I’ve been seeing a fair amount of discourse lately that Gabe Newell might be the only reason why Steam is a benevolent monopoly, and it’s why I only buy games on Steam when there’s no other option, when they’re not otherwise available on GOG and Itch.io.
Because Steam says for now that they’ll have a failsafe in place to make our games playable even if the company goes under. Steam doesn’t nickel and dime people, for now. Steam is doing important work for Linux, for now. Our profiles are fun and customizable like the internet used to be, for now. Steam’s DRM is so light it hardly exists, for now. But what’s going to happen to our huge libraries when Gabe retires or dies?
I hate that I even have to think this way, but I for one don’t want to have all my eggs in one basket, especially when the competitors’ policies are doing more to protect users right now.
People misunderstand the issue with monopolies. Monopolies, by themselvs, are non-issues. It’s what they do in their position of monopoly that can be illegal, through anti-competitive behavior. Steam does none of that BS
antitrust for thee but not for me
I love Steam, but I don’t like how their rules seems to biased against Japanese games.
There are plenty of JP games outright refused by Steam despite have zero have adult content, and perfectly fine on being released on GOG or other digital platform.
Especially with visual novels and games with psychology theme.
Well, since I use Linux, Steam is the only platform that cares about my money. The competition chose not to support my system.
Steam is naturally the only platform gamers care about because they’re the only platform that acturally targers gamers, all other platforms target devs (except GOG who targets gamers that specifically want offline copies without DRM)
all other platforms target
devsshareholders
Steam has a monopoly: yes. Steam, like apple, takes a cut from all payments in the store, and micro transactions. Considering how Steam is a company, and could just be evil, and bad, like Google, it’s:
-Contributions and implementation of the opensource software Proton-Ge, which lets me just download a windows game and play it, off steam, and is also available, free & opensource on other platforms like Lutris. -Regular deals which make it the best place to buy games, if you choose to do so. -Steamdeck
Make it a (mostly) positive force, imho. However, a billion dollar company being able to do discounts below any small game distribution companies, is bad.
Plus, who knows what the next CEO after Gabe retires will have in mind?
Boo fucking hoo. Market can try and compete instead of using shady ways to agitate players to join their subpar service.
Nobody hates on Steam being a monopoly. Devs should thank Valve that their policy decreases piracy drastically.
If all monopolies would be like Steam, we would have no arguments against monopolies.
Nobody hates on Steam being a monopoly
That’s the problem imho. Right now they are “benevolent monopoly” for most of it’s users, except:
- currency conversions (famously Poland has the highest game prices on Steam in the world because Steam does not want to update the currency rates).
- innovation (Steam does not innovate Steam, they r&d othe products)
- accessibility (no way to make fonts bigger) (Those are my issues with it, there’s definitely more)
We know since at least 70’s, that when a company hits 4% market share, it stops innovating and competing with other companies, because buying the competition out and increasing the market share is safer and higher return (every 5% increase was 10% increase in profit, because they have to compete less).
- innovation (Steam does not innovate Steam, they r&d othe products)
But do they not?
Proton is a clear innovation they’ve implemented into their store front.
They have new lab experiments every so often, currently there’s a release calendar.
Family sharing.
Game recording.For some of those you could argue it’s an already existing concept, but even so. The implementation is certainly novel. And they are certainly continuing to improve a store front unmatched in features by any other.
Remind people that a monopoly isn’t illegal. Abusing a monopoly to prevent competition and using a monopoly as a means to create unfair market conditions in other categories - Windows and web browsers in the past or Apple’s monopoly on iOS software distribution.
Consoles are even more restrictive than an iPhone is still in the US and was in the EU. Complain about Steam all these devs and people want, unless it can be proven that Valve is using their market share to stop other companies from competing well, it’s a moot point calling them a monopoly. That Wolfire lawsuit when I read the initial court filings they put out was a joke. It was citing Twitter posts and blogspam articles citing anonymous forum posts
Steam was not the first PC digital distribution store. It wasn’t even great until like 2006/2007. In the early days Impulse could have been competitive but Stardock sold it to GameStop who in dumb move of the last 2 decades did nothing with it. Desura did not improve. GFWL was terrible. Windows Store used to have issues with making storage unreclaimable without a reformat of the drive. Direct2Drive never improved. GamersGate just stayed a key seller. GoG was never going to grow without regular day one games which wasn’t going to be competitive as DRM free. Humble Store stayed a key seller.
