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if GOG would finally make a Linux GOG Galaxy without having to go through troublesome third Party tinkering (compared to steam) it would be a great competitor.
I still think this is a huge blunder by GOG. There has to be a very significant overlap in the user base of DRM free software and Linux.
At least Heroic has matured very well and GOG partnered up with them so something is moving.
Glad to hear Gog is partnering with Heroic. Heroic is pretty slick, and only getting slicker. Shame to waste effort, and much better than forking and not contributing to upstream.
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CDPR aren’t gamers’ friends. Look at the transphobia controversy. Look at promising no crunch and then crunching anyway. CDPR are the “how do you do fellow kids” of the gaming industry. Everything they put out is greenwashed garbage.
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I don’t believe you. Google doesn’t show that article, and I followed your instructions to the letter. I think you’re making stuff up.
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I still don’t believe you. That article doesn’t mention transphobia at all. It makes a point about sexism, and sexism isn’t the same thing as transphobia. Your claim that there’s an article saying cheese is transphobic is false. Also, I agree with the article. I love drinking breast milk, but only if she consents. And cows can’t consent.
“They have a monopoly” doesn’t mean they’re the asshole.
But they still have a monopoly.
People get so fucking weird trying to deny this. They insist there’s good reasons none of their competitors matter, when the question was, do their competitors matter. They proudly state they never consider buying from anywhere else… end of thought. No amount of explanation for why they’re the PC gaming store will change that they are the PC gaming store. But the label doesn’t mean it’s their fault. The label means, it is so.
I think there’s a difference between them being a good company for customers and them being a digital fief. Similar to how Amazon could be seen as a “good” company by customers (return policy, cheap stuff, etc), but they essentially own an entire marketplace and decides who sells products, and extracts rents from people who are making good innovative stuff. Steam is the same way.
Of course, Valve doesn’t have the mistreatment of employees Amazon does. They have no internal hierarchy, which is cool and I imagine means less management involvement. Their president seems to just want to make gamers happy, and thats great too.
Theyre an anomaly in the business world because they’re seemingly a great company that doesn’t follow monetization trends, while still being hugely financially successful. But they still extract rents from videogame makers, so leftists see that as a black eye.
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I see what you’re getting at, and I agree to an extent. Steam doesn’t own the whole marketplace, but they do own their whole marketplace, which is the biggest. So I think the issue for leftists that I’m referring to is the rents aspect – profiting off of the value of other people’s work.
You could argue steam adds some value to accessing games in one place, or that they need to be able to maintain their servers in order to maintain efficient distribution for publishers. But in terms of classical economics Steam doesn’t produce a product, I think it’s arguable they provide a service, and I think their capital is mostly a product of their ownership of cloud capital. When a company makes money based mostly on the ownership of an asset, be it land or machinery or computers, that’s where leftists take umbrage. Not liberals or Democrats necessarily, just leftists.
But that all said I still like Steam and Valve overall.
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Sorry dude, you have a right to your opinion – but most of what you just said isn’t true. I understand you think it’s ridiculous, but being against rent extraction is a classically leftist political philosophy. You’re right that it costs money to operate servers, but that doesn’t mean those servers are not the property of Valve. They utilize that property to collect rent from publishers.
That fact is not well liked by leftists. By liberals? Sure, go nuts. But I think you’re in the process of finding yourself in the latter camp, at the moment. I’d definitely encourage you to look up leftists vs liberals because I think you may have a misunderstanding.
Regardless, I agree the hate/vitriol can go overboard coming from these types of people. I agree with the political and philosophical underpinnings of their frustration, but we are all born into a rat race and taught that we should do anything to get out of it, so no one actually thinks about whether things like “passive income” are right or wrong. We are taught that’s what you gotta shoot for, and I’m not going to blame someone for still believing that.
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The cut that Steam takes from publishers is a rent. It is the equivalent of buying property and allowing an individual or family to live in it, for a cut of their wages. The landowner and Steam do not produce anything – they are a place, physical or virtual, for people to operate out of, at a cost. Steam is not a store that sells their own products, they are a platform that sells other people’s stuff and they take a cut. If I own a big plot of land, and let a bunch of businesses operate on that land as long as they pay me monthly, I’m taking a rent. It’s the same thing.
