I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.
It’s not just factually wrong to call them a monopoly, it’s uncharitable given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices despite being in a position (and arguably having the right) to do so.
Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive.
Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.
If you're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter, and your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist. The sales and exposure of a game on Steam dwarf all other alternate PC storefronts. Even Ubisoft caved in and released their games on Steam.
Monopoly doesn't mean being the only game in town, you can have 100 other competitors, but if your competitors have <10% market share and you have >90% then you're basically a monopoly.
That's an exaggeration.
World of Warcraft, COD, League of Legends, all exist just fine. For brand new games, The Bazaar is doing very well and they're using their own launcher.
(Slightly off-topic, but The Bazaar is really good, for anyone who likes card-based auto-battler games! Highly recommend.)
Note the use of ‘store’ here. You can sell your game on your own website for a lower price.
One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com than it is on Steam, Gog, or Humble. Steam, Gog, and Humble all sell at the same price, however.
Well, not quite. They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
(Their ToS wouldn't allow gamers to form a class action, but developers were apparently allowed to.)
So, perhaps not all good.
What's also interesting is some games will unlock for you if you buy them from their own stores, like the Elder Scrolls Online MMO will unlock on Steam for you if you just link your Steam account.
My only annoyance with them is with Valve for not making new games / franchises. They clearly have a good talent pool, but they're so much slower than Nintendo it feels like in this regard. They're finally adding a new game, but its just a Team Fortress spiritual successor.
CDPR also puts all of their games DRM free from release on GoG - including The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.
But nit: that's not what "exception that proves the rule" means. An example of that saying is a sign that says "no parking 2-4pm", which proves that there is a rule that you can park any other time. WoW, Fortnite, CoD, Minecraft, those are just "exceptions".
No. It’s an implicit rule. You don’t get to language lawyer.
> One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com
Just checked, $35 on both.
Valve would only allow a dev to sell a game on their website for a lower price so long as the game sales numbers were not a threat to Steam. If Factorio sold very less on its website and suddenly 90% of sales were direct Valve would not be pleased and there would be consequences.
They got and have maintained that monopoly (I'll let others debate the merits of that wording) by being very very good to their users, which doesn't make the existence of the monopoly evidence that they aren't saints. If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are, even Epic (who would definitely be making noise if they thought they could get anyone to listen).
The desktop video gaming ecosystem is in perhaps the best shape possible: there's one clear winner at the moment who makes all customers very happy, with a few runners up hedging against that winner becoming abusive after all. If Steam became worse than Epic it wouldn't take long for Epic to overtake them, but as long as it's not worse it's nice that everyone has agreed on a standard platform.
Same if you want a video on your site: if you don't YouTube embed and instead host yourself, you get less amplified by youtube even if people want to watch it just as much. YouTube ends up getting to plaster ads interrupting your website trailer as much as they do on YouTube.
If you spread your marketing to a steam competitor with better cut you get the same problem, less amplification on Steam. Steam is today stone soup, Valve used to put in more of the meat and veggies but now that's more and more up to the captive devs. For a time Valve was the most profitable major company per employee in the US from this stone soup arrangement, but they did eventually have to drop their rates on the biggest devs, announced either a few days before or after the Epic Games Store launched.
For example, I still don't use Epic. And I've probably even paid on Steam for games that Epic gave away for free.
What's worrying is Steam has enough mass to preclude me from buying games on GoG to a point. Linux support, for one. Frictionless playing on a Deck if i choose to get one in the future, for two. Steam built in streaming, for three.
I bought GoG first for a couple years, but now I'm agnostic again. Esp with games that have Linux versions.
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Still, the only games you really own are those you've downloaded the crack for. Unless they're from GoG and DRM free.
And only if you have a good backup strategy :)
Helps that they don't have to be very very good to shareholders that don't give a fuck about games and just want money. I'm not really looking forward to find out what happens once Gabe passes on control of the company.
What stands out to me is that while most studios accept that they've got to pay their tithe to valve in order to succeed on PC, for many it seems to begrudgingly so and where they have the capability they investigate using their own or alternative channels to get a better rate. It's an interesting parallel to Valve's moan around 15 years or so that Microsoft could E.E.E. PC gaming and the linux direction was hedging against that.
>If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive
Well we know they are now thanks to the lawsuits shedding light in the long known pricing parity clauses. Anyone asking "why isn't this game cheaper on Epic if take take a smaller cut" now has their answer. Without risking any dev's NDA.
Im sure at thst point it's more worth considering.
Btw, based on my friend Bazaar still has its own balance issues arising every other patch.
This was in defiance of the fact that some lawyers were arranging a mass arbitration lawsuit over this stuff. So Valve is flipping the table hoping to evade that.
There's not much "lock-in" apart from the games one owns on the platform; and the social aspects of steam are mostly negligible or niche - sure there's the friendlist, but no gamer I know uses steam voice-chat so the friendlist is mostly replicated in discord and similar anyway.
https://galaxy.ai/youtube-summarizer/the-judges-ruling-a-maj...
>Initially, it was believed that this policy applied only to Steam keys, but the emails indicate a broader application, raising serious concerns about Valve's business practices.
They are a monopoly, but it doesn't look to me that they are taking particular advantage of the position. I buy mostly indie games, so I may be out of the loop, but what are they doing that makes them "not saints" ? (Expecially in relation to their market share)
That said: enforcement on such things is not going to be 100%. Larger companies will either be purposefully ignores or make their own internal deals and contracts to follow. Some smaller games will slip through like everything else in life (Valve can still let Malware slip in once in a blue moon. I'm not surprised you can find some niche Japanese game sold for cheaper on DLsite or wherever).
But the point is that they can push thst in devs because of the monopoly. And that's how you get stuff like the Wolfire lawsuit when a few people do push back.
