mr_MADAFAKA72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study
SkabySkalywagThey have the largest share and can direct the market/development, no question, but they not a monopoly. I think GOG has a good shot to complete as time carries on. At least while Gabe is still alive, they’ve been relatively ethical.
If the choice of largest developer platform is between Steam and companies like Epic, EA, or Microsoft, Steam still looks like a better alternative.
BunScientistSteam has so many features built-in like steam input, remote play [together], the forums with guides and stuff while most other platfors are relatively barebones, I’m not sure all stores have regional pricing either, they say Steam is a monopoly but they have done a lot to gain their market share for better or for worse
Came here to rant similarly. Just because they’re the biggest in the market does not mean they have a monopoly. There are plenty of options available, no one is locked into using or selling on steam.
“Lock-in” doesn’t make it a monopoly; market share does, and Steam dominates there. So much so that EA gave up on offering things exclusively on Origin.
Steam does not control the supply of it’s product, nor restrict it’s competition. Valve cannot unreasonably raise prices without consequences. They are not in a position to create barriers to entry into the market.
A monopoly implies customers cannot get it’s products and services elsewhere, through exclusivity or manipulation. Inferring that a business being a preferred vendor for a large portion of the market is equivalent to creating a monopoly is absurd.
I buy games on GOG when they’re available, but it seems like their market share is getting smaller as time goes on.
That said, the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is non-existent, so they may never really be able to have a true monopoly. They can still have problematic levels of influence, though. I’m sincerely worried about what direction Valve will take after Gaben retires or dies.
Yeah other than gog and itch every other platform is terrible. Epic gives a bigger share to devs and gives away a lot of free games, but they’re a publicly traded company trying to buy their way into the market so they can enshittify.
Basically, there isn’t a moat around pc game stores, but competitors aren’t even trying to be as nice as steam, and many publishers don’t publish to the best alternative because they want you use DRM (gog)
Epic gives a bigger share to devs and gives away a lot of free games, but they’re a publicly traded company trying to buy their way into the market so they can enshittify.
220+ free games in the library. One paid game that was an exclusive that wasn’t worth it in the end. No other transactions. Haven’t done the math, but in retail prices, that’s a lot of money to piss away hoping I’ll spend anything more.
poryThey’re not giving away retail price games. They’re paying dev teams single payouts to make a game limited-time-claimable. Your copy of a $60 game didn’t cost Epic $60, it cost them “$400k divided by number of downloads within the promo period”. And the devs take the payout because they know it’s coming in addition to all the paying customers on Steam. Basically a guaranteed return on investment.
Whoa, that’s really neat information. Thanks for sharing!
MS Gamepass uses the same model. Some percentage of a customer’s $30/mo doesn’t go to Sandfall Studios for “selling” Expedition 33 on Gamepass, Sandfall got a fat lump sum from MS in exchange for MS being allowed to distribute their game to subscribers.
Another banger. What other secrets do you have to share?
They have the largest share and can direct the market/development
That means they’re a monopoly. Having some small fry competitors doesn’t make you not a monopoly.
Horse {they/them}no, they are correct
you are confusing “pure monopoly” which means a single firm has 100% share of the market with the general use and legal term “monopoly” which means that a single firm has control of their sector of the market
you are confusing “pure monopoly” which means a single firm has 100% share of the market with the general use and legal term “monopoly” which means that a single firm has control of their sector of the market
To me, the amount of excusing from the gamer community is incredible. Stuff like “they’re not a monopoly because they’re ethical and I like Steam.”
They are, in fact, a growing pseudo monopoly. They take anticompetitive measures, with their APIs and storefront policies (like dictating pricing on other stores). Set aside the 30% cut, and no, it’s mostly not enshittified on the consumer side…
Yet.
How can people type that out on Reddit, with spam and ads in their face, without seeing the future danger? The irony is tremendous.
nullWho said anything resembling “they’re not a monopoly because they’re ethical and I like Steam.”?