I feel like I don’t even need to comment on your weird bragging about profiting off of war, but I’ll just say this – whether you like it or not, whether you are personally interested or not, you are financially interested in the suffering and death of other people. If you think that’s morally okay, good for you. Personally, I think that’s pretty monstrous. I’d wish you a good day, but after learning that, I hope you get some help.
Until any competing store releases a Linux client, I can’t really argue against Steam. They are a gatekeeper and almost a monopoly, but they’re also the most benevolent and pro-consumer gatekeeper that we have in the PC gaming distribution space. As long as all the competition continue to be Windows-only and, in some cases, actively work against Linux users, I don’t want Valve’s digital fiefdom to fall.
I’m not sure “gatekeepr” is the right term when all you do is simply being better for your customers than anyone else. Like, Ubisoft, EA, Epic, they all are garbage companies. GOG is the only store I’d mildly consider (ignoring tiny indie ones like Itch here), but they also have 0 interest in Linux support, which is where they lose me. Without Valve, Linux gaming would not be where it is today, and as a Linux user that is already like 85% of my decision making being done in favor of Valve - with the remaining 15% not all strictly being in another camp either. If someone wants to challenge that monopoly, they’d have to do something better than forcing exclusives or luring with “free” games, because that’s some shady shit that makes me just want to stay away even more.
Valve isn’t perfect though. Especially when it comes to owning games. I couldn’t use Asprite on my laptop on my schools wifi because it couldn’t verify that I own a 1gb program to draw pixels. Disabling wifi didn’t help either. Still made up it’s mind on not letting me make sprites for my school assignment till I connected it to my home wifi.
The best part? There’s literally a free version that’s not on steam that I purposely didn’t download because I wanted to support the dev!Steam has an offline mode though. Why was it asking to verify anything?
None of that stuff sounds like Valve interfering.
Nobody is saying Valve is perfect. But the other companies just sucks much harder
How are they a gatekeeper? Near monopoly sure. But they don’t force companies to only publish on Steam. They don’t have restrictive rules. I’m not sure what gate they are keeping.
If you reeeeally want to stretch, they do have rules about pricing things lower on other platforms. Like, you can have a sale on your website that makes it cheaper than Steam, but can’t have the base price cheaper there than on Steam. That’s about it.
Disproven many times over.
You can’t sell the free generated Steam keys on other platforms lower than on Steam. You are perfectly free to sell the game on other platforms for less than Steam.
Valve is interesting. Enshitification is the standard for something like social media. Corporations are the real customer and users do creative labor to keep it valuable.
Valve flips the script. Developers struggle because they are only expected to labor. Studios don’t get the full value of their labor. They might be a huge corporation but they are a worker to valve
Just wanted to say: good work with OpenRGB!
When a monopoly is faced with a smaller, more efficient competitor, they cut prices to keep people from switching, or buy the new competitor, make themselves more efficient, and increase profits.
When Steam was faced with smaller competition that charged lower prices, they did - nothing. They’re not the leader because of a trick, or clever marketing, but because they give both publishers and gamers a huge stack of things they want.
Sure, Steam seems fairly okay, especially their Linux support, but I still mostly prefer GOG, wherever possible, because it offers more control to their customer over the product they bought.
It helps that Valve is not publicly traded, but I fear that if the current owner (Gabe Newell) dies, there might be a shift in business practices.
Enshittification can still happen in privately traded/owned companies, it generally happens slower and in case there are other reason for the owner(s) to maximize short term profits (e.g. business built on VC money), it can happen faster.
Gog support sucks tbh. Steam refunds everything no questions asked. Bought elden ring on gog, wrong region, couldn’t activate it back home. They told me to suck it. Fuck gog
In what region is Elden Ring available on GOG?
Gog is also much easier to deal with via a VPN. I bought some region locked games easily doing that and could play them anywhere, because they are DRM-free. Steam is much more difficult, because each account belongs to a specific region. Moving accounts means you have to have an bank account and address in different countries, so easy for rich people, more difficult for ordinary folks.
He probably has it confused with green man gaming, the CD key site.
Ah, true. My bad.
So more-efficient competitors emerged against the supermajority market leader and didn’t impact that company’s market share.
Hmm.
Thats not what they said, “More efficient” didn’t happen.
Just either a wildly more toxic environment with Epic, or a cheaper but much less user friendly one with GOG.
Steam didn’t need to change because neither of the competition understand the market.
