I still don’t understand how the Californian government bailed them out when they were bankrupt, yet they were allowed to remain an independent company? Why didn’t the government take full control?
Electricity in cities in the Bay Area that have their own municipal power company (like Palo Alto and Santa Clara) is literally 1/3 the cost of PG&E.
Fuck them. If there was ever a case to be made for government owned utilities (and like why is that even a debate in the first place?) these assholes would be the poster child.
Palo Alto’s got the right idea - the city runs the electricity, gas, water, sewer, and they also have a city-owned fiber internet provider for businesses (which they want to eventually roll out for residential use too). Services are cheaper than other cities where they contract these out to third-party companies, since they’re running them to benefit residents, not to make money.
They do contract out some things (garbage/recycling/compost is contracted to GreenWaste) but not many.
Because the USA haven’t had the balls to hold corporations responsible for their actions in decades. They can save them from failure, but have no willpower to correct any of their malevolent behaviors.
I really hope this generation is the one that finally changes that trend.
They are. The FTC have already brought antitrust suits against three of the companies you just listed, and you can bet your ass they’re eyeing the rest.
Decades of neoliberalism doesn’t get undone in a single day. This is good news, and if America keeps putting competent people in power we’ll see more of it.
Edit: Funny how I was replying to a comment with examples of companies that wish they had 70% of the market under their control yet people didn’t disagree with OP but bringing up Valve? Oh man, Gaben can do no wrong! 70% of the market under the control of a company owned by a single man? No problemo!
You can’t break up steam and improve the market in any particular way. Since they’re not really big on exclusivity agreements, there’s also very little a court order would do to make the market more competitive.
If consumers were more evenly spread around different platforms there would be actual competition to determine prices and margins for the developers. Right now Epic takes a smaller share of the revenues but the price is the same to try and compensate for the smaller number of buyers. With their dominant position it’s pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more (which would require a ridiculous amount of capital), people have their well established habits and won’t move even if the product they’re using isn’t necessarily the best or they’re spending more than they need to.
Epic had all the money in the world and tons of time (and users) to create a viable alternative. They didn’t fail because valve squeezed them out, they failed because they refuse to improve their product. In fact, it could be said that Epic wanted to become the monopoly themselves. If they spent half as much effort on their product as they do on lawsuits and exclusivity deals, they would have been a viable competitor. But they didn’t. At the end of the day, it sucks to use. Steam does not.
EGS is perfectly usable and in my opinion is better than Steam in some aspects (way less bloat, open the app and your games are right there to launch even if you’re on the storefront), your saying they refuse to improve their product just shows you’re not using it because it’s way better than it was on release.
And yes, Valve has a monopoly, they control enough of the market that it goes where they decide it’s going and they’re the default solution people turn to when they need the services they offer, they’re also working on increasing their reach with streaming on the platform, forums, reviews and so on. If all you need is found on a single platform and it’s the platform that a vast majority is using then what do we call that? That’s right, a monopoly.
Want a similar example? Microsoft is considered to be in a monopolistic position with Windows, yet they have competitors, same with Office, same with Explorer back in the day. Google is a monopoly even though competitors exist.
Opinions aside, that’s still not the legal definition of a monopoly.
Monopoly: Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service.
Valve does not have exclusive control of the PC gaming market. The EGS funded lawsuit even says that in the docket. They are only suing on the grounds of the keys issue. I don’t disagree with you that when Newell leaves, things COULD change, but you can’t base the present on the possible future. At this time, steam is on “top” because the vast majority of users have voted with their wallet and time. Not because they are engaged in sweeping anti-competitive backdoor dealings. You know, like EGS does.
Did you read the articles? The judge acknowledged that Google is widely recognized as the best general purpose search engine but that part of why they are used so often is because of Google paying people to make Google the default search option which many people never change.
it’s pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more
(1) Many PC gamers simply wait for games to go on sale. Epic buying exclusive agreements isn’t as dominating of a strategy as they think it is; even if it’s expensive.
(2) Steam is the incumbent. You have to be better in order to be worth it to switch. As you mentioned, Epic is lacking in features
(3) Valve has not treated the desktop market the way Apple as treated the app store. Look at how far Epic has taken Apple to court; compared to their biggest rival, Valve
(4) Valve has put in alot of work in other layers; such as making open hardware and contributing to AMD GPU drivers on Linux. They work on the whole platform, even parts they do not directly make money off. This is called investment.
(5) What exactly would you break Steam into being? One app for reviews, another for buying, and another for launching games? Break the development studio into a different company? Even if Epic is throwing around money made from its game engine and games?
That’s the thing though, with their market share an hypothetical competitor could be better and people still wouldn’t switch, Steam is where their games are, it’s where their friends play, building everything from scratch elsewhere wouldn’t be worth the trouble even if the alternative was better.
Store, development, forums, trading platform, launcher, online gaming services, hardware, streaming integrated into the platform, DRM… Valve has their hands all over the place and there’s a single person at the top of that. Wanna wait until they start becoming bad before considering that maybe it’s not a good thing that they have a hold on 70% of the market? Hell, just the fact that Newell could decide that they’re closing their doors tomorrow and no one has access to their games anymore should be fucking worrying to everyone.
At what seams would you break Steam at? In this day and age those are just app store features. Is there anything you listed Sony, Microsoft or Apple don’t have?
I do understand having a Steam library would make it harder to switch but most of us have a few GOG games and collect Epic free games as well (though, I haven’t even looked at the free Epic games since Christmas).
People even download a launcher like Hero Launcher on the Steamdeck to run games from other stores. We have the freedom to use Steam in tagent with other stores and we do. You can buy a game off GOG and add it to Steam to launch it.
