- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
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LMFAO, I love when someone says they tried everything when it’s so blatantly obvious they didn’t really try anything.
Both Epic and Amazon seemed to believe that if you gave out enough free games then Steam would just… Disappear? Really really dumb.
Neither company has invested any time into making their launcher any good. They haven’t invested any time into making their ecosystem feature rich like Steam. They have just given away a bunch of games and had sales and hoped that magic would take care of the rest.
Valve doesn’t even have to try to beat the competition when the competition doesn’t put any effort in.
GoG Galaxy is the only decent alternative launcher I’ve used and it’s being maintained (seemingly) by one guy who only works one day a year. It’s not as good as Steam by a long shot, but far far better than any of the launchers that come from companies WAY WAY bigger and wealthier. Even the itch.io launcher is better!!!
Blizzard, Amazon, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, and Rockstar (and more) all have their own launchers and not a single one is decent or necessary. Why make such an inferior product when Steam already exists?
Valve and I have trust. 20 years of it. They are there, have fair prices, let me play where and when I want, no gotchas, I trust them. Sure tomorrow they could break that trust, but so far they haven’t.
Then Amazon, who has continuously ruined my trust. Adding ads to an ad free prime tier, lying about delivery times, getting shittier and cheaper products on their store, and oh yeah, just being an evil company. And they wonder why I never even looked at their store.
And Valve is pushing for Linux support, it might not be a major point for most but for me it is.
In my two days with linux ive come to really like it, im annoyed at myself for staying with windows for so long and not even trying it. (Cachyos) I prefer everything about gnome and plasma to windows right now. I was just dealing with their garbage ui and random updates for no reason. Its nice having some control.
It’s more than just pushing for support. They have made a lot of windows only games just work on Linux.
They’ve changed it from “need to release and support Linux” to “zero effort other than not actively fuck up the compatibility layer”. In user land, it’s the same thing. For developers it’s a vast difference.
More than that, they don’t lock it down to apps coming from Steam. In a Steam Deck, you can get the app from anywhere, even pirating, if you wish, and it works with Proton.
And the Steam Deck runs games that didn’t have to come from Steam.
Valve is legitimately doing things for the customer, even if they aren’t always a customer of Valve.
It’s also a plus for me too.
For me it’s the reason I started playing games again. Have been using Linux forever, didn’t wanted a dual boot etc. So when games started to work on Linux I stared to buy and play more and more.
Although recently it has mostly been openRTC without steam.
Kinda wish I fully commited, but I can run my windows programs/games off my windows partition fairly easily, so I don’t need to open it to access that data (thought this would be impossible for some reason). I was suprised that embergen worked and seemed to run as well as it does on my windows drive.
Have they tried being trustworthy, adding value, and not fucking over customers?
But we tried everything BUT that.
To disrupt stream, you’d need to be better than Steam. Also, what am I gonna do with my existing 1000 games in steam? I DON’T WANT 5 GAME MANAGERS.
All these companies think people want 10 streaming services, 5 steams, 7 spotifys. WE DONT. We just want 1 that does everything we want.
I want five game managers.
Maybe a sixth to manage those.
Competition in the PC market is a good thing. Otherwise it’s just another locked down console.
I know that today in most English-speaking countries, competition is worshipped as an all-powerful god that solves every problem. But the reality is that competition is often detrimental to a lot of stakeholders in an industry. Competition optimizes for specific parameters in a downward spiral- that’s why every streaming service sucks, and is worse than Netflix was 10 years ago.
What would you hope to get out of a Steam competitor? I will guess that you are talking about price pressure. But Steam does not set the prices- publishers do. That’s why the same game is $69.99 whether you get it on Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox store, Epic Games Store, or buying physical copies from Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, or wherever else. In that way you could argue Steam already has tons of effective competition putting pressure on prices, just outside of the specific PC digital storefront space.
So maybe if Valve had more competition, Steam might be forced to reduce their fees to publishers, but there’s no reason to believe that cost savings would be passed on to consumers.
If anything, having competition just repeats the fixed costs, or in other words reduces the population of users that fixed costs are spread over, driving up the total and per-unit costs of the whole system.