Steam didn’t need to change because none of their competitors challenge their de facto monopoly. Reasons do not change how it is plainly a monopoly. They have a supermajority market share, and people glibly admit, they don’t even consider buying games except on Steam.
You said
more efficient competitors
But now you are saying that they didn’t challenge the monopoly? If they dont even challenge then how are they competition?
Steam let’s me buy games and play them. The interface with Big Picture Mode let’s me interact with the store.
The issue I see is that no one is competing on PC with Steam because they keep trying to tie themselves with the fucking trainwreck that’s Windows.
They keep trying to tie themselves with shitty desktop launchers.
They keep trying to tie themselves with toxic customer service.
There is competition, but it’s with Sony, Microsoft and their consoles.
If they dont even challenge then how are they competition?
That’s equivocating two definitions of “competition.”
no one is competing on PC
… that’s admitting they have a monopoly. That’s the monopoly we’re talking about. You’re not disagreeing with me, you’re just picking unrelated definitions and talking about something else.
Steam’s competitors, on PC, are services like GOG and EGS. Their teensy market share doesn’t disqualify them as competitors. They are in the exact same market. That’s why they have a “market share.” And Steam’s market share is so overwhelming that you’re treating their would-be rivals like they do not exist.
I could basically buy anything that I get on Steam, on either Epic or GOG. Their market share is not why I buy games on Steam, I gave you those reasons already.
I do not run Windows because its a shitty hostile environment that contractually prevents distributors from providing an optimised interface for gaming. It inserts adverts into every section, and even Windows users unironically complain that Windows Update is malware.
I gave you those reasons already.
In response to a comment reading: “Reasons do not change how it is plainly a monopoly.”
Their market share is what make them a monopoly. That’s what the word means.
Upvoting ‘no competitors means it’s not a monopoly’ is tribalism. Y’all don’t care about the words. You are performing loyalty. Comments defending the ingroup must be good and smart and right… even if they’re repeating the initial criticism.
‘Steam’s competition doesn’t matter.’ ‘Wrong! They have no competition.’ That’s worse. You know that’s worse, right?
Thats not what was said at all.
No competition is not good. But Epic is worse competition, and GOG is halfhearted competition that is an ultimately worse experience for most people.
This is just silly, is this dev just a salty b?
I may not like some parts of steam (like its ui) but I’d say gaben showed us how a big company should always be run.
They don’t buy out anyone (hello epic) they made many proconsuner moves and they are funding alternatives like proton without any guarantee of return.Your shit doesn’t sell without steam not because its YouTube and holding everything and everyone hostage, but because everything else is just that much worse.
If you wanna shoot yourself in the foot go ahead but don’t complain nobody is is helping with it.
Digital fiefdoms like who, you ask, as if you don’t already know the answer? “Valve is the most egregious example,” says Gavrilović. He hopes for a future where devs, not digital feudal lords, have more power, “but I lack the imagination to envision the replacement of Valve with a community owned alternative. That ‘winter castle’ will not fall as easily, but we should at least start openly discussing alternatives.”
Make an opensource game store that’s owned by a non-profit and paid for by the game studios that want to sell on it, giving them a say on how things should run.
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That could easily be abused by the big players, and would be.
How?
Call me when they show predatory behaviour to establish their monopoly. I don’t think steam has exclusive deals as epic has for example.
Loot boxes and what is essentially a market of nft’s. Otherwise they’re pretty cool I guess.
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I don’t know if a spiritual successor will be as good. I mean, it wasn’t exactly the gameplay that made it so compelling; it was the writing. None of the supposed successors being made rn have the writers from the original game.
It also is a shame it wouldn’t be set within Elysium; a very well built world that is as exciting as it is mysterious.
Summer Eternal has Tuulik and Red Info has Rostov and Kurvitz
I feel like some journalist got high as fuck with a dev, wrote out a fucking fever dream of… drivel and then the editors were like fuck it, Tim Sweeney pays us to post some hit pieces against Valve and this is all we got this month so we’ll just run with this.
Let’s save it for when Gabe bites it and it gets shity.
Right on. I enjoy steam and I find Valve are mostly responsible gatekeepers, but at the end of the day, they’re still a gatekeeper
Are they gatekeepers though? It’s not like they own Windows or Linux and stop you from using any other store. Just having the biggest audience doesn’t make them gatekeepers to the market.
