe Valve games. Also unlike a monopoly there are many similarly functional competitors easily accessible on the Internet that offer an almost identical service.
Steam “locks you in” to their ecosystem. But only for each individual game you choose to buy on their platform. If you didn’t want to hitch all your games to Steam for fear that they shut down or break bad Steam does not mind if you install GoG and buy physical copies of games to diversify your portfolio so to speak.
qarbone@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I do exactly that. I have complementary libraries on GoG and Steam, although Steam is obviously bigger.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
When I think of monopolies, I think more of telecomms, of Wal-Mart and their selling at a lose to kill off competition, Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software, and other examples. Unless I’m missing something, Steam didn’t do that, they were just first in the game and built a better product than the others did. Offering a better service that attracted customers. Now do I think it’s too large and would welcome competition, absolutely. But monopolies typically aren’t though just having larger market share with a better product.
If Steam did something like oh, pay developers/publishers to be exclusive to their platform, then yeah you’d have a good argument there.
cogman@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.
They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.
It’s the most nothing of nothings.
To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they’d constantly try to switch you back to IE.
exu@feditown.com 14 hours ago
*steam price the same as external price only if the external sale is for steam keys. And you have some time to offer an equivalent sale on steam.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 14 hours ago
This is the point everyone tends to gloss over. Glad to see someone has actually read the friggin’ Steam TOS.
Saapas@piefed.zip 13 hours ago
That doesn’t sound as bad
Serinus@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Any of those places charging 30% on a product they’re only publishing electronically is using walled gardens and monopolistic practices to do so.
I’d rather they go after Steam last, but Steam belongs in that group with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It’s extraordinarily difficult to sell your PC game without Steam. A few large studios can do it, but not many others.
Still notas egregious as Apple, and now Android with their restrictions on side loading.
catsarebadpeople@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
What do you propose Steam changes instead of 30%?
cheat700000007@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
But sweeny mad no one lieks epic store
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
No matter how good or bad steam was and is for gaming industry, they made gaming on Linux not only viable but great, and hence made completely ditching windows an achievable thing with little effort.
I’m grateful for that, even though I boycotted them from day 1 (until left4dead came out) for destroying physical and used games.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Here’s what I don’t understand… Say we all agree they are a monopoly, what do you do about it?
It doesn’t seem feasible to break them up into smaller companies, how would that even work? What are the dividing lines between what portion of the company goes where? Does that even solve anything?
Force them to charge less money? Okay, now they charge the same as Epic (or even less). Basically every other store is now being undercut by the biggest player on the scene. There is now even less reason to use a storefront that isn’t Steam. It doesn’t feel like that solves the problem either.
It seems like all the courts have tried to do so far is charge them money for existing, not get them to change what they do, which seems a lot less like the government trying to stop the big bad monopoly and more like the government wanting to get their cut. What does “stopping the monopoly” even mean? Are we happier and better off as consumers if Valve is forced to shut down Steam entirely? Is that the goal?
kossa@feddit.org 9 hours ago
It doesn’t seem feasible to break them up into smaller companies, how would that even work?
It is a shame how uncreative we as a society have becone to deal with monopolies.
Remember when Microsoft almost got divided over bundling a browser with their OS? 'Cause Pepperidge Farm remembers 😅
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Uh, Microsoft got in trouble for making their browser an unremovable part of the operating system, and aggressively trying to force you to use it as a browser. Not remotely accurate to say the problem was just including a web browser. And in the end, they got barely any punishment for it.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
What’s your point?
Are you saying that Microsoft being split up made no sense? If so, what would you suggest instead?
Or are you saying since they “almost” did it to MS, then they could do it to Steam? If so, where do you make the split that effects any change? You could split Valve the game dev company from the Steam platform, but I don’t think that makes Steam any less monolithic in their space - they don’t get their market share from the games Valve has made.
Illecors@lemmy.cafe 9 hours ago
Isn’t there a difference between public and private companies?
JamBandFan1996@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
They aren’t even close to a monopoly though
HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Nationalize it. The public now owns it and it pays for utilities for the public.
Jako302@feddit.org 5 hours ago
“Nationalize it” is easy to say, but I honestly think even Microsoft would do a better job with steam than the US government would.
ChonkyOwlbear@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Any monopoly that is too big and important to be broken up needs to be nationalized.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
I never said it was too big or too important to be broken up. I’m saying I don’t see how to split it up that actually solves the problem. I don’t think people are scared of Valve the Game Devs, maybe the hardware section but there were tons of other options on the market almost as soon as the Steam Deck took off. It’s the store that people take issue with, so how do you separate to make the store not a problem? Regionally? Have Steam NA, Steam EU, Steam Asia, etc. etc.? I suppose that is possible, but I’m unsure if I see how that actually solves the problem (even assuming you can get around people just buying from a different region’s Steam).