The comment threads above mine?
I typed this out before I saw them, not expecting much of that on Lemmy (being a enshittification refuge and all).
They have the largest share and can direct the market/development, no question, but they not a monopoly. I think GOG has a good shot to complete as time carries on. At least while Gabe is still alive, they’ve been relatively ethical. If the choice of largest developer platform is between Steam and companies like Epic, EA, or Microsoft, Steam still looks like a better alternative.
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”.
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.
Who said anything resembling “they’re not a monopoly because they’re ethical and I like Steam.”?
…but they not a monopoly… At least while Gabe is still alive, they’ve been relatively ethical.
Friend, I don’t know what more you could want. That’s… pretty similar.
The difference is that Steam is not a public company. While they have done some problematic things, everything they have done has been to benefit the customers.
Plenty of stores dictate the price on other stores. The idea is just to keep pricing consistent across the board. Why would one store list a product and help advertise it when they know they aren’t going to sell much of because it’s cheaper elsewhere.
Physical items have some leeway in that as stores can mark things down, but digital items are the same regardless of where you get it from, and when it comes to steam if a store is selling a steam key Valve does not take the 30%, meaning they get nothing out of a key sold elsewhere and will sell less copies themselves if the other keys are cheaper.
On that 30%, I remember articles coming out when steam was gaining traction that showed how little it was compared to physical stores. When you combined creating the physical game, shipping, and store cut developers were lucky to get 50% of the game cost. And that didn’t count GameStop pushing preowned for $2 less that the dev didn’t get any cut of.
They have reversed a lot of things that the customers pushed back on as well.
As long as GabeN is in charge I don’t think they will go public and become shit. Apparently his son is poised to take over when he retires or passes and is in the same mindset of this father, but time will tell.
Valve got to where it is specifically by playing the long game and looking forward while putting the customer first. The efforts they made for VR and the Steam Deck would not have happened in any other company.
Plenty of stores dictate the price on other stores.
…How is this okay?!
Let’s put it another way. What if Walmart upcharged for some product, and told the manufacturer “if you don’t raise prices at every other store, we might pull your brand.”
They have no choice if Walmart is the majority of their marketshare.
What if Amazon did this? Or EGS, if they had 75% market share?
…Yes, it’s a massive improvement over physical retail. Does that mean 30% across the board is okay? And what about the factor of most devs getting crowded out by a much larger selection, now?
…And plenty of private companies are anti consumer. Some get worse going private. That’s no guarantee.
Look, Steam is incredible in many ways. One massively understated thing is Valve’s attempts to keep the store tagged an organized, which is a enormous boon to “niche” games and gamers, as opposed to spammy, unsorted messes like the iOS/Android App Stores or Amazon. It’s clear they actually care about their consumers and sellers, and their long term experience.
…But I still do not trust one company with an entire sector. I want GoG, or hell, even EGS to still have some market share in whatever niches work for them, in case Steam starts to enshittify.
Amazon does do that, and people hate it for it. Lemmings just seem to suddenly go blind when dealing with Valve’s shitty practices.
I don’t know what you’re expecting. Publishers don’t put every game on GoG and all the publisher run stores are very anti consumer, or they’re EGS which will definitely turn anti consumer the second they think they’ve got the market share. Where are you wanting people to buy their games?
I want them available and Itch and GoG or publisher stores or elsewhere, basically anything but one store unless they need Steam for API features.
I want Steam to not have so much marketshare they can dictate prices to other stores.
The status quo right now is okay, but I don’t like the direction it’s heading, where other stores may not even keep their heads above water.
I want them available and Itch and GoG or publisher stores or elsewhere, basically anything but one store unless
This seems to be suggesting that a large portion of games is only published to steam, which I don’t think is the case?
Except it literally is, per the article?
As far as I am aware, they only dictate the pricing of Steam keys on other stores. That seems fair to me, because they are doing the distribution in that case. Games that are on Steam can be cheaper elsewhere if they’re distributed separately.
