ITT I learn that oligarch gabe nawel is the elon musk of gamers
I don’t care that Steam has an effective monopoly on digital games. That’s fine. Games can and are on many other services for PC, but gamers want them on Steam. Fine. Whatever. You can even buy games from other services, get Steam codes, and use them as if you got them from Steam, even though Steam get no money from that sale. That’s amazing. Really.
But.
They killed the idea that you can own a PC game. I mean legally own it, be able to sell your copy of it to another person, and no longer have it yourself. You could do that with physical. You still can with physical console games. But on PC that concept is dead. It’s not coming back. And Valve did that. You now just rent them. Fine, you think, Valve isn’t going anywhere. But one day Valve will be gone, and this will matter. No king rules forever.
And the least said about lootboxes and hats and all that scummy crap the better.
The fact that valve has competitors means its not a monopoly. They aren’t anti competitive. They just make a good product and treat their customers better than their competitors.
If all “monopolies” acted like Valve, most people wouldn’t hate monopolies.
If all billionaires acted like GabeN, far fewer people would be calling for the guillotines.
I still think billionaires shouldn’t exist. Just saying hes probably at the bottom of the list of shitty billionaire behavior.
Great. Any time someone has a successful business that supports Linux somehow it is just terrible. I always wonder if these are these real people or just FUD from competitors trying to max Linux support undesirable. Sure I prefer FOSS, but I’m also happy there is some commercial game support. Maybe I’ll use it some day, maybe I won’t.
I’m severely alarmed by the amount of people arguing whether or not Steam is a monopoly. You don’t need 100% of market share to have monopoly position. Pure monopolies are extremely rare and are almost always state-run companies like for public transport. No anti-monopoly legislation is written in a way to only break up firms with literally 0 competition.
Wtf? You can pretty much play any game on steam without steam…
They’re a private company and thus have resisted many of the enshittification trends that run rampant through the industry.
And also their competitors are absolutely atrocious and are completely tone-deaf to what customers actually want.
This is exactly right. As soon as a company becomes public, it’s all over. Profits at X%, every quarter, no matter the cost. It’s the death of a company.
It doesn’t have to go public to do that. It can get sold to private equity. The original owner can pass the business to their kid who has grown up privileged and huffs their own farts. Going public is a guarantee of enshittification but it isn’t the only way.
Because they are one of the few mega companies that hasn’t shrinkflated, enshittified, or otherwise crumbled the quality of their offering. Haven’t sold out the privacy of their customer base to advertising companies, and are generally good to deal with for customers and developers.
It’s not a secret formula that no other company can learn from. It’s as simple as not being dicks IMO.
For some reason, most companies seem to grow too a certain threshold at which they sell their souls to profit and will self destruct to get more of it. Steam thankfully isn’t one of them…… yet.
They’re not beholden to public investors. If they go public or sell to a public company it will change.
If Gaben leaves or dies, Valve is probably fucked.
That will be like a whale-fall event for all the skittering bottom feeders of the finance abyss.
He has a son who will supposedly take over, but we’ll have to see how that goes when it happens.
I thought his son has already taken the helm and had the same mentality as his dad?
Maybe they might actually moderating their forums and getting rid of the bigots and fascists though.
All these concern trolling articles about Valve’s “monopoly”. We never get this shit about Youtube, Windows, local ISPs and other utilities, etc. Super subtle, guys.
The entire AAA video game industry right now is basically freaking out, panicking and financially imploding right now, after at least a solid decade of mainly figuring out how to waste an enormous amount of money…
While all trying to be the next big live service game.
A live service game isn’t so much a game as it is a platform itself, a cash shop for in game content, a social media platform in itself.
(See Roblox for an extremely problematic but successful version of pulling this off)
These people all failed miserably at this, such that Ubisoft imploded, EA got bought out by Saudi Blood Money, Unity itself is imploding as an organization, MSFT switched its gaming division into pure wealth extraction mode before they shut it down in ~5 years and just act as IP liscensing overlords… etc.