Amazon and Epic’s idea was to just give away games. Ubisoft and EA stores barely even had games they didn’t publish. So sparse I bet they didn’t have self publishing tools. Those 2 puzzlingly regularly had issues maintaining login sessions persisting over time. PC gaming is dieing was the mainstream meme until like 2015. Epic on Android doesn’t even have a library of owned games view and it’s been almost a year since that released.
Valve didn’t make Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Stardock+GameStop, Direct2Drive, … all under invest and/or mismanage their PC game store platform efforts. It’s not up to Valve to stop making the platform more appealing. EGS is 7 years old. Those other companies have been doing PC game stores for much longer. I remember buying and downloading PC games from Amazon before Prime gaming. It was just like Direct2Drive. Since 2004 Direct2Drive was always a storefront for any publishers game whereas Steam didn’t start listing 3rd party games until 2005.
If any service was comparable to like end of 2013 Steam, that would easily be second best store platform. Instead every store is at best like 2010 Steam with nicer animations, bigger buttons. And today there’s way more resources to make a competitor. More cloud service providers with mature onboarding tools. NPM install. A lot more open source databases. Kubernetes. Git. Etc. Should be able to do better than 7 year old Steam in 7 years from these companies that were far larger than 2002/2003 Valve when they got into PC game distribution. The big publishers were probably all wealthier than Valve up to like 2015
It’s not Sony and Nintendo’s fault that since the Kinect on the 360, Microsoft hasn’t been able to manage their studios to be competitive with Nintendo and Sony studios
100% agree to everything. Steam is monopoly. But they implement policies for gamers in mind, not money. If anything, devs should praise Steam for decreasing gaming piracy. Things that Valve do for gamers is incomparable to whatever EA, Ubi, Epic do.
But they implement policies for gamers in mind, not money
- sucky currency conversion rates they refuse to update
- they take 30% cut
- they are banning games on behest of Mastercard and Visa
So, no. It’s enshittification.
they are banning games on behest of Mastercard and Visa
They literally have no choice, this was under threat of being essentially cut off any banking system. It’s fucked up, no questions about it, but it’s a societal problem that needs to be addressed legally, as any single company is powerless against that. Even Apple would not survive being banned by visa & MC
Monopolies are just an effect of capitalism in its current form.
I’m more concerned with the games companies who aren’t even monopolies, and are already seen as shit services run by shitty people (unless anyone actually likes Ubisoft, EA, and their launchers???)Gamers have respect for Gaben, and I’ve heard more faith and less worry about his son taking over than practically the entire team of owners from Valve’s competitors. They have a monopoly because it’s a good service, and the fact that it’s has a user base as big as it does shouldn’t surprise anyone: they seem to be doing things right enough to not be a bother. That’s what matters more than the inevitability of a business getting big - there’s a lot more Nuance and that doesn’t just magically happen, nor is just pointing it out helpful in sensible critique.
In this one case, I’m okay with its monopoly as long as Gabe is in charge. I have bought tens of thousands of dollars in games on the platform and it’s crazy I can still hit download on games over 20 years old in my library AND have my save game data imported from that time.
So far, Valve has been fair to their users. Hell, they heard concerns over gambling and just took a sledgehammer to the CS2 skin market. I don’t think any other company would devalue their digital assets to a tune of -3 BILLION dollars. Valve is the GOAT.
10s of thousands? HELP
Then why aren’t 72% of games on GOG.
Yeah I gotta say that I am a steam fanboy, but GOG is making me pause. After 20 years of being on steam (oh my god it’s been that long) I am finding myself preferring GOG. No DRM is pretty sick.
They want to fight back against steam the winner isn’t more DRM, it’s using valve’s own weapon against them, and using less DRM.
If it wasn’t for Valve’s aggressive support for Linux (and GOG being for-profit and hence inherently evil) then I’d definitely prioritize GOG.
GOG version is superior for modding like Skyrim or Fallout series because of the forced updates if you launch the game on Steam.
I will always choose GOG over Steam if given the choice, but too many developers still think it’s okay to take your money without giving you true ownership of your purchase. Steam allows that exploitation and GOG does not.
Because they are cowards.
This isn’t a scientific study, which is what most people will assume when they read that.
75% of respondents were senior managers of C-suite level
And from the “white paper”:
All respondents are managers
There is no evidence that any respondents are game developers. Working as a manager in the same building where people actually develop games doesn’t mean you are a “dev”.
