this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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Yeah, it's a monopoly.
That's not a complaint. It's not a value judgement. People think the word is automatically negative or criminal, because of how often that market power gets abused - but it is just the label for having that market power. Valve is not a trust. Valve does not do any anti-competitive practices. (Their 30% cut is obscene, but it's the same obscenity demanded by other monopoly storefronts.) Nonetheless, company after company keeps saying:
This store is the only store that really matters.
If you're not on this store, you're probably fucked.
We have a word for that.
Totally agree. They definitely have a monopoly in PC game distribution, but this feels different than most other situations. They are not forcing anything on anyone. This is really the consumer's choice. The thing is, they offer a great service and consumers don't really have much to complain about. The only time you would need to complain about something is if you lost your entire steam library. Which is a reminder that you don't really own these games, you are renting them.
Think about other monopolies. Microsoft has a dominant force in the PC OS. You have other options like MacOS and Linux, but if you wanted to switch from windows to MacOS, you really can't. Microsoft can force products onto people like edge browser or ads.
Comcast and Cox are monopolies as they normally service specific regional areas and stay out of each other's way. Because of this, there is no competition when looking for an ISP and both companies generally act on bad practices and milk the consumers for everything they can.
The more you dig deeper into it, you'll find that all these companies try and fuck over the consumer. The difference with Valve, is that they can fuck over the producer moreso than the consumer. The only other company I can think of that is similar is eBay. eBay is really a monopoly for an auction like or used goods marketplace. The consumer is more protected than the producer.
Tbh, I don't know the ins and outs of the game development process, but at least for smaller teams and games, 30% seems very reasonable to get your game out there. I am in the process of making a game now and I am fine with that fee and not having to deal with all the headaches. I just want to make a game, publish it, and make some money.
Losing an entire third of your revenue, straight off the top, is egregious. It's the figure console manufacturers settled on when they had game developers by the balls. Seeing it continue with a company that controls nothing about the platform they serve says a lot about how much power is inherent to simply having a supermajority market share.
Steam shoved its way onto everyone's computer as mandatory DRM for Half-Life 2. Calling that move "forward-thinking" would not be a compliment.
Taking 1/3 of your revenue when they quadruple it absolutely is not egregious. Steam is the reason you're capable of making a living selling PC games to begin with.
PC gaming existed for decades before Steam and wouldn't magically disappear without it.
Steam increases sales because it's the only store customers use.
Taking the same kind of money Nintendo charges for the privilege of publishing on Switch, just to be on the de-facto monopoly that Valve has secured, is not some kind of favor. It's a sign of the power they wield. They didn't help you make the game. They didn't invent the video card. They don't even make the OS that 95% of their customers use.
They're a middleman.
For massive studios.
Indie games would not have the tiniest chance in hell of succeeding without Steam massively amplifying their reach. If you have a budget under a million, Steam is the best thing that's ever happened to you and nothing is close.
BECAUSE IT'S A MONOPOLY.
The internet is not some big-money-only affair, where independent creators have no chance of breakout grassroots success. Digital publishing has been the best thing ever for small games, except every platform is centralized, so there's still some gigantic arbitrary gatekeeper.
Praising that gatekeeper as if they invented the internet is not a serious argument. Indie developers like this one have been held back - the game's exactly the same, and it was just as available to anyone with a credit card, but it sold fuck-all beforehand because people only use one store.
We're pretending Steam (who has done literally nothing to suppress any other platform) doesn't exist. There is no "monopoly" involved in the discussion
It's because people don't have any interest in buying digital products from individuals, especially products that necessarily must change over time. Steam is the entire reason being an indie developer can be done, and very probably most of the reason most AAA PC ports exist at all. Without Steam, console gaming would quite possibly be the only option if you wanted modern demanding games.
'They have all the sales so they must be the only reason anyone buys things.'
'Stop calling them a monopoly! It's not like they have all the sales.'
It is impossible to address nonsense like this in a forum with enforced politeness.
They have all the PC sales because they created the entire market and are constantly driving it forward. They have the whole indie market because they made indie development possible. The entire console indie market is the product of Steam making it possible for them to make money on a product long enough to port it to console. Most PC ports are exclusively because they have a single high quality market to handle distribution. Digital distribution across 200 countries is a huge pain in the ass, especially when the console competition has a whole bunch of features you'd have to build by hand that Steam handles for you. And the whole Linux market is because Steam built and invested heavily in the Steam deck and the tech to make it viable.
Market share doesn't matter. They are entitled to have the whole market if it's because the entire consumer base chooses them organically, because nobody else can be bothered to make a product that isn't dogshit.
Gish gallop of post-hoc nonsense. This is how things are - so it must be the only way it'd happen.
Market share is literally the only factor in what defines a monopoly. But people can't even bring themselves to say they have a monopoly, even as they defend that monopoly, because that sounds bad and Steam good therefore nuh uh. Let's go round and round and insist that buying games online in 1999 didn't exist, and then Steam happened, so literally everything since then is thanks to Valve. Nothing else changed! No outside factors!
All of the things I'm talking about are hard prerequisites to those markets existing at all, they're things no one else ever tried to do, and they're things that PC gaming would be in far worse shape if someone like Epic had done first, because unlike Steam, it's a literal certainty that they'd abuse them.
Check.
Even without Steam around, do you really think Average Joe is going to check a bunch of storefronts looking for a game? Nah, they're going to see what comes up on Twitch/YouTube and then play that. That would have meant nothing but sponsored garbage forever. Steam saved us from that fate with Greenlight and later opening the door entirely (and favouring indies in their upcoming and new lists)
Do you remember Direct2Drive? Opened up in 2004, digital storefront for games run by IGN? No? That's ok, neither does anyone else, and it had the pull of fucking IGN. That's the market Steam was launching into at the time, a time when many people were openly exclaiming PC gaming was dying.
At the time gamer chat was a mostly text-based affair over several places and services, and voice was the realm of the few people with the skills to get TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble going or a connection to those people. Steam did something wild and brought the whole community together in one place. All the games, all the gamers, and all the developers in one place.
That's how Steam ended up a monopoly, and with their collection of mature services no one is going to beat them at everything. If you want to beat them you're going to need to focus on one aspect of their service, beat that, and then work with other people who have targeted other parts of the service and connect. In other words, you need to do the exact opposite of Battle.net/Epic/Uplay/Origin/etc. but none of those companies will do that because they are too selfish to give up any part of the profits.
Only the FOSS community would have the required mentality and why would they step on Steam? Linux gaming has never been this good. It's almost like the only people who could take on Steam view it as an asset.
Oh and just to be clear: virtually no other service has even tried to do anything but be a worse version of Steam. GOG and Itch.io instead opted to focus on what made them different and thus occupy meaningful niches, but everyone else continues to be worthless to this day and they only have themselves to blame.
Or games could be in multiple stores.
You could go to a game store... and it would have... all of the games.
Like a real-ass brick-and-mortar store, and physical glass-disc games in little plastic boxes.
Valve has not been an obstacle to that possibility, but Steam's 30% cut says they don't mind de facto exclusivity. They're not charging you like they're abusing their monopoly... but they're charging game developers the same as bastards like Nintendo and Apple.
The article is entirely about how that monopoly holds back the industry. There is one store. You're on it, or you're fucked. And getting there requires sacrificing an entire third of revenue, straight off the top. For obvious reasons developers and publishers would rather not do that. Valve has them by the balls - and a gentle grip doesn't really defuse that situation.