Steam is simply the better product, hands down.
Edit: To prove that I see your point but just don’t agree with it: Here is a quote from an ArsTechnica article about a judge viewing Steam as a monopoly.
Despite those changes, Judge Coughenour once again dismissed Wolfire’s argument that Valve had engaged in “illegal tying” between the Steam platform (which provides game library management, social networking, achievement tracking, Steam Workshop mods, etc.) and the Steam game store (i.e., the part that sells the games). Those two sides of Steam form a single market, the judge wrote, because “commercial viability for a platform is possible only when it generates revenue from a linked game store.” What’s more, the suit has not shown there is any sufficient market demand “for fully functional gaming platforms distinct from game stores.”
Does this judge expect me to buy a game from Epic which is missing features and then pay Valve a fee to contact the developer through Steam? Will Epic cheapen their price by 30% so I can “enable Steam features.” This would be unprecedented. I cannot go to Amazon to return/complain about a product I bought from Walmart.
So? A private company having control of the market is never a good thing, no matter how good they are at the moment because you never know what will happen in the future.
Alright then, let’s do nothing until Newell dies and they become controlled by someone else that people don’t like as much, maybe you guys will wake up then.
What’s a better alternative? Have tried all major ones except paid ones and I always return to Google. Maybe for basic stuff Duck Duck Go / Bing is fine, but once you start searching for local / non-English stuff, results were underwhelming.
I’ve been using kagi for a few months (6 according to my bank). It is paid. It is great. It’s so good I’ve switched my wife to it since Google was giving her a lot of garbage (she’s a non techie) and she says “it feels like Google used to be. The answers are what I was looking for. I forgot I was using Kagi”
I want the answer to be a federated system, like YaCy. Which I tried to set up, and its results make AltaVista look good. Maybe good enough for a corporate intranet, but not the internet at large.
There are lots of articles about how they make their search results worse on purpose for more profit. They alter search queries on the server side to give results for a search which is more aligned with an advertising partner. They inject AI into search results which can be wildly wrong.
Same (AdGuard) I meant like I’d consistently get all of the first page of results linking to hyper SEO clickbait sites / AMP links / Adsense affiliates (think multi-page/gallery/click-through articles and low quality content farm sites like CNET, Forbes, Quora, etc) with a smattering of straight up keyword banks, snippet aggregator spam, and chatbot articles full of longwinded made-up nonsense with zero payoff.
Even more annoying was that Google started dumbing down all my searches, regardless of technical detail and specificity, just railroading me into simplistic drivel. Eventually verbatim/quotes syntax stopped working also, and that was the end of google’s usefulness to me.
Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it’s customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call
They’re not anti-competitive, that’s the difference. Devs can even sell Steam keys on their own website and take 100% of the profit if they so choose, and there’s absolutely no lock-in.
I’m not sure where the anti-trust is. Having a high marketshare by itself doesn’t mean you’re committing anti-trust, abusing that market position does.
Just having a high market share isn’t the issue. It’s abusing that dominant market position that is.
Valve has been smart enough not to do that. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the like haven’t. In fact, Valve’s competitors have been more anti-competitive than Valve.
ASML, who make EUV machines and other semiconductor tooling, is also in a dominant market position (way more dominant actually). Do you ever see calls to break them up? No. Because they haven’t been abusing their power. They know that if they put a toe out of line, they’ll be in trouble with regulators.
Google and the like have been able to act with impunity because the US protects them, to the detriment of their smaller companies and their citizens.
ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West’s economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn’t be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.
Really? Because they’re part of the giants that determine game prices, pricing is based on everyone that takes a cut along the way, they take 30%, that’s calculated into what games need to sell for, 30% is enough to make them billions in profit, billions in profit is money that came out of our pockets to go in Newell’s pockets so he can own six yachts.
I swear if it was a public company people would be flipping out because their numbers would be public and the profit would be going to investors, but they’re private and they only have one investor the profit goes to do that’s perfectly fine I guess???
Shit, doesn’t YouTube take like 60%? I think Twitch takes a big chunk too. Gog takes 30%. MS takes 30%. Sony takes 30%. Nintendo takes 30%. Apple takes 30%. GameStop, BestBuy, Amazon, and Walmart all take roughly 30% too.
It’s the industry standard.
And unlike the likes of the Play Store or App store, Valve provides a lot for that 30%.
free cloud sync
free online multiplayer (not a given, look at MS/Sony/Nintendo)
forums
game demos
game recording with some neat features
a VR system
in-home streaming
family game sharing
a review system
a mod distribution platform
dev tools
advertising
online services you can tie into your game
achievements
a cross-platform, userspace anti-cheat solution
notes
backwards compatibility tooling
OS compatibility layers
Linux development
driver development
vast controller support
performance overlays
steam input
the list goes on…
I’m not in love with everything Valve does (loot boxes, micro-transactions 🤢). But it’s undeniable that compared to other companies that take the same (or higher) cut, you get a lot back.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to live in the fantasy world where they only take a 1% cut, but that’s just what it is, a fantasy.
How about we focus on the fact that the industry standard makes owners and c-suite billionaires? Do you think people would start hating a company if they cut their share to 10% and prices came down instead of having that extra enrich the few?
Reread my comment. I’m not saying it’s ok because it’s the industry standard, I’m saying it’s tolerable because it’s the industry standard and yet despite their strong market position, they still consciously provide a good value.