Now I certainly am not saying anything so dumb as “In GabeN we trust” or “I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term”. But the solution is regulation, not competition.
The other notable place monopolies fail is servicing less profitable populations. Valve has so far done the opposite. Epic has outright refused to support Linux, while Valve has made their own free gaming Linux distro, with tons of work put into Proton for free to ensure compatibility. VR is a tiny niche, but Valve still put out one of the best VR systems kn the market. The “handheld” PC market was incredibly niche, but Valve released the Steam Deck and I would guess sold an order of magnitude or two more units than anything before or since in that space. I don’t really see any underserved niches asking for a competitor.
The problem with a lack of competition is you end up in a “my way or the highway” scenario, both for the customers and suppliers, with the distributor having, functionally, complete control over who gets to sell what to who, and who gets to buy what. So you really are saying “In GabeN we trust” and “I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term” as you have no other option.
I’d say you’re partially correct when you say regulation is the amswer, but with only a single entity, or even just a small number, in the field regulatory capture becomes a real risk. This can be overcone either by a legeslative with principals and a backbone (good luck, especially considering that needs to be maintained in perpetuity) or by having enough entities with different goals that no one of them can’t dominate.
Ultimately you need a combination of robust regulation and enough competition that there is presure for them to play fair.
I’m not a native English speaker.
Steam does set the prices, in that they use their dominant position to force the best price always being on Steam, whether it’s 5 bucks or 100. This is pretty well established in recent lawsuits, whether US courts end up deciding that Steam is doing so legally or not.
In any case, I don’t care about price pressure. Games are way too cheap as it is (partially thanks to Steam leaning hard on seasonal sales developers and publishers can’t afford to ignore, incidentally).
The stuff that does bother me is Steam telling developers and publishers what to do, what the consequences of not doing it will be and how much of their money they will take afterwards with no recourse. I’ve seen them do this with my faceholes.
So yes, Steam has a dominant position that harms competition and yes, they do leverage it to do harm. Not to end users, where they’re still competing with consoles and effectively with Microsoft, but certainly on the developer marketplace where content creators can’t afford to not be in the platform.
Steam uses a Uberified UGC gig economy system on PC game devs where it sets the rules because there’s no alternative. And that’s bad. More competition makes that less sustainable. And that’s good.
That’s a poor take, steam doesn’t set the prices. They take a cut, sure, but so does every store. The dev/publisher sets the price.
Games aren’t too cheap, again the publishers set the price and I’m sure there’s plenty of research that goes into that.
Im not sure what you think steam are telling publishers to do? The only rules I’m familiar with are the consumer protection rules, and the not selling a steam key cheaper than they’re selling the game on steam.
I’m not sure what part of what you’ve mentioned is therefore a harm to the publishers? Where publishers sell their games for maximum sales is going to be based on where the users are. If another company wanted to change this then they need to focus on what makes the consumer go there. Epics idea to lock publishers into their store with big wads of cash is what is actually harmful to the pc market (and didn’t work anyway).
As others have pointed out, competition here is usually dictated by shareholders which means the end user is exploited for maximum profit. One of the reason steam is so successful is that they don’t have this problem.
No, Steam will outright tell you they’ll delist you (or at least keep you from placement) if you offer a sale on a different store and don’t match it on Steam. Emails saying as much outright were released on the last round of antitrust lawsuits for this exact reason.
Games are too cheap. There is, in fact, plenty of research to show that.
Steam is telling devs of all sizes to do a bunch of things. When it’s something they like to advertise it typically gets coverage, like tweaks to Early Access info or other consumer-friendly stuff. When it’s more controversial less so, like telling indie devs to invest on localizing to Chinese to go with Valve’s China expansion plans or risk worse store placement.
I never once mentioned Epic. I am flabbergasted by how this Cult of the Gaben devolved into a weird console wars rehash between Epic and Steam. They’re both big corporations, neither is your friend, both have valid strategies to get your business. Stop it.