That being said, I totally agree that they’re a monopoly based on their market power.
What I’ve read is that devs can’t price games lower than Steam on a non-Steam storefront that doesn’t use Steam keys.
For instance, if a dev has their own little DRM free store page where they sell DRM free downloads, they can’t take the 30% fee off their own store (reflecting what they’d actually make) without risking being delisted.
Maybe it’s an OCD thing, but this bothers me as a consumer. I could pay the same price for, say, Rimworld from Ludeon or from Steam, but Ludeon would get significantly less from the Steam sale.
rozodruI don’t know if I would say they’re a monopoly there are other options/store fronts out there…it’s just that the vast majority outside of GOG suck. in fact they all suck OTHER than Steam and GOG.
And as a Linux user…I ain’t got much of a choice. Steam, now, just works for me. I don’t even have to toggle the compatibility option anymore or hell even mess around with proton if I don’t want to. install steam via whatever package manager or flatpak and i’m off to the races.
Anything other than Steam is unlikely to work. EA, Epic, and Microsoft have all essentially told me they don’t want my business simply because I use Linux.
I think it qualifies as a monopoly because of the network effect of having so many users and so many games on it. Especially on the developer side, it’s basically mandatory to release your game on Steam because the number of users you can reach is so much higher than any other platform.
That being said, it’s not a monopoly that most people have a problem with because they generally continue to serve users well even though they have enough market power that they could enshittify things. If they were a public company they almost certainly would have done that by now.
It’s hard to justify calling them a monopoly when they don’t have exclusive control over the supply of a product or service. Developers aren’t forced to exclusively ship on Steam or not at all.
But then again, supposedly Steam do force developers to put games on sale on Steam at the same price elsewhere it’s on sale which is definitely a monopolistic behaviour (stifling competition where say a new market might make their fee 10%, enabling the developer to sell it cheaper on a different marketplace).
skulblakaYou can sell your game for different prices on different platforms, you just can’t sell steam keys that way. If you purchase a game on Itch and it gives you a steam key, that’s still a steam purchase and is subject to this restriction. If you purchase a game on Itch and it hands you an installer then you can buy that game at whatever price they want to sell it at.
And yet Steam keys have been sold for less than Steam prices for over a decade.
Like the recently released ARC Raiders.
isthereanydeal.com/game/arc-raiders/info/
All time low of $31.92 vs $39.99 on Steam. Current low is $34.17 for a Steam key.
If Steam suddenly introduced a policy that prohibited devs from selling on other platforms alongside Steam, most devs would choose Steam because they would make way more money on Steam than elsewhere.
The power to do that is monopoly power, regardless of whether Steam is abusing that power currently. I think that their behavior on the whole is pretty good, but that doesn’t make them not a monopoly.
Developers aren’t forced to exclusively ship on Steam or not at all.
That’s just not true in practical terms. If you want your game to be discovered and you don’t have a massive advertising budget, it’s not a serious option to try to forego selling on Steam while staying in business as a game developer. That’s like saying Amazon isn’t an ecommerce monopoly because you’re not “forced” to sell there, even though that would mean bankruptcy and irrelevance for most sellers.
As a Linux user, exactly as well.
rapcheefyi heroic launcher installs and runs epic and gog games beautifully
epic and uplay is a bit more complicated, but with a bit of fiddling, lutris worked well enough for me
unfortunately (?) no solution for microsoft/xbox stuff yet, if they’re not on steam i mean
that said i’m not giving any money these companies (except for gog ofc), but free stuff is free
epic and uplay is a bit more complicated, but with a bit of fiddling, lutris worked well enough for me
unfortunately (?) no solution for microsoft/xbox stuff yet, if they’re not on steam i mean
that said i’m not giving any money these companies (except for gog ofc), but free stuff is free
circuitfarmerThere’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.
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.
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.
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. partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
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.