And let’s not pretend that even if everyone switched to a 10% margin (assuming that would even be profitable), people wouldn’t then complain about 10% being too high. It’s like taxes - no matter what it’s set as, a significant amount of people will always say “that’s too high! I don’t want to pay that!”
Antitrust is not about preventing big companies making money. It’s about preventing specific practices by monopolies to restrict the free market and to abuse their users. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton I find morally objectionable with companies as big as Valve and people as rich as Gabe. We might agree on those issues. But this particular Google thing is about something else. And Valve is indeed different to most tech companies in that regard.
If you don’t consider that a company taking billions out of our pockets and putting it in the pockets of a single person abuse then I don’t know what to say.
Hot take: if they aren’t hurting me or others, money wise or not, I don’t care if they have majority market share. In this case it makes sense, they treat their customers right and don’t bully the market.
But they’re hurting you, their market dominance means they don’t have to compete for pricing, the reason Newell is a billionaire is because the games they sell are sold for more than they’re worth.
The devs determine they need to sell X copies at Y$/copy, they then calculate what Valve’s cut will be and add it over Y$
Example: You think you’ll sell a million copy and want to make 10 millions to recoup your cost and make a profit so you need 10$ per. But the truth is that after everyone else gets their cut (publisher, distributor, taxes…) you’re left with about 50% of the sale price going to you, that means your need to sell the game for 20$ to end up with 10$/copy going to you. If everyone else had lower margins and you got 70% of the sale price ending up in your pocket you would need to sell your game for 14.30$ a copy to end up with 10$ going to you. Everyone else in this example are the people who aren’t part of the actual development cost, their margins are huge compared to the amount of work they accomplish, the proof of that is that they’re making billions in profit, profit is revenue - cost, their cost is basically nothing, hosting content and distributing it costs peanuts these days and prices are only going down, so their profit is actually increasing passively over time. Because the devs need to set the price at 20$ instead of 14.30$ you’re paying 5.70$ more for the same product and that 5.70$ is all going into the pockets of people that had nothing to do with actually creating the product you’re purchasing.
You are so lost in the sauce. We’re talking about a company that hosts a video game sales platform, if I feel like they are fucking me, I can go elsewhere, there’s epic, gog, ubishit, ea, xbox, itch, I don’t have to go to steam. I choose to.
If they aren’t fucking me, let them make as much as they want. There are far, FAR bigger fish to fry.
Neither did google. The problem is that this case, from the title stated in another thread, Google are doing anti-competitive shit to make sure they maintain the dominant position. But steam does not practice in anti competitive behaviours (as far as I know anyway). In fact, the competitor can arguably be held to anti competitive behaviour depending on how you spin it.
Steam is currently being sued for anti competitive practices and do we really need to wait until they do bad shit before we start to consider that a single company having a good on 70% of the market isn’t a good thing?
Wtf is with people deciding a monopoly is good because the company hasn’t started enshittifying it yet. It will happen. It’s what monopolies do. Healthy competition is an important part of preventing enshittification.
Steam has no competitors because nobody is competing with them, not because they are forcing nobody to compete with them.
Steam isn’t abusing their dominant position to prevent competition. Other companies could make their own storefront and compete with steam. Nobody does in a way that’s actually comparable to steam.
Steam has a monopoly, but it’s not because steam is actively keeping it that way.
If you have enough control on the market you don’t have to actively try and stop competitors, you’re just the default solution and people automatically turn to you. Walmart doesn’t need to use dirty tactics to compete against mom and pop shops, the day they open people just start going to Walmart instead because they have everything in a single place.
Nobody can because of Steam’s monopoly. You can try to create your own store but you won’t have nearly the same selection of games. Monopolies are bad. Even when they’re companies you like. To be clear, I’m not saying Steam should be broken up, I’m not saying they should lose games to other stores. I’m saying they’re a monopoly, and that is bad because it enables Steam to stagnate or even get worse.
It’s also pretty inarguable imo that Steam has been getting worse. Steam sales used to be events. You’d get multiple huge discounts on AAA games. Now you’re lucky to get 40% off a 6 year old game. And don’t get me started on the UI, which, while fine, hasn’t changed meaningfully in like a decade. There simply is no incentive for Steam to be better. So they’re not. We should consider ourselves lucky that they’re still as good as they are, because they won’t be forever.
And that practice is what? Providing value to the consumer? The thing that MAYBE can be used against them is the clause for selling STEAM KEYS outside of steam. But that is it. Take a look at mindustry, the game is free everywhere else but steam. But that did not violate steam ToS since they didn’t sell the steam keys for less than what is listed on steam.
It’s in front of a judge right now and information is public if you want to know more, and no they’re not getting sued for providing value to the consumer (but don’t worry, they charge you enough that they can provide value AND make Newell a billionaire… so maybe you should be angry about that if you don’t care about the rest.)
Have you read the filings? The complaints are that steam listings for a game have to match the lowest price for the game, that keys can’t be sold for less than the steam listing (I’m not really sure how this is a different thing from the low pricing), and that steam takes too big a cut of the proceeds. That last one is particularly hilarious, in that they are bringing this lawsuit to a court that respects USA business laws, which pointedly do not hold that ‘being too greedy’ is a problem (outside of price-gouging laws, which are not relevant here…)
Other retailers take a smaller cut. But because Steam mandates that the Steam storefront always gets the lowest price, publishers can’t take advantage of that lower cut to offer lower prices. They can only lower the price to something that doesn’t torpedo them with a 30% cut on Steam.
You don’t need to have full control of the market to be considered a monopoly, you just need a big enough share that you can make it sway in the direction that you want, which Steam has. Example: Microsoft is considered a monopoly even though there’s Apple and Linux that get market shares.
