Jesus fucking Christ in blue skirt, y’all have your nose full of Gabe’s juice gagging him so much.
I truly enjoy all of you morons cicle jerking “eat the rich” but bending over Valve and paying for the lube.
“But think of how much he did for Linux gnagnagna”. Fuck that shit. Wake the fuck up. Torvalds does not own a 500 millions yacht.
Lemmy is truly going full retard and speedrunning Reddit clusterfuck as fast as possible.
Doesn’t matter how you got there, if you have become a monopoly you should be brought low.
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.
Well aside from the CS skin black market.
people fellating valve will never get less disgusting. have some shame and self respect.
Remember when steam introduced the 2h refund policy out of their own volition rather than being forced by multiple governments? Yeah me neither.
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.
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.
alright, lets compare game platforms(this may contain Opinions).
- Steam, probably the only good platform on here(also some stupendous features like a clock/alarm,note taking,browser,etc), but people should remember they are a monopoly(not the worse monopoly i have seen, look at something like Google or Microsoft), and they are still AAA company(Gabe Newell is a billionaire and the 106 richest man according to Forbes).
- GOG(why is it not being shown in the meme), Dont like their stance on being Pro-AI(if the LLMS was only used on One banner or smth or it had a fair reasoning, i would have been content with LLM usage.) and subpar features(maybe?),no DRM guarantee is nice.
but i like their program where they make older games Legally playable(IIRC Steam used to do the same?). - Ubisoft store,EA Store,Epic Games Store,Microsoft Store(due to Xbox logo),itch.io. they all have subpar features, and am pretty sure itch.io has more of a focus on UGC content.
- Console(Playstation,Nintendo,Xbox): I personally dont like the Video Game choice, and paying for a sub to play online.
i know there is stuff like DLSite aswell,but i never used them(the only Video Game franchise i know that sells there is Touhou Project)
Capitalism good when valve does it?
What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.
Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)
The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.
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).
ffs, you do not own the games you bought.
You haven’t owned the games you buy since software licenses became ubiquitous.
Any business that has over 4% market rate should be forcibly split.
My dude, 4% is insanity. If you did that, there would be - at absolute bare minimum - 26 different companies for any given market, including distribution. No one would be able to scale to serve global demand in any way, shape, or form. You’d have to route packages through three different companies in order to get a product to your friend in Switzerland. Any product that got popular would see its parent company split. If someone wrote an OS that was too good and everyone decided it was fantastic, the company would somehow have to split in such a way as to divide the OS share between two companies, which would then negate the point of having the same OS as your buddy.
The problem isn’t market share, it’s enforced market share. Anti-competitive practices. Lobbying. Buying out competition. These are places that Steam demonstrably is more ethical than its competition.
All Epic had to do in order to capitalize on Fortnite was to make a launcher that was better than (or at least approaching the quality of) Valve’s. Instead, when the starting gun went off, they started walking backwards.
My dude. At over 4% market share companies are incentivised to buy out competition and become monopolies because it’s more profitable.
No one would be able to scale to serve global demand in any way, shape, or form
Yes. Perfect. Because any and all global companies so far are evil and anti-consumer. Disagree? Name 3.
The problem isn’t market share, it’s enforced market share. Anti-competitive practices. Lobbying. Buying out competition
So yeah, I’m glad we agree, that any company at 4% market share must be stopped from growing, because otherwise all of that happens.
STOP giving the COnsuMer WHAt they WANTTTTT!!!NOOOOOOOO MY SLOPCORE BUSINESS CANT COMPETE WITH ACTUAL GOODS AND SERVICES.
Which lawsuit is this about?
Valve does a lot of things pretty badly, it’s just that they and the fans control the narrative.
What are you talking about?
Allowing and Promoting child gambling for example.
They are still way better than the other megacorps but they also have some skelletons in their closet.
Also there were honeymoon periods for Google, Elon Musk’s companies, even Microsoft during Windows 7.
First you’re grateful for quality product. Then society will force you to be grateful for them giving you “potential job opportunities”, and you must treat some underpaid and infuriating job like it was free money.
That singular example is certainly valid. Is there anything else?
