Not OC, duh.
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I mean, yes.
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Steam is a scary monopoly, getting scarier.
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It’s not their fault the industry (minus GOG) comitted mass seppuku.
Both can be true. One can worry about Valve, and use them hesitantly, while laughing at everything else like it’s a cartoon.
agreed, i still dislike GOG’S AI take.
GOG’S AI take
What happened, exactly?
All I can find is someone used an AI image for some kind of marketing.
I remember for a job requirement they want The developer to use AI or Smth
itch.io seems rather unproblematic
Except for you know the whole it actually is a huge f****** mess.
I wouldn’t classify it as “scary” quite yet.
Our benevolent yachtlord for life won’t live forever. Next guy (or group of owners) may not be quite content with simply having a billion dollar yacht, might enshittify for more yachts quicker.
Point being, GabeN is no saint, but he shows restraint with his greed, if you can even call him greedy. Next guy might kill the golden goose and then we’ll all have a fun time because all our games are all on Steam. That’s the scary bit.
I would still wait until we know who the heir apparent is to worry.
I feel like a peasant waiting to find out if the good old king’s son is gonna ruin everything.
Good news is his kids appear to be level headed like him.
As they say wealth never lasts past the third generation. Gaben built it up, his kids understand their father and keep it going. The grandkids are spoiled and don’t get it and run it into the ground.
So we got time.
Whilst mostly true, to truly maintain wealth over many generations, you have to be very consistent with the culture that you pass down.
If Gabe is smart (I assume he is), he will know about the third generation problem, and how to mitigate it. He will talk about it with his kids and grandkids when they are old enough to understand. Building a culture around a shared set of values, making then understand that their success is built on providing the best experience to gamers that they can.
The other key thing, is to make the next generations understand that, whilst 10 years may seek like a long time, it really isn’t.
It ain’t a public company. Nothing scary about it.
People don’t change in a dime when you get to gabens age. You tend to become stubborn and set in your ways.
What’s scary is what the guy after gaben will do. But so long as gaben is around and the company is private we are fine.
We did get lucky with the benevolent king, but we might not get that lucky in the future, yeah.
How is steam a monopoly if they don’t even own the biggest platform they sell games to? And even steam os being Linux has to be fully open to comply with the gpl meaning anyone can modify and install whatever they want.
It’s not. You can still buy from the others if you want to be treated like shit, excepting GOG, in my opinion. Consoles are true monopolies, because you can only choose if you want to buy a console and marry to its store, now that physical media is becoming a rarity.
They have a big fraction of the market because they are efficient at selling what people want. I don’t like it, I believe Newell, specifically, is profiting greedily from Valve’s situation, but shit, this is not even a natural monopoly.
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Lol gog with the propeller hat in the corner
hahaha yeah.
Shoulda had him playing with Itch.io
good idea.
No shit. It kills me when people play on console. I mean I get the simplicity and all, but they try to use the “it’s cheaper” angle and yeah, bullshit. It’s initially cheaper, then you’re paying what $20 a month to just play online, then games are $10 off at most on their respective stores and then you get to rebuy them when a new console comes out.
Steam games are like 50%-90% off constantly, and Epic has free games like every week. I’ve had games for over 15 years through steam. So yeah I paid $1,000 for my PC but after 3 years console owners have spent $1,500+ after monthly fees and buying games.
this is the reason why i dont like Consoles, If you ignore Video Game choices.
(if you want to know Video Game choice: TF2 Is not on Console for example, ik it used to be but not anymore,but its one of my favorite multiplayer game, no multiplayer video game i found is like it.)Also backwards compatibility. I can buy a new shiny modern PC and nearly all the games I bought in the past 30 years will run.
Oh true, like Windows 98/95 Video Games.
Just like that, yes. Also DOS Games and whatever
Yeah - through virtual machines and emulators, but still.
I just bought a Switch 2 and am playing Pokemon Champions lol. Consoles are not horrible
Did you even read the entire comment or are you just here to provide a random fact about yourself and contribute nothing?
They bought a Nintendo product.
Do you really have to ask?
Nintendo is the worst offender here.
Their audacity to pretend that the switch 2 is a different console than the original switch is fascinating. They cut corners on hardware when they released the original and now Nintendo is charging you again to buy slightly better hardware that will still underperform.