I never see people talking about what valve should change other than lowering the 30% cut, but arbitrarily forcing that would set a bad precedent.
Instead of virtue signalling here’s reasonable things Valve could do:
- allow developers to chose what features of steam they use for each game, allowing them to lower the cut by individually opting out of forums, workshop, cloud saves, achievements, inventory items etc
- offer a purchase = one time download with no drm (still legally one copy) for the closest thing to “owning” a digital game
- allow someone to inherit a steam account
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure proton is free to use and you can install stores and games not from steam on a Steam Deck, so again I really don’t know what they’re gatekeeping.
For specifics, I’d like to see consistent, transparent censorship standards, and Steam Workshop files made publicly available.
Steam’s censorship issues are only going to be more of a problem as the Japanese PC market continues its explosive growth. The platform’s inconsistency is surely frustrating Japanese developers, and the lack of transparency is giving fuel to a (not unearned) narrative that its content reviewers are arbitrary and xenophobic.
The Workshop matter is far smaller in comparison, but Steam is gatekeeping crowdsourced work product.
The workshop is an interesting topic and one if like to see a larger discussion around - theoretically people are free to upload their workshop content outside of Steam altogether, but arguably it’s on developers to support importing non-workshop content.
Censorship is definitely something that needs sorting out. I hadn’t heard of much censorship going on but I can definitely see it happening, giv n Japan’s standards can differentiate massively from America’s. Clear rules need to be laid, and I hope clear reasons are given when it occurs.
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I’m with you on all of this. I’m familiar with this (am a game dev) and you’re 100% right that the biggest cost is game distribution. One thing though: it costs ~$100 to list a game on Steam, which is returned to you after it’s made a thousand or two.
Honestly there’s nothing much valve can do to appease people, but I believe the most likely thing they can do is release data on how much distribution costs and give companies the ability to disable the “extra stuff” to save even a few percent of their revenue.
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It got added when they moved from Greenlight to the current system IIRC.
Double checked and it’s called the “Steam Direct fee”, is $100 (+ potential taxes) and you get it back when the game makes $1,000 “Adjusted Gross Revenue”.
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Having the biggest audience to the degree that they do absolutely makes them a gatekeeper. If Steam became predatory tomorrow it would have a catastrophic effect on the consumer friendliness of the current PC market because you wouldn’t have anywhere else to turn for many games. GOG and Itch don’t have nearly as large of a selection of mainstream stuff.
That’s on developers for not putting their games on other platforms, Valve do not prevent you from doing so. If they went crazy tomorrow, people can just jump ship.
I swear the only games that could never be on another store would be Valve’s own. It’s really not their fault that other platforms are so bad or niche.
Like realistically what should they do to not be seen as gatekeepers? Become worse to scare developers and customers onto other platforms?
It’s not their fault they’re gatekeepers, it’s a symptom of their success. The biggest platform will have a much greater pull inherently, and it should be their responsibility to act fairly because of that position. Thankfully they seem to take that seriously so far. We can only hope it stays that way.
But what’s the alternative?
Gog, direct distribution, something else I haven’t thought of. I just fear monocultures. Things can go south fast
How is steam stopping developers from doing direct distribution?
The question was what are the alternatives, those are alternatives
In response to you saying steam is a gatekeeper.
I think their market dominance makes it an uphill battle for a dev to not put their games on steam. I don’t think that’s much of a problem right now because Valve has been reliable, but all it takes is a bad turn of events at Valve leadership for that to change. I think they are a gatekeeper only insofar as they have market dominance and a platform with games with DRM
Some titles have been very popular without steam, Dark and Darker is a good example of this, GTA 5 another.
I’m not going to pretend they don’t have the most sales, but they also have objectively the best platform. People love it.
As a gamer, there isn’t too much I can do about it, except buy games from other stores where the developers offer their games. As a developer, if I’m worried about Valve becoming abusive, it makes sense for me to use more than one marketplace, or a different marketplace than Valve altogether. Since Valve doesn’t seem to have a lot of exclusivity deals, this either means it costs more for developers to maintain multiple distribution channels, or they don’t think it benefits them to have multiple distribution channels. That said, the continued existence of those other distribution channels leaves the option to leave if they don’t like Valve’s behavior.
As a gamer, all I can do is support other stores, and I do.
