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- cross-posted to:
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I think a lot of PC players are waiting on the steam release.
I know I am. Epic is just junk compared to steam.
Or epic giveaway. I’ll spend actual money if it is on Steam or GOG.
It me. Only thing on my epic account is free games and even then I don’t think I’ve ever booted up a single one of them
I’m not. The game looks boring af.
And people will insist they’re not a monopoly.
The word doesn’t mean “zero competition exists.” It means the competition does not matter.
Except Valve allows people to sell their own keys without Valve taking a cut. That system is why at least half the vendors here can exist at all. The dev/publisher cuts a bunch of their own Steam keys and dumps them off with these shops who take less than the 30% cut that Valve takes from sales within Steam and the dev/publisher gets to keep the difference or pass that on to the customer as a discount. Steam just isn’t a monopoly. They allow sellers to use everything that their platform offers for nothing more than a percentage of what is made exclusively from sales within the platform. A seller can sell their game through their own website and take home 100% (less whatever their payment processor charges, usually a single digit percent) of the sale, while still using everything that Steamworks and Steam in general is bringing to the table and all without any lock-in or requirements that they stick with Steam. All of that is a HUGE strike against considering Steam a monopoly, but that’s not even everything.
So far as “the competition does not matter” that’s largely because the competition (Primarily talking EGS here, but it’s apropos UPlay and Origin too) hasn’t done anything to make for a better value proposition other than paying for store exclusives and giving developers a rightfully higher cut of sales for a shot at a much smaller portion of the PC market. If Epic offered answers to Proton, Steam Link, communities, workshop, meta-games in the store, quick UI, marketplace, etc… It might make for a real challenge to Steam, but as it stands now there’s nothing in EGS that puts up anything approaching half of what you get for the same games in Steam. I’ve never bought anything in EGS, but trying to use their app with any of the free games that they’ve given me has immediately turned me right around and sent me back to Steam while it takes literal minutes for the app to get me signed back in and going (and often has to spend time updating a game once it does) while Steam was good to go 2 seconds after boot, never needs me to reauth once I’ve signed into a system, and keeps my games updated silently without my having to notice or worry.
Now GOG on the other hand, where I have spent a decent amount of money and own a good number of games has managed to make a proposition of giving me a barebones store that gives me barebones downloads of games that don’t need updates, or a launcher, without any DRM so I can just download an EXE and get my games. They matter, they’re bringing something to the table that nobody else does and I love them for that. I go out of my way to buy games on GOG when they’re the sort of things that don’t need any of the stuff that Steam is providing.
If any of the other publisher owned storefronts tried to do anything half as ambitious as GOG or Steam, they’d probably matter, but the fact is that they won’t because they don’t think like Valve or GOG, they think like MBA shitlords who’s single trick is extracting rents for properties made by smarter people, often back in the days before those MBAs knew their multiplication tables. The same school of idiots who saw how Netflix had a really good thing going and thought that they could have the good thing themselves so now we have a worse situation than we had before Netflix destroyed the cable industry and we get all of these platforms that don’t work as well as Netflix did/does where you have to go to 30 different shitty places to get what you used to find in one really good place. A whole lot of idiots who paid a lot of money to learn in fancy schools that you can personally get rich by convincing a company to kill the golden goose, so long as you immediately proceed to get out of town so it’s the next guy’s problem to solve before anyone notices that the golden eggs aren’t rolling in anymore. It’s incomprehensible to me that people are going to bat for those muppets when all they ever do is make things worse so they can line their 401k with another million.
What makes Steam a monopoly is market dominance. Nothing else counts.
The keys thing underlines how little their competition matters. They can effectively give away copies, to other platforms, and those other platforms remain irrelevant.
Shitting on Epic - however fun and well-deserved - does not change how we are talking about Steam.