As for nationalizing it… I just don’t have any faith in the US government to not turn it to absolute shit on day one. Unfortunately, at this stage, I trust Valve and it’s Billionaire CEO more than I do the government. I hate to just resign myself to trying to make the most of the dystopia we’ve been given but… :(
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I’m not sure how important Steam is.
Sure, we all like video games, but I don’t think people are going to die if they start overcharging for them and we have to go outside to buy them in a store again.
derg@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
We make their practice of forcing game companies to charge the same on Steam as other platforms illegal. If they could charge less on other platforms (due to the lower cuts of the other platforms) they would, and it would loosen Steam’s artificial hold on being the de-facto place to buy games.
bountygiver@lemmy.ml 7 hours ago
Then they would just simply stop giving out free steam keys for off platform purchases. Depends on how many people buy from publisher site because they get to keep their games in a single library, it might end up with the game publishers getting less revenue overall.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
Their policy is not that you aren’t allowed to sell your game cheaper on another platform, their policy is that you can’t sell Steam keys on other platforms cheaper than you are selling the game on Steam. Basically, you can’t use Steam’s infrastructure when undercutting “Steam customers”. Games that are on Steam go on sale on other platforms when they are not on sale on Steam all the time currently.
jnod4@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
They’re not even a monopoly. We can always pirate the games, or more ethically, buy used cds with old games or open source games etc, even if steam enshittifies, it’s not gonna affect me.
paultimate14@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Even if Valve’s offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven’t seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.
Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don’t love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.
CoyoteFacts@piefed.ca 9 hours ago
I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.
I wonder if there’s a future where every game marketplace uses open standards/APIs that 3rd-party launchers (like Heroic) can consume for downloading games, checking DRM status, tracking achievements, friends, and so on. DRM is probably the hardest part of that, though maybe there could be closed-source blobs downloadable to enable a store’s DRM. It’s obviously not in the interest of companies solely focused on profit and dark patterns, but I wonder if Steam would ever consider using its weight to do it anyway.
hakase@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
How do we tax Gabe that much without necessarily watering down his share in the company and ensuring that outside investors enshittify it in the process? Genuine question.
paultimate14@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
- Taxing those outside investors too
- Taxing Valve as a corporation more, making them less profitable and less attractive to said investors.
- I’m not even convinced this would be an issue at all really. Remember Valve is not publicly traded. I suspect Gabe would hold on to controlling ownership as long as it was profitable, and remember that taxes are usually on profits.
- Even if outside investors move in and enshittify, the moment they start doing anticompetitive you hit them with antitrust suits. Not to mention the industry can also be regulated even before all this: a lot of governments are cracking down on lootboxes already.
Xylight@lemdro.id 5 hours ago
Leave the multi billion dollar corporation alone
Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
Not true. Look at how they handled their anti-gambling lawsuit. They essentially did away with cases and keys, and now you can “open a terminal”. You aren’t gambling according to steam anymore, since you can decline the offer, but because this decline accept mechanic is baked into a dynamic pricing, you are now required to pay steam an average of 1700 usd for a pair of digital gloves, if you even get the offer.
They got rid of “gambling” for something much worse
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 11 hours ago
Remember that you are on Lemmy: a decentralized and open source platform owned by the community.
Steam is a proprietary, closed source, for profit third party software launcher owned by a billionaire.
L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
STOP giving the COnsuMer WHAt they WANTTTTT!!!NOOOOOOOO MY SLOPCORE BUSINESS CANT COMPETE WITH ACTUAL GOODS AND SERVICES.
nialv7@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I mean, this meme is not wrong. Valve is a de facto monopoly because everyone else is shit, and user hostile. But, a monopoly is still a monopoly, and we shouldn’t be glazing a billion dollar company, in any circumstances. And it’s not like Valve has never done anything wrong.
It’s ok to like Valve, I like Valve. But we need to hold them to account, and call them out when they do something wrong. If you think Valve did nothing wrong, why not let them prove it in court? They have a lot of money, they can afford some lawyers.
elephantium@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Valve is a de facto monopoly
Is it, though? I can buy games on gog, on itch.io, on epic (but that would require me to use epic, lol), or maybe on humble bundle (took a quick look, mentioned steam keys, not sure).
I thought that “monopoly” meant that a company has exclusive control in their market which clearly doesn’t apply here.