I find it really interesting how Valve hired Yanis Varoufakis to analyze the markets that were spontaneously emerging from games on their platform, and how he went on to write a book about the feudalistic nature of internet platforms that is being referred to here. I wonder what Gaben thinks of that and what Yanis thinks about Steam.
Then there is the aspect of Valve being a flat company, no hierarchy, and how Gaben has talked about avoiding rent-seeking that other companies were taking part in, how he wants to make good products for gamers, doesn’t look at sales numbers.
Valve has some really great philosophy running behind it, and then there is the fiefdom of Steam extracting rents from publishers.
I agree and hope that what comes after it is even better at supporting gaming on GNU/Linux and contributing to various libre and opensource projects like KDE and Proton and Mesa and such.
Even Avalon fell eventually.
Dont buy your game codes on steam if you use steam!
Gamestop sells them among others.
Hard to walk away from steam services but GoG is non drm, so once they get better linux integration going start a library there.
Bottom line everyone should be disturbing their spend among various players.
While steam is great, once gabe is ded, we are cooked frogs.
Eh… I have a 500+ game library on GOG and moved back to Steam in 2020. Steam just has too many good features. I’m at the point where I don’t really care about DRM anymore. I know that’s an unpopular opinion but after 20+ years I realize it’s just a boogeyman.
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That’s your opinion dawg… my opinion is that i don’t to pay for that trash, so now I don’t.
I have other options when I don’t like how a vendor behaves ;)
I can keep this up as long as fit grey markets exit and/or Fitgirl is around. So prolly until I am dead.
These shiti corpo operations should get a hint, this aint rent or food lol 100% discretionary media with apple options
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But so everybody is clear, buying shiti corpo products does not help devs who already laid off by the shiti corpo after the crunch. You are not paying the developers as humans, you are paying a legal entity collecting rent. Some of that money will be used to retain min amount of staff required to maintain minimum service.
Once corpos start to “value the work people put into the things you like” we can revisit this topic.
Fucking disgusting bootlicking, learn how businesses and this specific industry operates before you say idiotic shit that is not factually correct.
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I pay for products I decided worth my money, I am sorry your feelz get hurt when exercise my rights to vote with my wallet.
Paying corpos has nothing to do with developers getting paid. Again, learning how the commercial operations are actually ran.
Brain dead takes:
you probably never worked a day in your life.
all while you shit on others that want to get paid for work
think you are special for beig a good person because you didn’t support capitalism
You made up these points and you failed to address crux of my argument.
Juvenile.
I would not call it a booegyman… it is a non burger for avg gamer tho.
But for people who think bigger, it is a valid concern IMHO. Also, if it is not for people who think bigger, we would never big here tech wise.
If we keep accepting current trends, everything will get shittier…
Steam is an exception to this maxim, but for how long?
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I’ve been waiting for Galaxy for Linux for 10 years, since they announced it in 2014. They obviously don’t care.
Rule 1: “No Tux, No Bucks”
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Rule 1: “No Tux, No Bucks”
Yes
I’d really like it if Valve waits for until after I get a pile of external hard drives before they go under.
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Steam obsessed people always cry about the lack of “features” in other stores, as if a game store + launcher needs features other than being able to buy and launch games.
Hell, I don’t even want to launch games. Just let me buy and download an exe (oh yeah, GoG does that, which is why I use GoG whenever I can…)
Sucks for devs that people just won’t buy their game if it isn’t on Steam though :/ Idk how to change peoples’ behaviour, unless Steam does something egregiously bad to users
One of those features is Proton. Thanks to Steam I can play every game I am interested in, without the need to install Windows.
GoG sometimes pushes out Linux installers that they immediately stop supporting, resulting in non-working games. Fuck that.
Your wants and needs are different from other people’s wants and needs, doesn’t mean other people are wrong.
Steam was around for long enough, with it’s array of features, that I have grown accustomed to having them. Even when it first launched, Steam was more than just a store and library. It had Friends and, while not yet integrated into the app itself, they also provided the User Forums for every single individual game.
Even as just a store and ignoring all the other periphery features, it has more features for actually finding things than any other digital market for buying games. Not to mention sales, user reviews, and more.
Steam is widely regarded as the best option because they do things in the interest of their customers, instead of shareholders with a stake in the company.
The problem here is you think other stores actually let you buy and launch games reliably.
Steam is fast. Epic is slow. Epic is always asking me to 2FA to access my library of free games. Epic takes minutes to load their store homepage.