I get that non nativ ports can have performance problems, but even Nintendo originals run under 30fps with mediocre graphics. You get better performance if you run the switch games on a steam deck via an emulator.
Personally not in the market so I can’t verify that, but damn - just how awful you and your fanbase have to be to release a product that performs worse than your direct competitors on your own originals ground. Steamdeck is already an underperformer in terms of hardware, and how much longer has it been produced than the Switch 2? 3 years?!
Pokemon Champions, the game that was supposed to be the definitive PVP pokemon game but only launched with 186 out of 1028 pokemon? That game?
Yeah it’s fun
It kills me when people play on console.
As a PC and console gamer, consoles are easier to buy once and play a round of games for a number of years. PCs, on the other hand, are much better especially for certain game types.
Each has its role, but I was almost exclusively a console gamer for a couple of years because:
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You can sit back and relax and play on your TV after a long day of work
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If I buy a console, I can expect that almost all games will play correctly on it without having to upgrade mid-cycle
It’s quite a bit more complicated to try to figure out which video games your current graphics card can and cannot play, when you should spring for an upgrade, and when you need to do a complete re-build. To add to that I do not like windows and so I’m a member of the linux gaming club (there are dozens of us, DOZENS) and that makes things more complicated as well. With a console, they’ve worked out the licensing, the performance, and most fiddly bits and I can just sit on my couch, buy a game and play.
When I was younger and had more time to deal with things like the above, I gamed exclusively on PC. But with everything else going on with work and life, I find it much easier to just pick up a controller, plunk down on the couch, and play for a couple of hours.
Both have their pluses and minuses. I would say I like console gaming better because it usually happens in the living room and doesn’t feel as anti-social.
But to your point…cost savings isn’t really the primary reason to game on a console IMO.
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I paid $1,000 for my PC
What year was this?
It took me $1200 to build a PC to play Skryim on high settings in 2012.
And in most cases you can’t mod your games at all on console, which is basically a free way to vastly increase the shelf life of any title.
PC forever.
I call it accepting a negative, voicing opinions against it, while also not interfacing with it.
The pricing behind PS+, when considering all the Netflix-style games available, is decently generous. Less so for Game Pass, but it used to be better. I think most people are upset that it’s a gatekeeper for online play, but begrudgingly accept it as part of that wide game service.
I’m generally with you that pricing is better, but I have had occasions where a deal price on PlayStation beat out the lowest historical price of a Steam key.
If you were to claim you should never accept a platform with negative behaviors, I would point at Steam’s Counterstrike skins market, which can even encroach on you should scammers wish to sell to you, or steal your account to get a high “user reliability score”. I’d rather it didn’t exist. I still support Steam even with it there.
Don’t forget the Humble Bundle which or mostly on Steam.
2/593 I paid for, it’s getting pretty ridiculous. If I was much younger, this would be an insane library. Instead it’s mostly the greatest hits of the past and there’s a lot of library overlap with what I own on Steam and played already.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to ask “are other companies bad?” when trying to determine if a company is a monopoly. One thought experiment I like to do is pretend the CEO dies and is replaced by Satan. How much damage could he do? If it’s a lot, then probably you’ve got a monopoly.
Suppose Gaben dies, and he’s replaced by Satan. Could he do damage to the gaming community by doing something exorbitant, like charging a 30% cut of game sales from the folks who actually develop the games? Could they do anticompetitive vendor lock stuff like only allowing you to purchase DLC through steam? Only time will tell. And it will, because at some point Gaben will die, and he will be replaced by someone less magnanimous and angelic than him.
That also makes no sense. Literally any large company could do great deals of harm even if they have countless competitors if they set out for the goal of just doing harm.
There is a serious fundamental difference between a monopoly and a general market preference.
If every single one of your competitors all decide to be stupid and you don’t you arnt a monopoly. You just are the only one not being stupid.
Literally any large company could do great deals of harm
Which is why there shouldn’t be any large companies.
That also makes no sense. Literally any large company could do great deals of harm even if they have countless competitors if they set out for the goal of just doing harm.
Surely you understand that the amount of harm that a company with no serious competitors can do is much higher and longer lasting than the harm that a company with competitors can do.