Not allowing games to be sold at a lower price on other platforms. (Not steam keys)
This is not even slightly offensive. Consoles have games that are entirely exclusive to them. It’s a license/publishing agreement…
The narrative of 4 massive sales per year and constant smaller sales in between is prettay great, let me just say.
ur right, ever since steam came out, games have been getting less expensive
Those sales are on the devs.
Whoever they’re on, I like 'em.
Then be grateful for the devs, not the platform!
Alright bud, my bad.
I also like the narratives of continuous game support, easy updates, being able to install games any number of times forever, making a fantastic handheld gaming device that can be hooked up to a TV that is easy to update and modify, convenient ways to communicate and play with friends, reviews, and basically everything except for the forums (which should be moderated by the game publishers).
The only complaints I recall people making about steam are losing their account because they forgot their password and valve being thorough in not just giving it to someone or that easy streaming killed physical games. To be honest, the first sucks but isn’t valve’s fault and the second is just convenience and reliability being more attractive than physical media. I have played and have had continuous access to far more games since steam than prior because I don’t have to manage physical media and the benefits outweigh the negatives of not really owning the games. Everything is a tradeoff, and I chose to get rid of old consoles because they were too much work compared to using online games services like steam.
I also did use several of the other ones in the meme and dropped them because they offered only downloading games and weren’t even very good at that.
Apart from running gambling for children (pretty hefty thing to put aside, but still), what do you mean?
Quarter machines and Pokémon cards are gambling, too. Parents are shitty. Their kids shouldn’t even be on steam until older and then why do they have credit cards? Parents are crap.
They basically take away most of the profit margin of games created by studios. 30% is a huge cut for a virtual storefront. A single medium studios usually employ more people than steam as a whole.
Don’t Sony, MS and Nintendo take the same 30% cut from third-party games sold on their platforms?
It doesn’t really seem to be publicly verifiable, but if this article is to be believed, then yes. Would be kind of weird if they wouldn’t either, since selling games is their business too, and they have to compete with Steam / PC.
Whataboutism. The fact that someone is a POS doesn’t justify you being one. But if you really want to compare, they all have major studios under their wing and thousands of employees (sub 300 for steam). Epic also only takes 12%, and GOG let’s you actually own your games, DRM free (your steam library dies with you). I’m not defending any of these stores, just pointing out that steam isn’t the good guy gamers think they are. They care about profit, that’s it, yet any critisism is met with an army of gamers ready to give their life for capitalist selfish business.
That is not a whataboutism. The claim was “30% is a huge cut for a virtual storefront”. The only way to qualify that comparison is to look at other virtual storefronts for games. If you have other cases of comparison to give apart from Sony, MS, and Nintendo, I’m open to look at them. Epic, so far, is a bit of a standout with its pricing.
Yeah let’s ignore Epic, just because .
And let’s also ignore the kid gambling epidemic created by Valve.
And let’s ignore the fact that you don’t own your steam games, but send death treath to Ubisoft if they say the same.
BTW, Sony, MS and Nintendo all suck, but at least they create jobs for devs.
Epic made it very clear from the start they were trying to undercut Steam, not by being better, but by paying out developers to create exclusive games for the Epic store, something extremely hated on PC. Even on Steam you can still sell your games elsewhere too.
Steam also controls the larger markets share of PC gaming. Of course they’re going to have to price themselves competitively. Because why would you pay more for a platform that has way less users and a bad reputation?
You can actually just pay an almost 0% cut by delivering directly to your customers, but that’s exactly why you use a storefront to sell your game. You go where the customers are, and they are at Steam.
BTW, Sony, MS and Nintendo all suck, but at least they create jobs for devs.
They’d be public if they only cared about profit. It might be 99.9% of what they care about but private businesses do have things they do that aren’t as profitable but they do them to make something better. Or because they want to see it in the world.
This isn’t really a problem though, more a consideration or trade off. If Valve’s services are worth that 30% cut, because you reach more people or don’t have to make other costs that would dwarf the cut, it’s worth it. Nobody’s forcing companies to sign up with Steam, other than indirectly because it turns out doing so is a sensible deal.
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.
i dont know why you think they are run efficiently, they just dont need much labor to run their “land lording” scheme