I always find it funny how defensive people get when I bring this up about Steam on Lemmy of all places, suddenly people are perfectly ok with the centralization of power in the hands of a single person.
It’s not about market share, it’s about actually using that market share to negatively impact competition. Steam doesn’t have any sort of exclusivity agreements with anyone, nor do they get paid if a customer buys a key on another platform or on the dev’s own website. There’s no anti-competitive behavior here at all, people use Steam because they like the experience more.
There’s a massive difference between anti-competitive behavior and just being a really good option. You don’t get broken up because you’re successful, you get broken up because you’re abusing your dominant market position. I have yet to see any evidence that Valve does this.
Game pricing is still based on then taking a 30% cut so it’s negatively impacting consumers because that’s billions in profit that they make and with their dominance they don’t need to actively take anti competitive measures, they’re the default choice.
It’s like Walmart, they don’t need to actively push mom and pop shops out of the way, they just need to open their doors and wait them out. In theory all they did was offer something great (everything you want in the same place!) but the end result is competition closing their doors.
Where companies with monopolies are found to gain that title by ousting competitors and brutal buyouts and tactics literally every time, Valve exists. Literally. They just exist. Big difference between a monopoly and the best.
Other companies also exist. In fact there are several launchers and two other digital distributors, and several websites, where one can purchase games. There are some things Steam is shit on. The still feels old interface as a broad example. Competitors could push in, like Epic. Instead, they manage to create the next step up from a gold-tainted dung pile, shit on their own launcher or store stability and performance, and create an experience so bad that Steam is able, through the fuckups of their rivals, maintain a market majority.
Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.
I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.
Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.
I agree, sort of. People may be right to point out that it’s not only about a dominant position but also about abusing that market power to lock people in. Still I think our entire platform-economy is a little problematic. People want one-stop-shopping because it’s really convenient, and people tend to go to platforms where others already are. So most people stick with Steam, Spotify, Uber, Whatsapp, etc. I don’t think this has to be a problem, if indeed these platform are in a way neutral, free, not abusing their power. Sometimes these platforms already behave in responsible manner, but there really is no guarantee that this will stay that way. Everything with a dominant position can be enshittified, including Steam. What we need are FOSS decentralized platforms! Platforms where everyone comes together are so important, that they shouldn’t be left to for-profit companies, people should come together in public squares.
Thing is we can’t know for sure they’re not abusing their power… Oh wait, we can in fact!
Game price is based on wanting a return on investment after a certain number of sales, the amount of money needed to make a profit is based on the development cost, every time someone in the distribution chain takes a cut the price increases. Valve takes a 30% cut and that’s enough to have made their owner a billionaire, those billions come from money you and me and all other Steam users spent that we didn’t need to.
It’s the same logic as in any other market, the only difference is that other companies are trading publically so people get angry because their numbers are public and we can easily see that they’re making billions in profit off of us to enrich investors, well with Valve there’s only one investor.
And again, do we need to wait until they start acting in truly awful ways before we act on the fact that they control a majority of the market and are trying to increase their market dominance? Newell could die tomorrow and the company could then be made public and turn to shit, what then? “Dang, we should have done something while we had the chance I guess…”???
do we need to wait until they start acting in truly awful ways before we act on the fact that they control a majority of the market and are trying to increase their market dominance
No I was arguing for exactly the opposite. Let’s not wait, but aim for non-profit decentralized platforms.
No shit. Now do Amazon, apple, meta, Microsoft, Disney and all the food conglomerates. Then it will have been a good start.
They’ve got Amazon in the works
Amazon
Would be nice if we didn’t let them kill off so many other businesses first before doing something about it.
Walmart and telecom too.
Too big to fail financial industry should go first.
oil, pharma… most of all critical aspects of every day life is controlled by oligopolies
“Too big to fail” shouldn’t exist
If it’s too big to fail it should be made small. Any capitalist will tell you capitalism depends on competition.
Unless, you’re suggesting, america might not be capitalist and we treat businesses as if they were socialist.
Do PG&E
I still don’t understand how the Californian government bailed them out when they were bankrupt, yet they were allowed to remain an independent company? Why didn’t the government take full control?
Electricity in cities in the Bay Area that have their own municipal power company (like Palo Alto and Santa Clara) is literally 1/3 the cost of PG&E.
FUUUUUUUUUUUCK PG&E
Fuck them. If there was ever a case to be made for government owned utilities (and like why is that even a debate in the first place?) these assholes would be the poster child.
Palo Alto’s got the right idea - the city runs the electricity, gas, water, sewer, and they also have a city-owned fiber internet provider for businesses (which they want to eventually roll out for residential use too). Services are cheaper than other cities where they contract these out to third-party companies, since they’re running them to benefit residents, not to make money.
They do contract out some things (garbage/recycling/compost is contracted to GreenWaste) but not many.
Because the USA haven’t had the balls to hold corporations responsible for their actions in decades. They can save them from failure, but have no willpower to correct any of their malevolent behaviors.
I really hope this generation is the one that finally changes that trend.
Gotta keep the rich people rich so they can fund my campaign.
It’s not about the balls to hold them responsible, it’s about not biting the hand that feeds you. They don’t want to do anything about it.
Because the governor owns a looot of shares. It’s just basic blatant corruption.
Cable companies too please.
The food companies fly low under the radar. They definitely need a wake up call.
I don’t think they’ll ever do anything serious to apple. That shit is untouchable.
They are. The FTC have already brought antitrust suits against three of the companies you just listed, and you can bet your ass they’re eyeing the rest.