Here’s the actual “white paper”, btw: https://cdn.rokky.com/products-content/docs/TheStateofPCGameDistribution_rokky_com.pdf
Thanks for pointing this out. That is hilarious. I immediately assume bros who have tried to make their own launchers popular
There’s a difference between being feature-rich and popular and being a monopoly.
Call me when Steam is buying competing stores to shut them down.
Now, in terms of PC gaming monopolies, let me introduce you to “Microsoft”.
Words don’t matter. Do well and have a platform that most prefer? You’re a monopoly. People don’t realize that to be a monopoly you must be the only source and actively prevent access to or other sources of the same product. How many of those using the term monopoly regarding Steam have GOG Galaxy, Epic, Battle.net, and etc. installed on their machines, ya think.
Being the best does not a monopoly make!
Edit: Further, and speaking of Epic, I never heard of Steam paying devs to pull their games from other platforms for exclusivity deals.
I think there is a distinction to be made between being a monopoly and doing anti-competitive behavior.
Steam hasn’t done any anti-competitive behavior that I am aware of, but they do have enough market power to be considered a monopoly. Consider how companies like EA and Activision tried to maintain competing platforms but caved because those platforms were not viable compared to Steam. That’s monopoly power.
I think they were viable but nobody trusts EA and Activision with keeping the game they buy.
but they do have enough market power to be considered a monopoly
Bullshit. Being the most popular platform does not automatically make a monopoly, this is armchair lawyer nonsense.
It’s true that I am not a lawyer, so feel free to not take what I say as what the law says. I think that the law certainly should consider Steam to be a monopoly with its level of market power, even if it doesn’t currently.
From what I have heard from actual lawyers, monopolies are not currently illegal under US law anyways. They’re only illegal when combined with anticompetitive practices. That’s my best understanding as a non-lawyer, anyways.
theres basically one anti conpetitive measure they hold primarily, and its the one that states the listing price of a game must be the same on all platforms policy. stops devs from having a lower listing price on other platforms.
other than that its usually other platforms shooting their selves.
I’m pretty sure that that only applies to steam keys being sold on other sites. If it’s being distributed in some other form, it can be cheaper.
This “most favored nation” clause in contracts is huge! It means that even if another store takes half of Steam’s cut (say, 15% vs 30%), the game can’t be sold for less, meaning other rival stores can never compete on price. In other words, Steam drives up prices for games economy-wide. Amazon does something similar, and this was part of the basis the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against them.
Say I sold a game for $10 on Steam and GameStoria. With the 30% you suggest I would take home $7 from Steam and $8.50 from GameStoria. I make more with a competitor who is willing to take less and of their instead wanted to charge more, Steam would be more profitable… The consumer doesn’t see anything but a $10 game.
Steam drives up prices for games economy-wide.
You must be joking
Failing to make a product that doesn’t suck shit does not make a monopoly for your competitor.
In fact, Steam is de facto not a monopoly because of the very existence of GOG. EA and Activision tried to break in to this arena but failed to provide a product that actually switched people off of steam, because they failed to provide a comparable experience to steam. GOG did, and they’re doing fine.
By this logic Google isn’t a search monopoly because DuckDuckGo exists, despite Google buying default placement in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc to make sure no other search provider can compete, with their bribe to Apple alone totaling $20 billion a year to maintain their search dominance. What do you think monopoly power is if not that?
Can you describe where Steam has done anything even approaching that, ever?
EA and Activision stores didn’t fail because Steam bought them out and bullied them out of the market, they failed because they were trash products. Steam doesn’t buy “default placement” in anything. They just have a good product that people want to use over alternatives.
Point out a situation in which Steam has acted anti-competitive and I might agree that you have a point, but I can’t think of any situations to call out here.
Whether something is a monopoly or not is independent of anti-competitive practices. It’s about market power.
If there’s a genuinely good product that’s popular because it’s good. There’s no need to step in and give shittier products more share in the market.
The point in breaking up monopolies is to be more fair for consumers. If you want to say they’re technically a monopoly because they have a large share of the market then fine. But I don’t see that as a bad thing until it starts abusing its power.
I agree that Steam is pretty good as it is, and there are certainly more pressing concerns. However, in an ideal world, what Steam does should probably be handled by the public sector because it’s a natural monopoly. People like only having to go to one place to find their games, but that place doesn’t have to be controlled by a for-profit corporation.
yes, it is “is independent of anti-competitive practices”, a monopoly is when there is only one company providing a product or service
Um, there is more than one type of anticompetitive practice? Amazon uses predatory pricing to drive companies out of business, Microsoft uses tying to sell Teams, Google uses self-preferencing for their own services in search results, Facebook acquired Instagram rather than compete with them, etc.
