I mean, they’re not really wrong. Valve has a monopoly on game distribution the same way that Google has a monopoly on Internet search. Alternatives exist, but they aren’t really competing with Steam.
Valve has so far been pretty pro-consumer which is how they got to where they are, but yhat doesn’t really change the fact that they essentially get to set the rules for digital distribution of games.
It’s also a big risk, as they could always enshittify. It’s a good platform now, but if Gabe dies or decides to give up his leadership position, that could all change very quickly.
Yeah, the day Gabe leaves is going to be a sad day for gaming, because Steam is probably gonna get real shitty real quick. I’m sure some finance-minded jackasses will do their best to maximize short-term profit and fly the whole ecosystem into the ground at Mach 3.
As long as it remains privately owned, it should be OK. The day shares go public, god forbid, will be the beginning of the end.
Thats not true. Privately owned firms tend to be really bad because they don’t have a feduciary duty to long term value. They suck everything dry. Private equity is the reason why daycare costs so much yet the daycare workers make minimum wage.
Steam just happens to be fine under private ownership because it makes enough profit for Gabe to be satisfied.
Privately owned is not the same thing as private equity. https://irely.com/private-equity-or-privately-owned-does-it-matter/
The first sentence
When you choose a software vendor, do you question how the company is financed? Should that be part of your evaluation?
This article seems to be about the ethos of private equity. Legally they’re nearly identical.
Sure, legally yes.
In practice, a lot of the time, not even close.
Gamers have good reason to love Valve for Steam alone – not even accounting for their amazing games. They really do have the best gamer-oriented platform, and seemingly they care about gamers. I think they’ve done a lot to advance gaming on linux as well which is much appreciated.
But, at least the way I see it, they still extract rents from game devs to an almost feudal degree.
“Sure – come sell your
graingame – but you’ll have to give me a third of your profit because I own thetown squareplatform/servers.”Side note: It’s pretty funny that for a while Valve had Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis on staff to analyze spontaneously emerging markets for digital items on Steam – and he went on to write about the phenomenon above in his recent book Technofeudalism.
Edit: formatting
When you buy something digital, since it’s expensive, you want an assurance that the platform would honor your access for many years.
Valve has the best chance of that.
Technically, I’d say that GOG does, as you can just download and back up all the installers for the games. Wouldn’t even matter if the company went bankrupt or even if the entire internet died completely. You could still install and play the games just fine.
Turns out if you invest in making your platform not suck it ends up paying dividends. Figure it out dumbfucks.
Something I think a lot of people in first world countries might not be thinking about also, is that Valve set very reasonable prices in third world countries for about 5-10 years. It meant not having to pirate games anymore, risking viruses and having to look for cracks every update, having distributors closed down, etc.
Steam set reasonable prices, had a download manager that could pause downloads, offered download servers in several regions and countries to make it faster, etc. And now they’re making gaming on Linux easier. 🤷🏻♂️
Platforms like EGS have been throwing incredible games at us for years (until recently), and they can’t get enough people to stick around because it’s just not worth the trouble even free. I have collected many of those games, and I ended up buying them on Steam because it was just easier to deal with, even with third-party modding (such as SMAPI for Stardew Valley).
The one thing I will say against Valve/Steam is that their social platform is a shitshow and either they should invest in moderation or just shut it down, because it’s impossible to enter there and not be blasted with racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. It sucks because there have been times when I went to a game’s Steam forum and found out about some recent bug or workaround, so there is value there, but it’s completely overtaken with all the bigotry. But I get it, gAmErS… if they ever moderated that place, their userbase would probably shrink.
I feel like steam entered the market for online distribution pretty early. It initially started as a way for valve to update their own games and morphed into a digital distribution platform. They have had way more time to generate good will. My experiences have been very positive with steam, why would I leave a platform that works for me, to go to other companies that have already fucked me as a consumer prior to releasing digital storefronts? If the wagon ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Valve has a huge amount of good will to burn and the cynical side of me is waiting for the day they start.
Bullshit. There are many other PC games stores and launchers. Only reason they don’t have lot of users is because they are just not very good. In my view, Valve is not actively trying to establish any monopoly, their competition is mostly incompetent, especially EGS. Of course, I understand that if devs want their games to succeed, they have to play by Valve’s rules, but let’s face it, that’s where customers are. This is not by some trickery of Valve. It’s because Valve happens to be very pro-consumer. So, I don’t agree with the assertion that Steam is a monopoly.
Epic games store could have been great and yet, Epic’s disdain for gamers has caused it to fail. Now EGS is just a glorified Fortnite launcher for the most part.
I am not saying that Steam or even Valve is perfect. They are not. They are just leagues better than their competition.
It’s only a monopoly in that it’s so much more popular than everything else that’s come along, and the main reason for that is because it’s better than competitors. Most others are just publisher stores, and almost all have functionality that users disagree with.
In the OP article, the game distribution platform Rokky is also apparently a publisher store, having recently bought the rights to distribute Chinese games in the west.
I agree. There are other stores you can get your games from, that never got mentioned in this piece. I personally love GOG for that purpose. There aren’t many new games in there but there are big and day one releases
I avoided signing up for years because I thought it would lead to us only owning a revokable digital license to every new game. Oh how the turn tables.
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In one sense yes they are a monopoly. But there are alternative game stores. However Valve has earned their cut of money by actually trying to make a platform that works for game developers, game players and themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, they have a high risk of turning bad and extorting the market they have captured. But the truth is that every equally or greater sized competitor (Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Epic) has already skipped to the extortion part of the cycle and Valve simply hasn’t, and hasn’t really expressed any intention to do that. Being a privately owned company, Valve is allowed to sit back, enjoy the money they do make and not have to constantly ask for more, and develop what the staff feel like making without strict deadlines.
The smaller competitors are still great even if not as feature filled (GOG, itch) and you should support them too. So while I reject that Valve is the big bad, I also reject that Valve could never enshittify. My position is that Valve has earned a trust no one else has (even itch had to cave to Credit Card companies), and that trust is Valve’s to break.
Game distribution platform Rokky has just released the results of a study it conducted with 306 senior managers of PC game developers (all from the US or UK), and it makes for some interesting reading.
This study has a chance of being reasonable, but this article is junk. No word on methodology. I’m sure(/s) that the 306 managers aren’t skewed because they’re known by a non-steam platform.