Decades of neoliberalism doesn’t get undone in a single day. This is good news, and if America keeps putting competent people in power we’ll see more of it.
Steam…
Edit: Funny how I was replying to a comment with examples of companies that wish they had 70% of the market under their control yet people didn’t disagree with OP but bringing up Valve? Oh man, Gaben can do no wrong! 70% of the market under the control of a company owned by a single man? No problemo!
You can’t break up steam and improve the market in any particular way. Since they’re not really big on exclusivity agreements, there’s also very little a court order would do to make the market more competitive.
If consumers were more evenly spread around different platforms there would be actual competition to determine prices and margins for the developers. Right now Epic takes a smaller share of the revenues but the price is the same to try and compensate for the smaller number of buyers. With their dominant position it’s pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more (which would require a ridiculous amount of capital), people have their well established habits and won’t move even if the product they’re using isn’t necessarily the best or they’re spending more than they need to.
That’s not what a monopoly is.
Epic had all the money in the world and tons of time (and users) to create a viable alternative. They didn’t fail because valve squeezed them out, they failed because they refuse to improve their product. In fact, it could be said that Epic wanted to become the monopoly themselves. If they spent half as much effort on their product as they do on lawsuits and exclusivity deals, they would have been a viable competitor. But they didn’t. At the end of the day, it sucks to use. Steam does not.
EGS is perfectly usable and in my opinion is better than Steam in some aspects (way less bloat, open the app and your games are right there to launch even if you’re on the storefront), your saying they refuse to improve their product just shows you’re not using it because it’s way better than it was on release.
And yes, Valve has a monopoly, they control enough of the market that it goes where they decide it’s going and they’re the default solution people turn to when they need the services they offer, they’re also working on increasing their reach with streaming on the platform, forums, reviews and so on. If all you need is found on a single platform and it’s the platform that a vast majority is using then what do we call that? That’s right, a monopoly.
Want a similar example? Microsoft is considered to be in a monopolistic position with Windows, yet they have competitors, same with Office, same with Explorer back in the day. Google is a monopoly even though competitors exist.
Fun fact: You can change which page your Steam client opens up to by default. I haven’t seen the store unless I wanted to in years.
Opinions aside, that’s still not the legal definition of a monopoly.
Monopoly: Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service.
Valve does not have exclusive control of the PC gaming market. The EGS funded lawsuit even says that in the docket. They are only suing on the grounds of the keys issue. I don’t disagree with you that when Newell leaves, things COULD change, but you can’t base the present on the possible future. At this time, steam is on “top” because the vast majority of users have voted with their wallet and time. Not because they are engaged in sweeping anti-competitive backdoor dealings. You know, like EGS does.
Well then, by your definition Microsoft never had a monopoly and Google isn’t one either.
You’re reaching because steam makes you seethe for whatever reason.
Betting you have a rage-boner for Firefox too.
I’m guessing you feel this way about any company from the west lmao
Did you read the articles? The judge acknowledged that Google is widely recognized as the best general purpose search engine but that part of why they are used so often is because of Google paying people to make Google the default search option which many people never change.
(1) Many PC gamers simply wait for games to go on sale. Epic buying exclusive agreements isn’t as dominating of a strategy as they think it is; even if it’s expensive.
(2) Steam is the incumbent. You have to be better in order to be worth it to switch. As you mentioned, Epic is lacking in features
(3) Valve has not treated the desktop market the way Apple as treated the app store. Look at how far Epic has taken Apple to court; compared to their biggest rival, Valve
(4) Valve has put in alot of work in other layers; such as making open hardware and contributing to AMD GPU drivers on Linux. They work on the whole platform, even parts they do not directly make money off. This is called investment.
(5) What exactly would you break Steam into being? One app for reviews, another for buying, and another for launching games? Break the development studio into a different company? Even if Epic is throwing around money made from its game engine and games?
If Valve was the company getting the exclusive deals and preventing Epic from selling things then I’d be more inclined to agree with OPs point.
That’s the thing though, with their market share an hypothetical competitor could be better and people still wouldn’t switch, Steam is where their games are, it’s where their friends play, building everything from scratch elsewhere wouldn’t be worth the trouble even if the alternative was better.
Store, development, forums, trading platform, launcher, online gaming services, hardware, streaming integrated into the platform, DRM… Valve has their hands all over the place and there’s a single person at the top of that. Wanna wait until they start becoming bad before considering that maybe it’s not a good thing that they have a hold on 70% of the market? Hell, just the fact that Newell could decide that they’re closing their doors tomorrow and no one has access to their games anymore should be fucking worrying to everyone.
At what seams would you break Steam at? In this day and age those are just app store features. Is there anything you listed Sony, Microsoft or Apple don’t have?
I do understand having a Steam library would make it harder to switch but most of us have a few GOG games and collect Epic free games as well (though, I haven’t even looked at the free Epic games since Christmas).
People even download a launcher like Hero Launcher on the Steamdeck to run games from other stores. We have the freedom to use Steam in tagent with other stores and we do. You can buy a game off GOG and add it to Steam to launch it.
Steam is simply the better product, hands down.
Edit: To prove that I see your point but just don’t agree with it: Here is a quote from an ArsTechnica article about a judge viewing Steam as a monopoly.
Does this judge expect me to buy a game from Epic which is missing features and then pay Valve a fee to contact the developer through Steam? Will Epic cheapen their price by 30% so I can “enable Steam features.” This would be unprecedented. I cannot go to Amazon to return/complain about a product I bought from Walmart.
Their market dominance isn’t because of anticompetitive practices, it’s because of customer-friendly practices. People like it, so people use it.