Competition would have a hard time being dictated by shareholders given that at least two of the top contenders in the space are privately owned. Because, since that’s your focus, yes, Epic is privately owned as well. Incidentally, GOG is one that is publicly owned and they are arguably the most pro-consumer player in this market.
I am not surprised at Steam having maneuvered its PR to position this way, but it’s always a bit shocking how well they did it without a ton of traditional marketing involved. I don’t think they’re a bad service or a particularly terrible company, but much like Nintendo the are a major tech corporation that works like a major tech corporation and you forget that at your peril, especially as a developer.
They are certainly a good argument for how public ownership doesn’t maximize value, because Steam is ridiculously undervalued by typical business analysts and they have maintained that status quo for many years and turned it into a sizeable yacht fleet. If anyhthing, Amazon guy’s surprise surprises me.
Steam does set the prices, in that they use their dominant position to force the best price always being on Steam, whether it’s 5 bucks or 100. This is pretty well established in recent lawsuits
Source? All I can find is lawsuits about the 30% cut, none about forcing the same price on steam as elsewhere.
Normally I tell people to do their own googling, but man, this is woefully underreported. For some reason when this came out the press latched on to some of the emails containing Valve employees trolling Tim Sweeney behind the scenes and that leak about how many employees they had and they barely mentioned this.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view
I don’t know if there’s some reason for it, but I saw it get reported in real time when it came out and the sources that remain online seem to be legit. It’s not particularly surprising, either. Valve is not shy about giving developers marching orders in general.
Thank you. I did search myself but like I said, different lawsuits kept popping up.
I’m not saying competition is bad, but as a consumer, managing a pile of clients sucks.
I’ll say it: competition can be bad sometimes. If Valve ever starts to conduct business unethically, the solution will be government regulation, not competition.
More detail below, but while this is not… wrong and government intervention is needed, it is clearly not deployed effectively in this space (presumably governments would catch up with Meta, Apple and Google first).
A more competitive landscape could solve that issue before it got to that. Especially if the big blocker is fanboyism.
Competition has failed. Repeatedly. The history of the post-industrial world is full of examples. There used to be a ton of competitive general stores in America before the Walton family destroyed them all. Competition is the most common way monopolies are created.
The problems the regulatory capture and the government’s lack of teeth. Which are issues for sure, but not ones solved by increasing competition.
That’s a weirdly lopsided argument. You seem to be saying that competition has failed and will yield a monopoly and the answer is regulation, which will fix the problem the second it gets over having failed at the exact same task.
Again, you’re not wrong, you need to course-correct the market through regulatory oversight. But that oversight is meant to both guarantee quality standards and re-enable competition in places where it has dried out.
For the purposes of the conversation we’re having, the regulation solution here is to fine or break up Steam so that other players can compete with them, ultimately. Well, and potentially to see if they should cut it out with the CounterStrike loot boxes and whatnot, but that’s not what we’re debating here.
So I’m not sure what your point is. Sure, eventually in a world where Steam is the only player in PC game distribution someone should step in and fix that problem. But before we get to that, as a user, I am not going to be here cheerleading for Steam to secure its monopoly first.
the regulation solution here is to fine or break up Steam so that other players can compete with them
I think that’s our fundamental misunderstanding here, because that’s not the regulatory solution I had in mind. I would look to other heavily regulated (or even nationalized) monopolies. Forcing Valve to split Steam up into either competing horizontal segments or disparate vertical segments would only make the service worse for the consumer AND the publishers (maybe you could make stronger arguments for some segments than others maybe hardware and game development could be split off from the store with little impact, but I don’t see the benefit there).
If you break the store up into competing units… Then what? Eventually one beats out the others and we are right back to where we started. Or worse, an equilibrium is reached between a small handful creating an oligopoly, like we see in so many other industries today.
Instead, I would leave Steam mostly as a single entity, subject to regulation about how it conducts business. From pricing to what it does with user data, to making sure that quasi competitors like Amazon, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo are all able to have fair access to distribute their games on the platform too. Create a regulatory board in charge of effectively managing the monopoly.
This whole “just add more competition” has led to a dystopian capitalist hellscape. It doesn’t work for more than a couple decades before the government needs to step in anyways.