If they start being stupid, they’re suddenly on par with the competitors already being stupid. Suddenly they have viable competitors.
A monopoly is when all competitors have been destroyed, not when competitors aren’t particularly competitive. At least, under the letter of US law.
They do have competitors, they competitors just aren’t very popular. There is the colloquial definition of monopoly, and a different legal bar for being declared a monopolist under US law.
To be declared a monopolist requires that a company already has destroyed or is actively seeking to destroy competitors through anti competitive behavior. Even if people mix terms, the general idea is that they’re not doing anything unreasonable and anti-competitive to gain their position in the market. They have competitors, they’re just not popular, and steam has not done anything to make them unpopular.
The real danger is that if steam decided to suddenly start being externally anti consumer, like many of it’s competitors already are, it would be difficult for people to migrate away due to a lack of interoperability between services. Users can’t transfer licenses to play games between services, nor can they easily interact with social features on other platforms. But that’s not really steam’s fault, that’s how all the competitors (for the most part) work as well.
There is the colloquial definition of monopoly, and a different legal bar for being declared a monopolist under US law.
The US legal bar for being a monopoly has been a joke since Reagan. But even aside from that, legality is not an interesting concept in discussions like these. Slavery was legal. The real question here is whether this situation has the potential to cause serious harm to society.
The real danger is that if steam decided to suddenly start being externally anti consumer, like many of it’s competitors already are, it would be difficult for people to migrate away due to a lack of interoperability between services. Users can’t transfer licenses to play games between services, nor can they easily interact with social features on other platforms.
Exactly, this is the problem. This is anticompetitive behavior.
But that’s not really steam’s fault, that’s how all the competitors (for the most part) work as well.
Yes it is, this is a deliberate choice they made. No one held a gun to their head. And it is precisely this kind of stuff that antitrust laws were supposed to protect us from. And you can see that in countries which do still have reasonable antitrust laws, Steam is being sued for precisely these practices.
Exactly, this is the problem. This is anticompetitive behavior.
It’s not anti competitive if it is litterlay also what all the competitors are doing, and have been doing since the very dawn of digital markets for software. It also dubious if they could legally even set up such interoperability even if they wanted to, as it could potentially violate parts of the DMCA.
They’re not doing anything to destroy their competitors, they’re not a monopolist, and the repeated failures of court cases against them all over the world shows that. There are a few on going cases against them, but, there are far far more cases that have already finished that failed to show any monopoly seeking behavior.
Yes, an evil ceo could do much harm by turning steam into the companies shooting themselves in the face. However, they are currently one of the only ones not doing that, so that’s where gamers will go.
There’s a difference between a monopoly that exists because all other options are shit and a monopoly that exists because of anticompetitive practices.
Tbf they already take a 30% cut, I dont have a huge issue with it though.
30% isn’t a big cut, and the DLC thing is to prevent customers from getting scammed
Wow, thanks Steam!
Dude… What? Just pass the blunt pls
Haha love this post. I find it astonishing how “leftist” lemmy can’t see this and keeps defending this obvious Monopoly just because the current CEO is an intelligent greedy guy… Happy suckers all around I guess…
I get that we shouldn’t be happy about any type of Monopoly but Steam occupies the PC gaming space similar to how Linux dominates the server space.
You can’t really complain that almost every server running Linux is a bad thing. Granted Steam is not open source, but you have to imagine how little effort it takes to not make a shitty marketplace/platform as a competitor.
The fact that such a low bar cannot be surpassed by multi billion dollar companies is all you really need to know, especially when GOG successfully exists.
ow Linux dominates the server space.
Linux is free. Free cannot be monopoly. Bad comparison here.
Steam is also free unless I’m missing something?
They mean free as in freedom / free speech (libre), not free as in free beer / free robux (gratis)
Linux is libre, Steam is not libre, both are gratis
Oh okay, thanks for clarifying.
Steam is gratis to create an account, it is not free. All game purchases have a 30% tax, and you don’t own the games you purchased.
Not tax, it’s Steam’s cut.
It’s more accurate to call it a commission for marketing, advertising, and distribution services. Steam isn’t doing nother, they are providing a service to their customers.
Thanks for clarifying
Steam is a closed source market place blob that takes 30% middle man tax. Valve however has understood FOSS, and the contributions they are making are immense.