So? A private company having control of the market is never a good thing, no matter how good they are at the moment because you never know what will happen in the future.
So if people trust a platform it’s hard to build an anti-trust case because the owner has a majority share.
It’s okay if you don’t like them for whatever reason, but comparing them to google, apple and Disney is ignorant at best, dishonest at the very least.
Rethink this stuff before you put yourself up as a reactionary lmao
Alright then, let’s do nothing until Newell dies and they become controlled by someone else that people don’t like as much, maybe you guys will wake up then.
“Let’s wait for them to start doing illegal stuff before we use the law against them.” Yeah, of course.
So let’s wait for the behemoth to really hurt the market enough that we notice it before we do something to prevent it from happening.
And people wonder why the world is turning to shit.
You still have yet tob porpoise any same solutions.
What do you propose they “break up” into?
Say it one more time for the mirror
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Majority also like Google. Like it or not, they still provide the best search engine.
Lol, they absolutely do not. Their search results have turned to shit.
What’s a better alternative? Have tried all major ones except paid ones and I always return to Google. Maybe for basic stuff Duck Duck Go / Bing is fine, but once you start searching for local / non-English stuff, results were underwhelming.
I’ve been using kagi for a few months (6 according to my bank). It is paid. It is great. It’s so good I’ve switched my wife to it since Google was giving her a lot of garbage (she’s a non techie) and she says “it feels like Google used to be. The answers are what I was looking for. I forgot I was using Kagi”
https://searx.space/
My current favorite search engine. Just pick one that’s running out of your country or close to it. Hope it works as well for you as it does for me.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try.
I bought a Kagi subscription within hours of finding the site. They’ll eventually enshittify but they’re very good for now.
I want the answer to be a federated system, like YaCy. Which I tried to set up, and its results make AltaVista look good. Maybe good enough for a corporate intranet, but not the internet at large.
There are lots of articles about how they make their search results worse on purpose for more profit. They alter search queries on the server side to give results for a search which is more aligned with an advertising partner. They inject AI into search results which can be wildly wrong.
Did they fix it? Last I tried it, all I could get was sponsored content and LLM spam.
I use adblock so have no reference point how it looks like without adblock. I assume you would just scroll a bit lower to get actual results?
Same (AdGuard) I meant like I’d consistently get all of the first page of results linking to hyper SEO clickbait sites / AMP links / Adsense affiliates (think multi-page/gallery/click-through articles and low quality content farm sites like CNET, Forbes, Quora, etc) with a smattering of straight up keyword banks, snippet aggregator spam, and chatbot articles full of longwinded made-up nonsense with zero payoff.
Even more annoying was that Google started dumbing down all my searches, regardless of technical detail and specificity, just railroading me into simplistic drivel. Eventually verbatim/quotes syntax stopped working also, and that was the end of google’s usefulness to me.
Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it’s customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call
Funny the things you can do when you don’t have to worry about shareholders.
So because they’re treating you right it’s ok to put 70% of the market in the hands of a single person?
They’re not anti-competitive, that’s the difference. Devs can even sell Steam keys on their own website and take 100% of the profit if they so choose, and there’s absolutely no lock-in.
I’m not sure where the anti-trust is. Having a high marketshare by itself doesn’t mean you’re committing anti-trust, abusing that market position does.
Just having a high market share isn’t the issue. It’s abusing that dominant market position that is.
Valve has been smart enough not to do that. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the like haven’t. In fact, Valve’s competitors have been more anti-competitive than Valve.
ASML, who make EUV machines and other semiconductor tooling, is also in a dominant market position (way more dominant actually). Do you ever see calls to break them up? No. Because they haven’t been abusing their power. They know that if they put a toe out of line, they’ll be in trouble with regulators.
Google and the like have been able to act with impunity because the US protects them, to the detriment of their smaller companies and their citizens.
ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West’s economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn’t be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.
Really? Because they’re part of the giants that determine game prices, pricing is based on everyone that takes a cut along the way, they take 30%, that’s calculated into what games need to sell for, 30% is enough to make them billions in profit, billions in profit is money that came out of our pockets to go in Newell’s pockets so he can own six yachts.
I swear if it was a public company people would be flipping out because their numbers would be public and the profit would be going to investors, but they’re private and they only have one investor the profit goes to do that’s perfectly fine I guess???
30% is the industry standard.
Shit, doesn’t YouTube take like 60%? I think Twitch takes a big chunk too. Gog takes 30%. MS takes 30%. Sony takes 30%. Nintendo takes 30%. Apple takes 30%. GameStop, BestBuy, Amazon, and Walmart all take roughly 30% too.
It’s the industry standard.
And unlike the likes of the Play Store or App store, Valve provides a lot for that 30%.
free cloud sync
free online multiplayer (not a given, look at MS/Sony/Nintendo)
forums
game demos
game recording with some neat features
a VR system
in-home streaming
family game sharing
a review system
a mod distribution platform
dev tools
advertising
online services you can tie into your game
achievements
a cross-platform, userspace anti-cheat solution
notes
backwards compatibility tooling
OS compatibility layers
Linux development
driver development
vast controller support
performance overlays
steam input
the list goes on…
I’m not in love with everything Valve does (loot boxes, micro-transactions 🤢). But it’s undeniable that compared to other companies that take the same (or higher) cut, you get a lot back.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to live in the fantasy world where they only take a 1% cut, but that’s just what it is, a fantasy.
Ok so because it’s the industry standard it’s ok?
