this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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There is no such thing as a good monopoly. He leverages a 30% tax on a huge chunk of the gaming industry. Steam, Microsoft, Epic, Sony and Nintendo all essentially participate in collusion and anti competitive behavior.
Think of all the indie studios that closed and sequels that got canceled and ask yourself if they could have made it if steam only took 5%.
They leveraged linux to save on development and maintenance costs. Capturing the handheld market at a tenth of the price while making the same profit isn't altruisme.
It's not like the value added for that 30% tax isn't there. Steam has made so many things so easy that it's easy to forget what things were like decades ago.
If you were an independent game publisher, you had to figure out how to set up a web storefront, a content delivery network hosted in perpetuity, take payments, do multiplayer, add in-game chat, map every weird joystick and gamepad in the universe to your control scheme, achievements, friend lists.... And every game developer had to do that independently because there was no public solution, really. The friction to enter the indie dev space was so much higher.
Also, steam does not force you to use their store- you can generate steam keys and sell your game away from the steam platform. The only thing that they enforce is if you sell it for a lower price elsewhere, they'll de-list your game. Which I think is reasonable.
You can use the same argument about Musk or Benzos as well. Clearly, they are over charging for the value or they wouldn't be billionaires.
Steam could give the same value on 2% taken and Gaben would probably still be able to afford at least one of his 6 mega yatchs. But there's indie companies that are struggling where just an extra 10% would go a long way.
In the end, Gaben and his friends greed is killing indie companies, affecting the quality and amount of games we get and is having a detrimental effect on the industry.
Yet because Gaben has a really good pr team and managed to convince everyone he's "not your average billionaire", we now have comments comparing him to Jesus and applauding his monopoly as being the only good one. Fucking hell.
Only if the game is purchased directly on Steam. A developer can sell Steam keys on their own website and not have Valve take a cut of the price. I think the only rule is that you can't sell the key cheaper than the price the developer has set on the Steam store.
It's just a way to bring in and trap people in their ecosystem. It's free like Gmail is free, not out of altruism. The bad seriously outweigh the good when it comes to steam, we shouldn't praise them.