Netflix is a great comparison, because Netflix was also plainly a monopoly. The streaming video market was Netflix. Their behavior as a monopoly was better for everyone, compared to this shit-show of vicious little fiefdoms… but defending a monopoly doesn’t make them stop being one.
Except, legally in the US where Valve is based, you’ve got 0 legs to stand on.
Valve does dominate the market they’re in, but they do so without creating an unreasonable restraint of competition in that market. They are dominant by providing the best product, not because they have unfair business practices which burden the competition. Like I said, Valve will literally allow game makers to go and take 100% of every sale they make (assuming they can process payments for free) while still allowing them to use the platform Valve have built and pay to maintain so long as they’ll pay Valve a cut for the copies that are sold directly through the Steam store. Valve allows their competition to sell games that package said competition’s stores inside of those games. Every EA or Ubisoft game comes with the competitor’s store bundled in. They create tools that allow their competitors games to run on platforms that the competition doesn’t want to bother with and they give them away. HOW IS ANY OF THAT AN UNREASONABLE RESTRAINT ON COMPETITION?
“Here you go guys, you so obviously don’t understand what the audience wants. How about you give us a cut of the sales you make on your games via our platform and we’ll let you install your platform on our customer’s PCs? How unreasonable and diabolical of us to cut down the competition by letting gamers see what an open sewage pipe of fetid scum they’d be dealing with in our absence. BWAH HA HAH HAH! We have constrained the competition by our cunning craft of having a better product. Truly we are monsters from HELL! HAIL GABEN!” -Valve, The monopolists 🙄
Steam is the antithesis of anticompetitive, they’re not the single seller of any good beyond “Valve Games” of which there are now 22(?) among millions of PC games, and they don’t generally dictate prices in the market; which is the succinct way of saying that they don’t live up to any portion of the legal standard for what constitutes a monopoly. Give me something factual that implicates Valve as a monopoly or get out of here with this nonsense.
In a legal context, the term monopoly is also used to describe a variety of market conditions that are not monopolies in the truest sense. For instance, the term monopoly may be referring to instances where:
- There are many buyers or sellers, but one actor has enough market share to dictate prices (near monopolies)
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
I’m not thrilled how every reply pretends I follow up “Steam has overwhelming market share” with “and they’re EEEVIL!!!”
I haven’t said shit about Valve, ethically. I outright said Netflix’s short-lived monopoly was better for consumers. I certainly haven’t defended Epic, whatever the hell that other guy wants to rail against.
But Valve obviously has power.
Valve has the ability to do these things.
Their competitors don’t.
Steam’s market share is so high, they could do whatever they want, whether or not they ever do.
We are talking about a long-awaited critical darling of a game, and we are talking about how its sales blow, specifically because it’s not on Steam. Yes, it has sales, but it doesn’t have enough sales, unless it goes through this one store. Defending the store’s practices will not change that. Defending the conditions that led here will not change that. It is a dead simple fact that Steam’s market share is real fuckin’ high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.
First things first, you cherry picked the one thing from my link that supports your position intentionally ignoring that it is a single prong in a standard that has several. Second, I’m glad you brought the FTC link, because they also do not agree with your stance if you bring the whole context from your own link into the conversation:
As a first step, courts ask if the firm has “monopoly power” in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.
Your definition only meets one portion of the FTC standard, which is why my comment addressed how Valve fails to meet any of the points of the standard beyond the dominant market position. YES STEAM IS MARKET DOMINANT, BUT NO THEY ARE NOT A MONOPOLY BECAUSE THEY DON’T MEET ANY OTHER PORTION OF THE STANDARD.
But Valve obviously has power.
To do what? PC is an open platform that they don’t control.
Valve has the ability to do these things.
To make people raise prices or exclude competitors? Again, how or where?
Their competitors don’t.
Epic is LITERALLY excluding competitors right now for a bunch of titles, other competitors have done likewise until they recognized that customers didn’t like it and decided that it wasn’t in their best interest to do so.