How about we focus on the fact that the industry standard makes owners and c-suite billionaires? Do you think people would start hating a company if they cut their share to 10% and prices came down instead of having that extra enrich the few?
Reread my comment. I’m not saying it’s ok because it’s the industry standard, I’m saying it’s tolerable because it’s the industry standard and yet despite their strong market position, they still consciously provide a good value.
And let’s not pretend that even if everyone switched to a 10% margin (assuming that would even be profitable), people wouldn’t then complain about 10% being too high. It’s like taxes - no matter what it’s set as, a significant amount of people will always say “that’s too high! I don’t want to pay that!”
Antitrust is not about preventing big companies making money. It’s about preventing specific practices by monopolies to restrict the free market and to abuse their users. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton I find morally objectionable with companies as big as Valve and people as rich as Gabe. We might agree on those issues. But this particular Google thing is about something else. And Valve is indeed different to most tech companies in that regard.
If you don’t consider that a company taking billions out of our pockets and putting it in the pockets of a single person abuse then I don’t know what to say.
You say that like your only option is to buy games from steam.
There are many other online stores you can use. Sorry you don’t like the most popular/oldest/one that reflects the wishes of the consumer the most.
Hot take: if they aren’t hurting me or others, money wise or not, I don’t care if they have majority market share. In this case it makes sense, they treat their customers right and don’t bully the market.
This simply isn’t the fight.
But they’re hurting you, their market dominance means they don’t have to compete for pricing, the reason Newell is a billionaire is because the games they sell are sold for more than they’re worth.
You know Valve doesn’t set the prices right? The developers do
The devs determine they need to sell X copies at Y$/copy, they then calculate what Valve’s cut will be and add it over Y$
Example: You think you’ll sell a million copy and want to make 10 millions to recoup your cost and make a profit so you need 10$ per. But the truth is that after everyone else gets their cut (publisher, distributor, taxes…) you’re left with about 50% of the sale price going to you, that means your need to sell the game for 20$ to end up with 10$/copy going to you. If everyone else had lower margins and you got 70% of the sale price ending up in your pocket you would need to sell your game for 14.30$ a copy to end up with 10$ going to you. Everyone else in this example are the people who aren’t part of the actual development cost, their margins are huge compared to the amount of work they accomplish, the proof of that is that they’re making billions in profit, profit is revenue - cost, their cost is basically nothing, hosting content and distributing it costs peanuts these days and prices are only going down, so their profit is actually increasing passively over time. Because the devs need to set the price at 20$ instead of 14.30$ you’re paying 5.70$ more for the same product and that 5.70$ is all going into the pockets of people that had nothing to do with actually creating the product you’re purchasing.
How is that different than selling anything else anywhere? You’ve picked a strange hill to die on, and your reasoning doesn’t even fit.
You don’t get to decide for me who I think is or isn’t hurting me, I do.
With these takes, what I really want to know is: Who hurt you?
Oh so you believe that margins high enough that the owner is a billionaire don’t hurt your wallet?
You are so lost in the sauce. We’re talking about a company that hosts a video game sales platform, if I feel like they are fucking me, I can go elsewhere, there’s epic, gog, ubishit, ea, xbox, itch, I don’t have to go to steam. I choose to.
If they aren’t fucking me, let them make as much as they want. There are far, FAR bigger fish to fry.
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Steam isn’t actually a monopoly in a meaningful way
Neither did google. The problem is that this case, from the title stated in another thread, Google are doing anti-competitive shit to make sure they maintain the dominant position. But steam does not practice in anti competitive behaviours (as far as I know anyway). In fact, the competitor can arguably be held to anti competitive behaviour depending on how you spin it.
Steam is currently being sued for anti competitive practices and do we really need to wait until they do bad shit before we start to consider that a single company having a good on 70% of the market isn’t a good thing?
Isn’t that only about the 30% fee?
Steam provides a lot of value for that 30% fee, more than Apple does.
Wtf is with people deciding a monopoly is good because the company hasn’t started enshittifying it yet. It will happen. It’s what monopolies do. Healthy competition is an important part of preventing enshittification.
Steam has no competitors because nobody is competing with them, not because they are forcing nobody to compete with them.
Steam isn’t abusing their dominant position to prevent competition. Other companies could make their own storefront and compete with steam. Nobody does in a way that’s actually comparable to steam.
Steam has a monopoly, but it’s not because steam is actively keeping it that way.
If you have enough control on the market you don’t have to actively try and stop competitors, you’re just the default solution and people automatically turn to you. Walmart doesn’t need to use dirty tactics to compete against mom and pop shops, the day they open people just start going to Walmart instead because they have everything in a single place.
Nobody can because of Steam’s monopoly. You can try to create your own store but you won’t have nearly the same selection of games. Monopolies are bad. Even when they’re companies you like. To be clear, I’m not saying Steam should be broken up, I’m not saying they should lose games to other stores. I’m saying they’re a monopoly, and that is bad because it enables Steam to stagnate or even get worse.
It’s also pretty inarguable imo that Steam has been getting worse. Steam sales used to be events. You’d get multiple huge discounts on AAA games. Now you’re lucky to get 40% off a 6 year old game. And don’t get me started on the UI, which, while fine, hasn’t changed meaningfully in like a decade. There simply is no incentive for Steam to be better. So they’re not. We should consider ourselves lucky that they’re still as good as they are, because they won’t be forever.
The day Newell leaves people will be eating their words.
Doubt it. Stay mad though, this shit is hilarious.
Gonna go buy a few dozen steam games to help pad Gabe’s wallet for making such a great platform.
Nope, about including price fixing clauses.
The 30% fee is another issue entirely.