Either way, it’ll be interesting (and maybe infuriating) to see how the court arguments pan out.
uberfreeza@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I agree. But I’m also keeping in mind that this is the situation capitalists claim to want: competition for everyone to continually improve. They just missed the part where they were supposed to improve and not make things worse. Aside from that, with all the major sites people think of like EA and Epic, it makes things even more difficult to topple that monopoly. Everyone wants to have their games in a convenient place. Having competition is incompatible with what players would want, because they’d need eight different launchers for games. I’m fully content with cycling itch and steam when I want what one or the other offers. For what I imagine is most people, it’s easier to use just one list/site that already has everything.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
So what exactly should be the punishment for doing nothing illegal while all your competitors sabotage themselves?
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Sometimes a monopoly can have so much money that it actually does some very significant amount of innovation. Look at Ma Bell.
The problem is to not let them get so big though. Then you’ve got to break it up and that gets hairy. Look at Ma Bell.
And then they might try to get back together. Look at Ma Bell.
And at the end of it, we might just end up with a duopoly of shit. Look at Ma Bell and Xfinity.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Valve does a lot of things pretty badly, it’s just that they and the fans control the narrative.
THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
The narrative of 4 massive sales per year and constant smaller sales in between is prettay great, let me just say.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Apart from running gambling for children (pretty hefty thing to put aside, but still), what do you mean?
zikzak025@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Steam has convinced the gaming industry that you can own nothing and be happy with it, just by virtue of being less shitty than everyone else.
Lemmy hates billionaires but never hesitates to kneel at the altar of Gaben.
Skv@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
All launchers mustdie and devs need to go back to selling their games directly.
the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Other companies keep suing Steam because they (the other companies not steam) are run incompetent fools. Overpaid executives with no clue are desire to learn anything about their target audience keep telling them that screwing your customers and employees is good actually. When they see a company that doesn’t is able to effortlessly outmatch them they can’t stand it.
noname_yet2077@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Based
NateNate60@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Many things can be true at once. Is it true that Steam controls a dominating share of the PC gaming market? Yes. Is it true that when a company enters such a market position, that they can use that position to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer behaviour? Yes. Has Valve actually engaged in such behaviour? No.
Telodzrum@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Doesn’t matter how you got there, if you have become a monopoly you should be brought low.
sanbdra@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Gamers: competition is good Also gamers: watches everything get absorbed into one launcher 😭
Changer098@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
How DARE this post claim that XBOX is a monopoly, nobody is buying that shit.
Grimy@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
EA and Microsoft aren’t the bar. Being slightly better isn’t good enough.
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 11 hours ago
I mean … all roads that lead to a monopoly … do lead to a monopoly.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Well, yeah…I mean it’s a non-zero group of people that specifically avoided consoles because of the walled gardens and monopolistic behavior by the companies that make them and the stores you get locked into.
So when one of the main vendors for your PC gaming platform starts behaving similarly of course you’re going to notice it.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I wish Valve weren’t so efficiently run. One of the few companies I wouldn’t mind working for, even though they’re not perfect. But they only have a few hundred employees and I’m not that good at anything, unless they need a full-time love-maker.
neobunch@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I’m no steam fanboy, we’ve been at odds ever since they decided to stop supporting Windows 8 and 7 and deliberately breaking the client so it stops working with those old systems, but there’s no denying that Steam does a bunch of things right.
All these Monopoly charges are just bitter competitors envious that they can’t just walk in throw some money and start getting market share from the PC market, they would actually have to put in an enormous amount of effort to to even approach all the functionality and feature set covered by Steam.
The PC is an open platform, you’re not obligated to anything, there are multiple storefronts which you can decide for or even go at it without using storefronts. Tell me again what are the alternative storefronts on the Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Apple and Android ecosystems?
And for the “if you’re not on steam you might as well not exist” crowd, isn’t that, like exactly that, the value that Steam brings to the table? You only need to decide if that’s worth the 30% cut they ask in return, like with any other purchase or contractual decision you make in your life.
FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Should be NSFW tagged if not trigger warning-ed
ThirdConsul@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Any business that has over 4% market rate should be forcibly split.
Steam is not FORCED to compete and innovate or go under, they do that at the whim of the owner. Who can change his mind. Or die, and the company will be inherited by whomever and sloppify.
Heck, anyone shilling that Steam is a good guy - ffs, you do not own the games you bought.
(Why 4%? There are some old studies that at 5% it brings more profit to get rid of the competition, below innovations are the way to get the money).
network_switch@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
People constantly dooming steam are punching themselves in the face instead of pushing for anything better. If they wanted a more competitive market do two things. Buy games on other storefronts. They exist. There have been digital storefronts since before Steam. Second is direct your complaining to competitors to improve their services. Like go complain on every EGS press release for Linux support and a gamepad friendly interface. Something equivalent to Steam input and remote play that isn’t using third party software like Sunshine/Moonlight. Something like steam curators and other social features. User reviews. The complainers of Steam are pretty much campaigning for Steam to be worse so others can compete without having to improve as much