One of Valve’s favorite anticompetitive cudgels is requiring “most favored nation” clauses in their contracts, prohibiting devs from selling for less on other storefronts (which Amazon also has used).
Um, there is more than one type of anticompetitive practice? Amazon uses predatory pricing to drive companies out of business, Microsoft uses tying to sell Teams, Google uses self-preferencing for their own services in search results, Facebook acquired Instagram rather than compete with them, etc.
None of which are related to Steam nor has Steam done anything resembling any of these examples to my knowledge.
One of Valve’s favorite anticompetitive cudgels is requiring “most favored nation” clauses in their contracts, prohibiting devs from selling for less on other storefronts (which Amazon also has used).
Valve prohibits people from selling steam keys for less on other storefronts which I think is perfectly reasonable. You can list your game on Steam for $20 and distribute it on Itch for $5 or even free and Steam has zero problem with this, so long as you aren’t distributing steam keys via that storefront. This is to try and prevent a developer from leveraging Steam for advertisement purposes but making all their actual sales off-platform.
GoG has, like, 1/5th the market share of Steam. It’s not nearly big enough to prevent Steam from having monopoly power. If Steam came out with a policy saying that games could not be on both Steam and GoG, the vast majority of devs would release on Steam. That’s monopoly power which Steam has, regardless of whether they are currently abusing it or not.
If they do anti-competitive behaviour then that would make them a monopoly.
“Steam is so popular because they’re good not because they’re a monopoly”
“Oh yeah? Well what if Steam was a monopoly? They would be a monopoly then right!”
Even if there were literally no other competitors, GOG holding 1/6th of the market share (your words) absolutely precludes Steam from being a monopoly.
You’re using a different definition of monopoly from what I’m using. To quote Wikipedia:
In economics, a monopoly is a single seller. In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises.
I’m using the latter of those definitions. I don’t think it’s particularly useful to only consider it a monopoly when there are literally no competitors. I think it is useful to consider it a monopoly when it has dominant market power. Steam’s estimated 75-80% market share is dominant market power.
Seriously. Part of the reason they’re even so popular is because they aren’t actively pursuing profit maxxing/enshittification business practices to corner the market and consolidate market share like every other one of these blood sucking cretins. They really are one of the extremely short list of corporations that ACTUALLY win in the marketplace because their product really is just that good. Running the steam deck with Linux, contributing to the development of Wine/Proton, and telling Microsoft to kick rocks has made me a Gaben fanboy for life. If Steam was the ONLY way you could purchase PC games, I’d honestly be fine with that, as long as Valve remains a private company under the iron fist of Mister Newell.
Remaining a privately held company is really the only protection from enshittification. Not a guarantee, mind you.
Well they are certainly the exception, not the rule. I’ll take it, but we definitely got cosmically lucky to have steam exist in this timeline the way it does. 99/100 times it’s a soulless shit factory that’s entirely reflective of the AAA industry as a whole.
They have a functional monopoly on game launchers, but it isn’t illegal to have a monopoly — it’s only illegal to use that monopoly for anti-competitive actions.
A monopoly in law doesn’t mean total (100%) market control; it means having the power to control prices or exclude competition. Courts often refer to this as monopoly power.
A monopoly could exist with as little as 50% of the market, or even lower. Steam has around 70–80%, which is easily enough to be considered a monopoly. However, you could argue that despite their large market share, they can’t truly control the market, since it’s their goodwill and consumer-friendly behavior that earned them that share in the first place — and if they ever tried to abuse it, people might go elsewhere.
Personally, I don’t really believe that. Considering your entire library is tied to their platform, they could pull all kinds of shady tactics if they wanted to. But it’s an argument.
As far as I’m concerned, Steam is the least evil of the major corporations. I can overlook the secret gambling ring and possible dark-money smuggling complicity because they seem to be a net benefit to consumers, and the harm mostly falls on those complicit in the scheme — as well as on China and Russia.
Edit, fixed spelling.
Steam does force the sellers on their platform to not give better discounts elsewhere. So basically if you see a game that’s 20% off on steam and it is ATL, you won’t find it 30% off anywhere else.
Not necessarily a monopoly but definitely not allowing competitive pricing.
Now that I think about it, it’s probably why Epic has to go with the “timed exclusive” approach instead of just giving you a bigger discount.
Not actually true. They only require price parity for steam keys. Basically don’t sell steam copies anywhere cheaper than on steam. Any other copy you can sell for whatever price.