The price fixing clauses are about steam keys being sold off-platform
Ah, gotcha. Thanks.
And that practice is what? Providing value to the consumer? The thing that MAYBE can be used against them is the clause for selling STEAM KEYS outside of steam. But that is it. Take a look at mindustry, the game is free everywhere else but steam. But that did not violate steam ToS since they didn’t sell the steam keys for less than what is listed on steam.
It’s in front of a judge right now and information is public if you want to know more, and no they’re not getting sued for providing value to the consumer (but don’t worry, they charge you enough that they can provide value AND make Newell a billionaire… so maybe you should be angry about that if you don’t care about the rest.)
Have you read the filings? The complaints are that steam listings for a game have to match the lowest price for the game, that keys can’t be sold for less than the steam listing (I’m not really sure how this is a different thing from the low pricing), and that steam takes too big a cut of the proceeds. That last one is particularly hilarious, in that they are bringing this lawsuit to a court that respects USA business laws, which pointedly do not hold that ‘being too greedy’ is a problem (outside of price-gouging laws, which are not relevant here…)
This is an issue because of Steam’s 30% cut.
Other retailers take a smaller cut. But because Steam mandates that the Steam storefront always gets the lowest price, publishers can’t take advantage of that lower cut to offer lower prices. They can only lower the price to something that doesn’t torpedo them with a 30% cut on Steam.
You know anyone can be sued for anything right?
Being sued doesn’t mean a damn thing, the case judgement is what matters.
You don’t need to have full control of the market to be considered a monopoly, you just need a big enough share that you can make it sway in the direction that you want, which Steam has. Example: Microsoft is considered a monopoly even though there’s Apple and Linux that get market shares.
I always find it funny how defensive people get when I bring this up about Steam on Lemmy of all places, suddenly people are perfectly ok with the centralization of power in the hands of a single person.
It’s not about market share, it’s about actually using that market share to negatively impact competition. Steam doesn’t have any sort of exclusivity agreements with anyone, nor do they get paid if a customer buys a key on another platform or on the dev’s own website. There’s no anti-competitive behavior here at all, people use Steam because they like the experience more.
There’s a massive difference between anti-competitive behavior and just being a really good option. You don’t get broken up because you’re successful, you get broken up because you’re abusing your dominant market position. I have yet to see any evidence that Valve does this.
Game pricing is still based on then taking a 30% cut so it’s negatively impacting consumers because that’s billions in profit that they make and with their dominance they don’t need to actively take anti competitive measures, they’re the default choice.
It’s like Walmart, they don’t need to actively push mom and pop shops out of the way, they just need to open their doors and wait them out. In theory all they did was offer something great (everything you want in the same place!) but the end result is competition closing their doors.
And we shouldn’t be shutting down/breakup up either if that’s all they’re doing. Being successful isn’t a crime.
Walmart has had multiple cases of predatory pricing accusations and has completely pulled out of Germany due to it. Criticism of Valve is: their service is too good? I’m really not seeing the anti-trust w/ Valve (here’s a related Wikipedia article for Valve), but I am seeing it for Walmart.
Perhaps we simply disagree?
Where companies with monopolies are found to gain that title by ousting competitors and brutal buyouts and tactics literally every time, Valve exists. Literally. They just exist. Big difference between a monopoly and the best.
Other companies also exist. In fact there are several launchers and two other digital distributors, and several websites, where one can purchase games. There are some things Steam is shit on. The still feels old interface as a broad example. Competitors could push in, like Epic. Instead, they manage to create the next step up from a gold-tainted dung pile, shit on their own launcher or store stability and performance, and create an experience so bad that Steam is able, through the fuckups of their rivals, maintain a market majority.
Huh.
Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.
I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.
Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.
Yep wait until Gabe retires and Microsoft buys it.
I agree, sort of. People may be right to point out that it’s not only about a dominant position but also about abusing that market power to lock people in. Still I think our entire platform-economy is a little problematic. People want one-stop-shopping because it’s really convenient, and people tend to go to platforms where others already are. So most people stick with Steam, Spotify, Uber, Whatsapp, etc. I don’t think this has to be a problem, if indeed these platform are in a way neutral, free, not abusing their power. Sometimes these platforms already behave in responsible manner, but there really is no guarantee that this will stay that way. Everything with a dominant position can be enshittified, including Steam. What we need are FOSS decentralized platforms! Platforms where everyone comes together are so important, that they shouldn’t be left to for-profit companies, people should come together in public squares.
Thing is we can’t know for sure they’re not abusing their power… Oh wait, we can in fact!
Game price is based on wanting a return on investment after a certain number of sales, the amount of money needed to make a profit is based on the development cost, every time someone in the distribution chain takes a cut the price increases. Valve takes a 30% cut and that’s enough to have made their owner a billionaire, those billions come from money you and me and all other Steam users spent that we didn’t need to.
It’s the same logic as in any other market, the only difference is that other companies are trading publically so people get angry because their numbers are public and we can easily see that they’re making billions in profit off of us to enrich investors, well with Valve there’s only one investor.
And again, do we need to wait until they start acting in truly awful ways before we act on the fact that they control a majority of the market and are trying to increase their market dominance? Newell could die tomorrow and the company could then be made public and turn to shit, what then? “Dang, we should have done something while we had the chance I guess…”???
No I was arguing for exactly the opposite. Let’s not wait, but aim for non-profit decentralized platforms.
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SHHHH!!!
Monopolies and authoritarians aren’t bad as long as people like them! Hadn’t you heard?
Join a decentralized platform because fuck Spez, defend a centralized platform because yay Gaben!