They all tried to establish vertically integrated businesses, and despise that they can’t come close to matching Valve, the most competent horizontally built business in the entire industry.
And yes, the ‘video game industry’ includes nearly all ‘video game journalists’.
These people are with few exceptions, allergic to doing any actual investigative journalism, they’re mostly just paid to manipulate the flow of discourse around video games, as a form of marketing.
Every other company could challenge Steam, but instead is enshittified within an inch of its life from the get-go. It’s as much that Steam is doing so much right as it is that competitors are doing so much wrong.
Not you, GOG.
GoG was my second digital store, I resisted Steam for so long, but over the years, Steam has become my #1 source for games. It’s just so easy, plus they are relatively consumer friendly. With the revamp of Steam Families, it’s just so so much easier to have everyone playing on Steam. Plus I have a Steam Deck.
I try and buy games on GoG, set them up with Heroic, and it works great, better than EA, Epic and other storefronts, but just not quite as slick as Steam.
One day St. Gabe will be martyred, and Steam will undergo the unavoidable descent into enshittification, as to will GoG. I do not pledge undying loyalty to any platform, but Steam and GoG have been awesome for so long.
Besides, other than Itch and Humble Bundle, who even comes close in being good to use?
Gog is good, itch.io is good. They have different niches, and each do beautifully.
GOG’s market share being around 1% compared to Steam’s 80% only proves the point that no amount of great features or love by gamers is enough to challenge the monopoly.
That’s because for the vast majority of gamers their games aren’t on GOG. From the top 50 sellers on Steam only Rimworld, Baldurs Gate 3, No Man’s Sky, Tainted Grail and Kerbal Space Program are sold on GOG. 90% of the top sellers on Steam aren’t on GOG. GOG has a lot of great features but when GOG doesn’t have the games people want to spend money on there’s very little reason for those people to use GOG.
There would be more if more people used GOG, but even so, I’m not sure I agree with your premise, because what do most people do when they want a game that’s on Steam and on GOG and even has achievements on both?
I imagine most people don’t even know when a new release releases on GOG platforms because 90% of the time that’s not the case. I know I don’t check GOG every time a new game releases. I’d have to know before-hand for me to buy there.
And that was kinda my point. When most of the games don’t release on GOG there’s very little point in trying to build a library on GOG because you can’t depend solely on GOG. You’re going to have to split your library and most people prefer to have all their games in one place.
I guess ideally we should have an open standard for software “storefronts” that should allow for multiple stores to be plugged into the same app.
I’m not mad because they go above and beyond to support Linux, which I prefer to use.
None of the other stores do even the bare minimum for Linux users, while Valve has helped make it easier to play almost every game.
I skimmed most of this thread and didn’t see anyone mention that Steam actually supports third party stores. They let developers sell game keys on other storefronts for free (with limits, granted—the number of keys they can generate depends on sales on Steam, I think.)
Fanatical and Humble only exist because Steam handles all of the games delivery infrastructure for them. That’s, like, the opposite of monopolistic behaviour. Name another tech monopoly giving their services away for free so other directly competing businesses can profit.
Not to mention they are no monopoly by any definition. I can buy games at half a dozen other stores I know of, probably a hundred I don’t.
Used to prefer GOG over Steam. GOG did nothing for Linux gamers though, they didn’t even release their Galaxy client for Linux. Will prefer GOG over Steam again when this changes (they said recently they want to change this, but only after Valve has already invested a lot into making Linux gaming a real thing with almost zero friction). That’s also basically the best thing that Valve has done - they really did help to make Linux gaming a reality, and Linux gaming is an important step towards toppling Windows’ dominance. They deserve a lot of credit for that. But there are also plenty of other things that you can criticize about Steam.
If you’re on Windows though, you should definitely always prefer GOG over Steam because it’s DRM-free (you buy it, you own it). Of course, there are many more games only available on Steam, so it might not be possible all the time, but at least you should prioritize your choices.
We also have plenty of other monopoly problems, one of the biggest is YouTube.