When a true FOSS project is dominating this means the people are in control of it. Not corpos nor is it a monopoly. People have voted by donating work for it to be the most successful thing in its applicable area. Dominating FOSS projects also suck up and integrate a lot of innovation greatly reducing duplicated effort.
FreeBSD is alive and well, and it even benefits from Linux’s DRM GPU drivers.
Although the drm gpu drivers are mostly of a corporate effort, we are seeing an occasional interventions by the people “no, not like that” to keep the sometimes shoddy quality up.
/<this is a bit too high effort post.>
Both Sony and Nintendo have been consistently posting record revenue numbers in the past few years. Neither are that far off Valve.
Regardless, this whole Steam circlejerk reminds me of the early days of Android, when people still believed that Google wasn’t “evil”. Let’s hope I’m in the wrong here.
Google isn’t privately owned. It’s hard to be on the stock market and not be evil. I think Costco is the only one that has managed it for any appreciable length and that is under threat of death from one of the co-founders.
In fairness Google was just becoming evil at that point. It was a fantastic company when the founders ran it.
I didn’t realize we were still in the early days of a platform that launched in 2003.
I’m old enough to remember the uproar because Half Life 2 had Steam as a hard requirement to be activated, even for physical copies.
Steam was born as Valve’s DRM.
As am I. I admittedly didn’t see the point of it at the time.
The difference was that people pretended like Google ever had an option to “not be evil”. At the end of the day, they were a publicly traded company, and thus, line must go up, or else the collective hive mind of the public market would vote the leadership out and replace them.
Steam is private, thus, the current leaderships can ignore the demands of the public market hive mind. Private companies can be evil, but it depends on who owns them. They’re not guaranteed.
Fundamentally you can’t compare a private and public company. Private companies have a legal requirement that drives them towards becoming shitty for the consumer. While a private company isn’t.
Steam is literally a mom and pop shop. A huge one but it is. They have no legal pressure to enshitify they have no legal requirement to put money and share holders before customers cause they have no shareholders.
Private companies have a legal requirement that drives them towards becoming shitty for the consumer. While a private company isn’t.
Umm… I think I’m confused now
The first word of that sentence should probably be “public” - then it makes sense.
Public companies do not actually have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. That is a myth based on a misreading of the Dodge V Ford decisions. That specific reading of the precedent of that decisions has never actually been used in a court case to charge a CEO.
Once steam goes to shit we will all sail the seven seas but multiplayer will suffer
GOG just sitting in the corner waiting for people to notice them.
GOG just sitting in the corner waiting for people to notice them.
And they can keep sitting there while they’re not actively supporting Linux, despite all that Cyberpunk/Witcher money (and according to their statements the funding got even better after their sale). To play their games on Linux, I have to go through all the steps to get Heroic and its terrible GUI, go through its WINE settings,…
Meanwhile 90% of the Steam games: Hit “Play” and it just works.
don’t forget the GenAI for marketing.
Gog is no longer part of cd project red
Gog is no longer part of cd project red
“and according to their statements the funding got even better after their sale”
How’s multiplayer on gog ?
am probably gonna rebuy all my video games on alternative platforms, or imma play open source games instead.
i can also take the games outside of Steam.I mostly play mmos tbf but I want to download and safely store a copy of wow classic servers and clients and mods in case we have an apocalypse event lol
kinda like me, i mostly play TF2. (but i have to wait hours for my servers to start.)
multiplayer will suffer
Good. It’s a cesspool.
Just playing with friends might get harder
Back in my day we used Hamachi and multiplayer was just fine.
Ugh it was a pain to setup
Competition actually exists, GOG, Epic, itch.io. More used to exist but they were shitty, inferior products and died out because of that. Steam grew up to being the standard it is now and we come to expect it. It’d take same or better to unseat them.
yeah i know,but i feel like Steam’s competitors are inferior.
(personal opinion though)Save for Epic the other two set out with what they intend. GOG wants you to buy games without DRM that you can download installers for whenever you want to install them. Generally more consumer choice.
ItchIo wants to be a place for small, indie developers to get a spot in the market without having to rely on Steam. Smaller games and media for consumption that I don’t think takes a big of a bite out as Steam does.