Steam’s market share is so high, they could do whatever they want, whether or not they ever do.
Not to beat a dead horse, but how? They literally have no control over PC users beyond that which they’ve earned from being the best of MANY options, so how could they possibly parlay that into a power they could use to exert force over consumers or developers? Unless they did something that made them into not the best option, they have competition from every angle including from their direct competitors at Microsoft whose platform (as of March 2024) houses 96.67% of their customers with Windows being the dominant OS for Steam users by an absurd amount. There’s incredible danger for Steam to try and pull anything anti-competitive because they literally live in the house that their competition built.
We are talking about a long-awaited critical darling of a game, and we are talking about how its sales blow, specifically because it’s not on Steam. Yes, it has sales, but it doesn’t have enough sales, unless it goes through this one store. Defending the store’s practices will not change that. Defending the conditions that led here will not change that.
You seem to imply that Steam being a monopoly has caused Remedy to suffer poor sales. However, we have the following problems there:
A) Steam fails to meet the legal definition of a monopoly. Just full stop. You attempt to take singular statements from a legal concept that by design has multiple prongs (specifically because we do not choose to harm companies who do no competitive wrong and come to their dominant position through the art of their craft being superior), but that’s just willfully misunderstanding the concept of a monopoly.
and
B) A developer choosing to launch their game on the Evercade Vs and failing to see the sorts of sales numbers they might expect on Sony Playstation/Microsoft Xbox/Nintendo Switch is hardly a justification to claim that the game did poorly because Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are a oligopoly. The dev CHOSE to launch on a shittier platform, one that doesn’t offer all the things that the current market expects. The devs are going to see lesser sales as a result, that’s just how it works, they weren’t harmed by a monopoly effect, they were harmed by their poor market choices.
It is a dead simple fact that Steam’s market share is real fuckin’ high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.
See, I think your problem may be that you think market share aside, all other things are equal, which is simply not the case. By your logic I should be able to offer you a nice shiny and new Evercade Vs in exchange for your Playstation 5 because it’s only the market share that makes it so that the Evercade has less games to play? It’s only natural where Steam is bringing more to the table, it has more customers as a result. EGS offers a pale shadow of what a consumer gets from Steam, so why should they count as much? Who owes them that? They need to get on that level if they want that credit due. They currently matter about as much as the effort they’re putting into competing, which I’ll agree isn’t much, but is hardly relevant here.
Pointing out which meaning applies is how definitions work. One is enough.
Cherry-picking is highlighting part of a paragraph, and ignoring that it begins: As a first step, courts ask if the firm has “monopoly power” in any market. The documents you picked are telling you, being a monopoly and doing harm are separate questions. The ability comes first, and that ability comes directly from market dominance.
Epic is LITERALLY excluding competitors right now for a bunch of titles
… a monopoly is not about who carries one specific game. It’s about the market. The market you know Steam dominates.
When Steam excludes a game, for any reason, that game usually sells a lot less. Orders of magnitude, sometimes. That is the power they wield over all games, as a game market. The fact they don’t abuse it is a defense against legal action - but we’re discussing legal actions that can only apply to monopolies. Determining whether they have that power comes first.
Those sales figures do not respond to price changes, either. Epic can offer whatever sale they like - for most sales, the price on Steam is the price. Y’know. Like in the definition I pointed out. The one that is the way that things are.
The dev CHOSE to launch on a shittier platform
‘Poor sales are your own fault for not selling through the one store that matters,’ says monopoly understander.
By your logic
Nothing sensible ever follows these words.
I was going to get to this but my last comment ran over the 5000 character limit and had to be trimmed back. I was just going to drop it, but on reflection it is important to drive the distinction home, so here it is:
It is a dead simple fact that Steam’s market share is real fuckin’ high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.
We have a word for that.
Yeah. We do. That word is dominance. It is not monopoly because monopoly has qualifiers beyond dominance.