It's proof that what the parent commenter said, the portion I explicitly quoted, is an exaggeration.
>Btw, based on my friend Bazaar still has its own balance issues arising every other patch.
I mean, sure. Can you name any competitive game that doesn't have balance issues? I can't. What matters to me is the iteration speed to address balance issues, which The Bazaar does at a really nice cadence.
Break the network effect, and incentivise things that work against it. Implement open protocols rather than walled gardens.
Allow other platforms to truly have a chance.
Saints sadly have no place in the capitalistic world we live in though. If they exist, they are quickly outcompeted.
They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
So, yes, it's been claimed and legally found that they have at least some anticompetitive practices, at least in the USA.
(Quoted text is from https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-case-explained)
It's also so clear to me in retrospect how long they've been building up to something like this. Investing in Wine and developing proton to make running Windows games on Linux as frictionless as possible, dipping their toes in hardware with much less ambitious projects like the Steam link and the controller for it so that they weren't going in without any experience as a company dealing with physical products...I can't imagine that this would have been able to pull for for most companies due to how much they had to be willing to invest in long-term endeavors that couldn't be guaranteed to succeed. I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that they might have single-handedly lifted up Linux gaming to the point where I'll never end up using Windows on a personal machine again, and that's because they put so much time and effort into the tooling for running the games independent of their distribution network. At this point, I probably would have been willing to forgive them for releasing the Steam Deck as a locked-down device, but instead they went ahead the made it pretty much indistinguishable from my laptop and desktop in terms of how much I can change or remove things. There have been so many discussions about whether the App Store should be considered a monopoly or not on iOS, and if there's not consensus on that, I can't even fathom how someone could make the argument that Steam is.
For UDK: they did get a lot better with that for UE4/5. These days, the first million dollars in that project's revenue has no cut, and after that it's a 5% royalties (there's also mandatory $1850 subscription seats per year if you have over a million gross revenue a year).
It's about as indie friendly as you can be for such an everpresent tool.
>Can you name any competitive game that doesn't have balance issues?
Sure. But I'm not entirely sure Bazaar is stable enough yet to have the mood swings of Overwatch 2. That's the danger. Make too many fans angry in this beta stage and you lose all goodwill for the full launch.
I do empathize highly with the devs as someone who will try to do that song and dance themselves one day. But that's why I'm not only making my game with direct sales figures in mind.
Gog is the only one I would say is on par with Steam, but they have a different niche. Still, Valve is on top and not because they hinder the competition, but because the competition likes to shoot their feet. Often.
It's also possible that some gamers did actually get money from Valve via arbitration, so they could've been found to have acted in an anticompetitive way, separately from the lawsuit. I've not been able to find anyone specifically saying that they did the arbitration, though.
I'm a happy Valve customer, and I'd still likely buy with them even if other platform's offered lower prices, but that doesn't change that they've leveraged their market domination to force concessions from publishers that benefit their business at the cost of competitors and customers.
Can we not say people aren't conversing in good faith solely as a method of shutting down further conversation?
They stated something as an absolute and I gave examples of why it isn't an absolute. That's a perfectly normal conversation. It's not even an argument.
As for Bazaar, it seems like you haven't played and aren't a fan, which is totally fine, but just a note that it is not in beta anymore. I'm not sure what your comments about "making my game with direct sales figures in mind" are referencing.
Yet Valve did nothing to stiffle competition. Their only major requirement for games published on Steam was that games suppose to get same efficient discounts as they get on other storefronts. E.g you cannot constantly sell your game on Epic Games store for $10 while Steam version cost never drops below $12.
Also game developers are allowed to request sane amount of Steam keys for free and sell them elsewhere while pocketing all the profit while Valve covers all the distribution costs.
Epic Games stiffled itself. Their store is shitty and dont even have player reviews. No surprise they have no customers except those who come to play Fortnite or get free games.
I will call a duck a duck as long as it quacks like one. I simply want to maintain the spirit of the guidelines
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
They made a hyperbolic statement and you are responding to the literal hyperbolic point and dismissing the main point in the same comment about the 90% monopoly. I don't see that as following the guidelines. There's no interesting conversation to have about "does your game not existing if it is not on Steam?", not even in a philosophical sense.
>it seems like you haven't played and aren't a fan, which is totally fine,
I'm just worried about its future. Especially in these turbulous times. You don't really get the luxury of rocking the boat that much. Maybe the founders will be fine, but the last thing I want is more layoffs over extemelty preventable issues.
> I'm not sure what your comments about "making my game with direct sales figures in mind" are referencing.
I wouldn't worry about it too mucn. Just personal ramblings. I'll just say "when I a good rush, sell shovels".
For example a publisher could price a new title at $69.99 on Steam or $59.99 on Epic and make the same gross margin, given the platform fees.
That Epic is a sub-par distribution platform does not change this, and Steam's agreement precludes the possibility that competitors can compete on price. Amazon was forced to remove price parity after regulatory pressure.
So like Microsoft of the 90's, Valve is using their market dominance to force publishers into agreements that limit competition. It's only different because we generally like Valve. Epic and GOG cannot compete on price and use that as a mechanism to grow their business because Steam could threaten to remove your product. It just so happens that Steam is so good that even with price discounts it's unlikely that competitors could use that as a major advantage.
They have no morals with how they make money. No morals in politics. They are running a monopoly with a 30% cut.
How is that a "do no evil" company? Because you can install an app from Epic? Give me a break...
Mobile games, especially Roblox, are a lot worse because they target much younger children with less parental control.
> Just checked, $35 on both.
This might be a regional thing then. When using a UK IP, it’s £30.00 on Steam, GOG and Humble. It’s £27.03 on factorio.com. I checked before posting.