They only require price parity for steam keys. Basically don’t sell steam copies anywhere cheaper than on steam.
Even that isn’t true which a quick search on isthereanydeals before buying games will show a lot of times when it comes to steam key prices.
Recent example is ARC Raiders. https://isthereanydeal.com/game/arc-raiders/info/
Current best price is 15% off for $34.17 versus $39.99 on Steam. And all time low was $31.92.
People are missing out on deals if they assume Steam store price is the lowest price for Steam games.
But the key price is the same, they giving you a discount. They can’t change the price of 100$ to 80$ without giving a 20% discount.
I linked their own guidelines regarding steam key prices. They do require price parity with steam for steam keys. (with some exceptions)
I believe the clause applies to any storefronts as it operates on the MFN pricing principle.
But let’s say it doesn’t, and you’re correct and you could buy the same game on itch, gog, humble, epic, M$ store, ubi store, whatever else.
Did you ever actually see any of the stores promote better pricing on their first party platform? I haven’t.
Did you ever see assassins creed games being 5$ cheaper if you buy them on the ubi store as an example?
Same as the above for humble, epic, EA, Microsoft?
That’d be a pretty effective way to drive people to your storefront and drive first party sales with additional profit to the first party… and yet for some reason that practice apparently doesn’t exist.
I am almost 100% sure that’s not done out of the goodness of the shareholders hearts and has more to do with the legal spaghet of it all.
But at the end of the day the above is speculation, I have no concrete way to prove it one way or the other besides the limited observations that I’ve made over the years.
Did you ever see assassins creed games being 5$ cheaper if you buy them on the ubi store as an example?
I had tracked ubisoft vs steam prices over the years, and usually if you wanted to pay less Ubisoft was the way to go for Ubisoft games.
Like Far Cry 6 $6 all time low on Ubisoft store and $11.99 all time low on Steam.
Good resource, thanks
Yeah its saved me money over the years. I’m realizing in this thread lot of people didn’t know Steam prices isn’t always the best price and missing out on lot of discounts.
What do you mean it doesn’t exist? Epic got me to download their launcher because they were selling gta 5 for free. How could I have found that out if I only play on steam???
They don’t want to drive you to your storefront so that you get the games cheaper. They want to sell for the same price without paying commission. They want to pocket the difference, not give it to you.
I’ve never seen a reliable source display steam has price parity. Their steam key price parity however is very clearly displayed. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Not true. I just checked the first game currently discounted I know on GOG’s front page: Ghost Runner. It’s at -75% (7.49€) on GOG but full price (29.99€) on Steam.
Price parity doesn’t mean no discounts. All games in all platforms are the same fucking base price, each store front applies different discounts for different products based on their metrics. The other guy is right, EGS doesn’t get 30% cut like steam but their games is not 15%-20% cheaper, if they give you a 15% once in the blue moon doesn’t mean shit.
Compare to lowest all time price on steam, not current price. Pretty sure it’s going to come out to the same.
Goal post.
Isthereanydeals. Frequently see steam keys available for cheaper than it is on Steam.
Recommend using it as a resource before buying games since it tracks prices, so no need to spend more than necessary.
Example is recently released ARC Raiders where you can save a few bucks. Current best is 15% off for a Steam key.
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/arc-raiders/info/
I’ve often wondered who is paying full price buying from Steam at launch over sometimes buying a Steam key from another storefront for 10-20% less. Guess its people who think games aren’t sold cheaper than on Steam.
Il Epic had free cloud saves and more social aspects they would be a much more appealing option, especially because they are much friendlier towards indie devs since they demand a much lower service fee. Steam is just the best for consumers right now
Also if they didn’t have an irrational hatred for Linux.
And all the fixation is on Epic vs Steam, but it has also been Epic vs GOG. Since their exclusive deals were prevented from being released on GOG too. Probably since people would actually be willing to biy from GOG if steam wasn’t available with how hated epic is, and would have led to GOG growing as opposed to Epic.
A lot of people requested that DARQ be made available on GOG. I was happy to work with GOG to bring the game to their platform. I wish the Epic Store would allow indie games to be sold there non-exclusively, as they do with larger, still unreleased games (Cyberpunk 2077), so players can enjoy what they want: a choice.
heroic launcher to the rescue!
I find it fascinating that Lemmings suddenly turn off their critical thinking skills when it comes to Valve. We really need to study this.
But they’re my favorite treat seller 🙁
What criticism of Valve do you have?