“I prefer a quality storefront that at least presents the pretense of caring about providing a quality product to one that just wants to separate me from my money”
“What are you, some kind of fanboy?”
Defending the reasons they’re a monopoly.
They’re still a monopoly.
As opposed to Epic Games which literally has a contract saying only they can sell the game on PC. I like how you’re “opposing” monopolies by defending anticompetitive exclusive licensing deals.
Where the fuck did I do any of what you’re mad about?
They’re not, actually. Just because you only see Epic (which still has market share despite every effort they’ve made to drive people away) doesn’t mean there aren’t other storefronts.
They’re definitely part of an oligopoly, though.
Those other storefronts matter even less.
Again: competition existing isn’t enough. It has to matter. Otherwise you’re describing a monopoly. It is a market dominated by one business.
In your mind, of course. Seems you have a monopoly on opinion.
This is abuse. This is making up rationale, to ignore the actual fucking argument.
Standard Oil, the clearest trust-busting case in history, only had 85% market share at its peak. Me telling you to count to one is not somehow climbing atop my high horse and repeating a conclusion. I am making an argument - it is not complicated - the basis and reasoning are right there for you to respond to, or not.
Called it.
Downvotes change nothing.
‘The majority of customers are waiting on this one store to carry this game.’
‘Yes, this one store is the only big store.’
'HOW DARE YOU."
Can I say as a non PC gamer who follows game news. PC gamers all have different machines, isn’t optimising the games extra costly? In addition, I can imagine the annoyance of getting bad reviews on steam because some Dingus is trying to play the game on a 10 year old PC.
Also, something like 30% of PC gamers pirate their games, so that doesn’t sound like an attractive market to me.
What does this post have to do with anything when it launched on PC the same day as PS5 and XSX? As well, a 10 year old pc would likely have a GTX 1070 or better and that’s enough to run the game just fine?
So you are advocating against user driven reviews the alternative which tends to be corporate relations driven reviews? You don’t want consumers to have a voice or user based resources?
isn’t optimising the games extra costly?
These days compilers can optimise it for the hardware mostly on their own.
I can imagine the annoyance of getting bad reviews on steam because some Dingus is trying to play the game on a 10 year old PC.
Yeah, that’s the great thing about PC. You don’t have to upgrade your hardware more than once a decade, and you can give feedback to games publishers that chasing ever increasing graphics trends is alienating their customers. You console gamers have to take whatever slop you’re given, but us PC gamers don’t have to worry about a publisher not supporting backwards compatibility, so we have more market power. We can apply greater pressure on the industry to apply pro-consumer business practices.
Also, something like 30% of PC gamers pirate their games
That’s definitely not true. I wish it was.
Also, something like 30% of PC gamers pirate their games
That’s definitely not true. I wish it was.
It’s just Spiders Georg bringing the average up.
PC is the largest single platform right now. Even if 30% pirate the game, there are more copies sold for the typical game on PC than PlayStation.
No physical release on consoles and exclusive to Epic on PC. Gee I wonder why they haven’t made their money back.
Physical releases wouldn’t make a difference on console, not being on steam and gog is a missed opportunity
I saw like no marketing for this game at all, and on top of that didn’t they restrict it to Epic? Definitely a dumb choice. Shame because I want Control 2 to happen. Hopefully this doesn’t affect that.
Epic funded part of development. Without the EGS restriction we likely wouldn’t have had the game at all. Or, at least, not in the current state.
The marketing has been pretty weird. Lots at release, then basically nothing.
If you want to sell something in a competitive landscape, even high schoolers know this simple fact in one easy step…
Release on steam/GoG or go bust being an EGS exclusive. I’m not compelled enough to buy from that shitty platform ever. And I’m not starved for content. I’m having fun w/ Helldivers 2
I still havent finished it
“Gotta release on Steam or you’re fucked.”
Because it’s a monopoly.
“HOW DARE YOU?!”