It’s not that bad. There are solutions to consolidate your game libraries, but frankly I have too many games for them to be practical (I do pay for Launchbox and then don’t use it).
Still, even if you primarily use Steam those alternatives are pretty functional to consolidate your other libraries, which does take the edge off quite a bit. That’s kind of the default for Linux gamers, where Steam+Heroic/Lutris is the de facto standard, and it works just fine without preventing Epic or GOG from being viable options.
I really hate it when I launch a game from Steam and another launcher pops up (looking at you, Funcom)
Funcom, Ubisoft, EA, SquEnix…
Yeah, people say this. And sometimes they say this even if the “other launcher” just pops up for a second, does a thing and automatically goes away, because that’s how Ubisoft’s one has worked for a while and people still complain about it A LOT.
I don’t get it.
The other launcher prevents me from playing games.
I bought Titanfall 2 on Origin shortly after release. A couple years later, it was very cheap on Steam with DLC included, so I bought it again.
I can’t start the Steam version, because the EA App tells me I didn’t buy the DLC.
I can’t be the first person with this issue, but EA doesn’t care. Their launcher prevents me from playing the games I bought because they don’t care.
Works for me in that exact same scenario.
But in any case, that’s a bug. I’ve encountered games that have gamebreaking bugs, second launcher or not, and with both EA and Steam. They both will give you a refund automatically, at the very least. That’s neither here nor there.
Yes, it’s a bug. You can find many reports on the internet, it’s existed for years and EA doesn’t care.
Oh, awesome, so I just have to accept that the second launcher prevents me from playing the game? I have to buy the DLC for a higher price in the EA store if I want to play them?
Awesome, who doesn’t want such a great second launcher! Please give me one in front of all my games, I’d hate being able to use Steam as my primary launcher!
Well, no, you found a bug in a poorly maintained game. You don’t have to accept anything, but if the customer support for both of the affected companies won’t help you fix it then the recourse is to get a refund.
But that is true regardless of whether the bug is on Steam, whatever EA is calling their authorization system these days or the game itself. It’s not a problem with the concept of a game featuring its own login flow, it’s a problem with the concept of not maintaining games properly. There are plenty of games in that same situation with no second launcher in them.
Because it shouldn’t be necessary.
“Shouldn’t”?
To do what?
I mean, I guess it depends on whether you assume the game “should” only exist within Steam. But, you know, at that point why not buy a PlayStation?
You can sell a game on multiple storefronts/launchers without forcing the steam version to first launch a different app
That depends on what you’re doing. A separate login is useful for stuff like cross-platform support. But also, if your game is some sort of MMO or live game you may need some sort of account management if you want to sell it stand-alone.
These days some people just plug into the storefront’s login system, but I also don’t begrudge the ones that don’t, mildly inconvenient as it can be. Especially not the ones that own their own storefront and are only on Steam because you can’t not be on Steam.
Which, again, I find to be a bad thing.
One of the only acception I have to the rule of multiple game managers is with emulation. For some reason I cannot stand having something like Emulation Station or anything else but for buying games, Steam is the absolute king with their platform.
I’ve embraced it, I use playnite to launch all my games. Regardless of which platform they are on
I like the idea of Playnite a lot, but it’s one of those cases where FOSS can’t figure itself out and I ended up buing the premium version of Launchbox instead specifically to avoid their hot mess of an add-on based modular system.
But hey, they both exist and they both do the thing. As does GOG Galaxy and other alternatives.
Fighting Steam as it stands now is like trying to fight an uphill battle on an 80° incline with ice covering the whole hill. It’s possible, but I doubt we’ll see anyone able to dethrone Steam so long as Valve keeps their principles and morals about not absolutely enshittifying everything to death on their end.
Did they try removing DRM and selling you a product instead of an option on a subscription service?
Amazon specifically is known for deleting and/or disabling libraries without justification and without recourse for the victim. It’s always a possibility with Steam as well, but I’m not aware of it happening (though I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if it has)
RIP Comixology. I can access lower-quality versions of stuff I bought on kindle but the high quality stuff I paid for is gone.
