It’s incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.
I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.
But at the same time, they’re cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.
So we uncritically give them all the power.
Competition sounds great, so long as it has all of the following:
- Something better than steam input and the steam controller.
- Something better than steam vr.
- Something better than steam workshop.
- something better than proton
- Something better than steams friends/chat/activity interface.
- Something better than the steam overlay.
- Something better than big picture.
- Absolutely no exclusives, and no deals forcing developers to use it.
- A nicer store interface than valve, with better community pages, curator pages, discussion pages, etc.
- An equivalent to steam fest with a strong demo scene.
- Something better than remote play together
This is of course also ignoring just how efficient, clean, customisable and ergonomic the steam interface is compared to all competition
Oh wait! That doesn’t exist. All we need is some way to guarantee valve doesn’t become public.
Is Steam really a monopoly when Valve doesn’t try to stifle competition and no other company could be bothered (besides maybe GOG) to make a half decent store?
It is a monopoly - they just don’t abuse it as much against their audience.
For developers it’s either take their 30% deal or just don’t sell your game because a lot of people only use steam.
Not even Cyberpunk or the Witcher could sell more on gog than on steam even though you knew that there the developers got 100% of the money spent. Gwent standalone flopped so hard on GOG that it had to be rereleased with limited features on steam and sold more there
People are just fundamentally lazy so it totally is a problem that you have one store with such a massive market share even if it’s very convenient for the end-user they can completely exploit their position against publishers.
Sure EPICs way of making games exclusive to their store is not elegant but without that no-one would choose that store over steam
This is partially on these companies for failing to provide an equal experience to Steam on their platform. I bought Witcher III in GoG to support the devs, and my reward was a lost save by the time the DLCs came out, because their client didn’t have cloud saves. So guess where I bought their stuff from there on? Sure, they added these features later but for some people the damage is already done.
Tell me a game store that supports Linux out of the box (not messing with wine stuff or lutris)
If you’re so sure Steam is a monopoly, can you please provide any evidence for that? To be clear, being very successful does not make someone a monopolist.
If Valve were a monopolist, they’d be listed here: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-designates-six-gatekeepers-under-digital-markets-act-2023-09-06_en