Steam has some legitimate criticisms to it certainly, and Gabe is part of the class of people I don’t like. But certainly not a monopoly.
Me playing steam games on an arm handheld right now cause you can just install an arm build of the steamos frontend on any arm linux device and with a little tweaking my games just work. Its actually amazing, modded terraria, trackmania, schedule 1, etc just work.
an arm handheld
Yes, that’s usually what the hand is at the end of.
Did you see the leg football match last night?
The only ARM Linux device i have is the Raspberry Pi 5.
would be cool to try it out on the PI.Oh, reminds me. Gotta bust out my RP with retropie os on it, is retropie still a thing? My RP is a little older it’s the 1gb cpu with wifi
pretty sure, dont have retropie on mine though.
The RP5 isnt the strongest device ever but im sure some indie games will run well on it. Also with steam pushing native linux and possibly native arm builds soon of games performance will only improve.
good comment, and yeah most 2D indie games work fine.3D is where it starts to struggle.
(with BOX86/BOX64/FEX-EMU ofc)
native,3D works fine.
“Luigi wins by doing nothing!” ahh company 😭
fr
They don’t allow ads in games. Support Steam.
really?
It’s not being a monopoly that is illegal — if it were then all of “big tech” would be screwed. It’s using a monopoly toward anti-competitive ends and enshittifying everything that is illegal…which is funny, because even that really doesn’t seem to be illegal when you look around these days.
The law only matters if it’s actually enforced.
Fun fact for those of you who stream from a gaming pc to laptop/steamdeck/whatever: you can add 3rd party games (like those off GOG) to steam and stream them without buying them on steam.
There’s also Sunshine/Moonlight and you don’t have to buy your games at all.
I can also add pirated games to Steam. And with a little fuckery using a simple text file, even get achievements, on Steam, through a pirated game.
i know that,pretty useful though.
You can also install the playnite launcher and launch all your games from one place without having to add them to steam
None of the competitors have great linux support and great gamepad support. I have no love for steam, for me it just happens to be the best platform from a technical point of view.
one of the reasons why most of the games i buy are on Steam
After hearing his connection to Musk I am starting to wonder. All is not what it seems.
Steam is a shitty business. They run a gambling scheme for children, they take a huge cut from devs (blabla industry standard blablabla), they make billions and basically employ less people than an indie studio. The fact that so many gamers would take a bullet to protect this billionaire dude is beyond me. Of course the guy is super right wing, you don’t run that type of business without being.
Yeah, I am definitely guilty of giving Steam a free pass because I used their service a lot.
There’s no such thing as a good billionaire. Some are less bad than others, but none are good.
I can get wanting to have enough money to live comfortably. But that line is crossed way before the “billionaire” mark.
They have more money than they could ever hope to spend in 10 lifetimes. So it is a conscious decision they make, to say “Instead of putting everything I don’t need to a good cause, I’m going to hoard it and buy a few more yachts instead.”
who, David Baszucki?
Musk v. Altman lawsuit exposed that not only are Musk and Gabe on speaking terms, but they also share a lot of opinions about AI and brain to computer interfaces.
It is the first crack in Steam I have seen, and if life has taught me anything, where there is smoke there is fire.
Gabe is a billionaire. He collects yachts.
The cracks have been there for years, we just wanted to believe that they weren’t because when we do acknowledge them we acknowledge that all of our money has gone to the parasite class.
Edits: words are hard, can’t decide how I want to say this — you get the picture.
You are right, of course. I think modern day media and it’s propaganda has been unbelievabley effective into duping everyone into believing a divided society of haves and have nots is acceptable.
t is the first crack in Steam I have seen,
Anyone who really wants to understand Valve should at bare minimum watch the 2 coffeezilla videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6jhjjVy5Ls
but why doesn’t Valve shove AI down everyone’s throat
I wouldn’t bet on that, but I do hope you are right and they keep AI off the platform.
True
Same reason they don’t make games, they don’t have to.
Everyone else has investors shoving Ai down their throat. No one’s shoving Gabe into doing anything.
public companies tend to do that atleast.
![Steam competitors be like. [Extended?]](https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/8d2d46eb-234c-41bd-b7c1-fb9c4c9f2508.webp){kind=link}