Why would they? it hasn’t helped gog and valve don’t do that either.
It hasn’t helped GOG? News to me.
It really hasn’t. They had a period where AAA pulbihsers were shipping games there day and date (Sega and Sony) and that’s no longer the case. And if you default to GOG, which I do, it’s easy to notice that fewer indies are defaulting to multilaunching on it.
To be clear, I’m not saying that GOG should start allowing DRM, I’m saying that they are quietly struggling and people won’t prioritize getting their games on GOG over Steam to avoid DRM. Which is a shame.
“It really hasn’t. Also, these are some reasons why it has.” It is literally their whole spiel and what keeps them on the radar, even if the popularity of the platform isn’t what it used to. Which makes sense, since they don’t actively advertise or force their platform but they’ve also been subject to negative press such as their handling of the Devotion devs and "many gamers"in their efforts to prioritize the success of Cyberpunk 2077 over any potential fallout in the region.
You run on an ideological platform, you lose people on ideological grounds, like incorporating titles and forms of DRM into the storefront. Indies can default to whatever storefront they want, that’s should be the norm. Mohjang did it to great success.
Being effectively forced to do it on Steam, that’s basically a statement about their effective monopoly. Your accumulated Steam library is basically an ever increasing sunk cost fallacy, although to the credit of Valve they haven’t acted like massive dickheads (yet). But that will change with time because the people who lead companies change over time whether they would have wanted it or not.
There is zero evidence that this is the case. I guarantee the vast majority of GOG users have never heard of Devotion.
GOG also do advertise. They’ve been reaching out to hardcore users for feedback, they have rolled out campaigns to promote their Capcom old game licensing and their new game request system and they’ve implemented an ad tab in their launcher (that they keep sending people polls about for some reason).
Much more likely what is happening is they are being choked out by Steam and DRM. With large publishers increasingly wanting data streams from their games, AAA releases on GOG are less justifiable. Sony pulled out when they started adding a PSN login to their games. It’s harder to tell Sega’s reasons, but they may have just been a desire to keep their increasingly popular Ryu Ga Gotoku stuff DRMd for longer. Indies, meanwhile, are cash strapped and MUST default to Steam, with support for any other platform being an increasingly unjustifiable spend. With Steam banning competing on prices (beyond free giveaways and subscriptions, it seems), there is just no competing.
So no, the DRM-free hook alone isn’t working for GOG. Working here would mean growing or at least preserving their stake against Steam’s all-consuming rage, and that’s clearly not happening.
Which is why I’d love for people to start acknowledging the issues with Steam and their position and start defaulting to GOG where they can.
To be fair, “gamers” did acknowledge the drm related issues… and insist that Steam is also drm-free and it is only the games that use drm (including steam-drm…) that aren’t.
Which… look, I like gog a lot and do make it a point to buy games there when feasible. But it is hard to get TOO upset with people changing the definition of DRM when cdp already did that for gog (it is basically just GOO with less stardock shitheads).
Which gets back to the bigger issue of people needing to understand what they are and aren’t “giving up” for a given DRM model. But that would involve people thinking critically and… we don’t do that anymore.
I keep reminding people that we “gamers” used to be super mad at Steam. There were boycotts. Every warez group on the planet dropped what they were doing to jailbreak Half Life 2 out of sheer spite.
I don’t worship GOG any more than I do Steam, but I do want a solid competitor keeping Valve in check and I would love it if that competitor was also DRM-free because I like owning stuff.
The “most Steam games are DRM-free” line is baffling, though. Especially since Valve itself seems to disagree. I mean, they’ll tell you to add more DRM on top and use their centralized online services to make backups and pirated copies worse because it’s weak DRM… but it’s DRM both stand-alone and as part of the GaaS model they’re pushing. They even added an entire warning box to remind you that they aren’t selling you anything and they can take all your stuff away whenever and people somehow presented that as a welcome sign of honestly, which was some of the most surreal PR I have seen in my life.
Maybe they should have just made a really great service that people would love?
I mean, he agrees with you:
We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either.
I can’t recommend enough actually reading the stuff people link in social media.