If you’re on Windows though, you should definitely always prefer GOG over Steam because it’s DRM-free (you buy it, you own it)
I’m not really disagreeing with you, as with GOG you are guaranteed to get a DRM free game (and an installer which is better than Steam’s backup, as it’s guaranteed to work offline), but they still sell you just a revocable license.
How is the license revocable without DRM? They have no mechanism to revoke it other than stopping you downloading it from them again.
Yea you just lose the ability to download it again. AFAIK that’s what happened with The Witcher 3’s DLCs brought through some gray market sites.
You obviously lose access to cloud saves, multiplayer and any other feature from the client l. Playing the game after that is no different than playing a pirated copy (practically and legally, if you care about that).What I mean is that you don’t own the copy any differently than you do on other platforms.
I don’t really see it much differently than Steam, as if a game is on GOG it’s going to be either DRM-free or at worst use the weak built in DRM (which can be bypassed easily).
That’s not to say I dislike GOG, I think the real value of it is the support and patches for older games. They also have a more generous refund policy (30 days, no time limit).
Edit: to be clear this is an issue with
capitalismthe sale of fully digital media, not with GOG and no, I’m not advocating for NFTs.I disagree that is legally no different, if you used a “grey” market seller to obtain access in a way gog deemed illegitimate then you never had license to use it. If you had a legitimate licence then using it after say gog terminated you account, you would still have legitimate license to use the copies you already downloaded despite gog not providing their services to you.
I was just using it as an example for what happens, because it’s the only times something like this has happened. Still, according to their user agreement, they sell you a license through them (so the publisher licenses the license to GOG and they then issue a license to you to access the game), which means that on account termination you lose it and any right you had.
To be clear, I don’t think “ownership” matters that much usually, since data is not a finite resource, but there’s a few cases in which it does, for example: you can’t sell or lend the games or you can’t legally host a tournament or other public events unless you get another license that allows you to do so.
Anyways, my point is that the GOG’s DRM free policy is good, but to me feels meaningless and more like a marketing gimmick and the laws on these things are unfairly against the user. What is meaningful for preservation tho is their “Preservation Program” through which they maintain older games to keep them working on modern systems (which includes fixing legal issues that prevent them from being sold)
I use Linux and I prefer GOG to Steam
GoG is probably a pretty small company, I can’t really expect them to have a full Linux support system when Linux up until Windows 10 support ended was probably a pretty small niche that is now a slightly bigger niche.
Because of all the other companies in that picture (except GOG, they’re cool).
What about itch vor humble bundle?
Humble bundle got stripped by its parent company IGN. That’s why they haven’t had a good bundle for a long time.
In July 2024, all Humble Games employees were reportedly laid off. The company said that it’s “restructuring”, and that Humble Bundle will not be affected.
Humble is being enshittified.
I still remember Humble Origin Bundle. The legendary pack that has never been matched again. Today’s humble bundle is crap compared to what it used to be.
I think some of the staff that was laid off started an alternative to humble, but a lack of presence means they aren’t well known and i have no idea how they’re doing.
itch.io is okay, but they used to be much better back when they first emerged right after Desura collapsed in 2013, and everyone moved their indie titles there, and before Steam had GreenLight and now Early Access. Now they’ve fallen into a weird space where half of their games’ installers aren’t even hosted on their site and you get redirected to the game’s own website. Humble Bundle has really crappy download speeds, so it’s hard to justify using them over Steam for anything larger than a VN, and half the games you buy on HB they actually just give you Steam keys to redeem anyways.
Steam, GoG, Humble Bundle, and Itch are the platforms I regularly buy PC games on. By far and away, Steam is #1. It’s got the games, it’s well integrated into everything, easy to use (especially on Linux). GoG is good, although I set up Heroic to use with GoG. It’s close, but not as many games that I want, and Heroic+GoG is a little less polished than Steam. Humble Bundle and Itch are generally too niche, although so much of my Steam library has come from Humble.
Steam is not a fucking monopoly. Take my downvote
Really simple: because they are running it like tax funded infrastructure and not like an extortion racket.
interesting