But if I have to actually read the article then what is the headline for?? /s
I like prime gaming, sure I haven’t actually bought anything but Amazon has given me a decent gog library and an ok Amazon games one.
No they haven’t because not once did I ever consider buying a game from their service. Mainly because I don’t know about it.
Maybe it’s because they don’t have VP of Steam at Valve ?
Maybe try not being Amazon first?
All they gotta do is copy steam features 1:1 and clean up the ui a bit. I’m not married to steam but no one wanna copy all their features let alone improve it.
So many of their most beloved features are crazily dev intensive to maintain, and critically they’re not static. Amazon never really updates their consumer interfaces, steam is constantly adding new features and reworking their old ones across all their UX. Its just not economically feasible to pop in and replace them if you’re a publicly traded company, the shareholders would look at the maintenance costs alone and faint
They can’t possibly be dev intensive to maintain, given what we know about how many devs Valve has.
They are VERY expensive and difficult to make, though, particularly if you don’t already own the PC platform. It’s not that every competitor wouldn’t like to match their feature set, it’s that Steam has had two decades of a head start and is a whole software company devoted entirely to this, as opposed to trying to simultaneously… you know, make games and stuff.
Steam Multiplayer, VAC and Steam Wallet integration are all extremely dev intensive examples, I’m not sure conflating team size with dev intensity is a great way to look at it since that’s not generally how software development works. (Unless you’ve got client accounts or deep customization, ofc)
Absolutely no argument about the rest, though. Steam built the entire concept of the market it dominates, and now people are trying to build their own little versions without any of the 20 years of novelty in even just defining the medium that valve has done.
Yeah, I don’t think that we’re saying very different things here, maybe having different intuitions on where and when the effort is applied.
I don’t imagine that those examples you provide are particularly unstable or need a ton of changes over time. Like everything on Steam they seem to be built as a module or an API that developers are on the hook for integrating and can be trusted to not change and need additional work from anybody later.
I’m sure there’s some back and forth for support and something breaks every now and then, but Valve’s approach seems to be to frontload the hell out of polish and then iterate as little as possible once everything is up and running. They really, REALLY don’t want an army of devs touching things constantly, they seem to favor finding what works and letting it be.
Hell, even their weird curation systems that were outright bad when they rolled out were like this. They were remarkably reluctant to make fast changes and once they found something that kinda works they haven’t touched it much. And that’s definitely the most dynamic and evolving part of their entire ecosystem, by far.
If anything a few pieces are looping back around to being legacy garbage. I don’t understand how trading cards survived not just their own obvious failure but the entire NFT backlash without being touched at all, and a bunch of their profile stuff is an absolute mess of old, stale UI, at least outside Big Picture.
I’m not even mad about it. It’s insane how much of a feature set they’ve been able to deploy with a relatively small team while also spending a ton of time and effort elsewhere.
Even some of these features are transparent to users but not to devs, for example to say few:
- Multiplayer (big one)
- Microtransactions (eww!)
- Steam Audio (support for specific Audio stuff, not voice)
- Steam cloud (Save games)
- DRM
- Input
- Key management
- Playtest
- Steam Voice
- Valve Anti-Cheat
- Stats and achievements
- Workshop and not as important but relevant to some:
- Virtual Reality support
In a sense, this is not so different from what AWS is doing: Basically you offer a service with an API so your customers don’t need to create the thing from scratch, but at the same time they become dependent of your exclusive services.
I know we all want to clown on this because amazon sucks and we all stan Steam as our corporate overlords.
But there are actually a lot of REALLY good insights in the original linkedin post. Particularly the reality that anything that competes with Steam needs to be
It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.
Epic is a shitshow and barely competent on the store front. But they took a very smart approach of starting from basics and adding what people want… and people want their video game store to be facebook.
Maybe if amazon had more tightly coupled that to twitch it could have worked but it is clear that coupling any services is a shitshow for them (remember when we could do actual watch parties if people bought stuff on amazon video?).
I forgot they even existed.
Was always going to be an uphill battle trying to battle Steam’s monopoly and the Stockholmed G*mers.
