Valve is a “natural monopoly”.
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I agree in principle but all the world is grey and “enemy of my enemy” and all that.
The actual monopoly posing the most threat is Microsoft and Windows. Valve knows that they are the underdog. So Valve supports Linux and Open Source and supports it like a non-monopolist would (because they are fighting the Windows monopoly). We all benefit from their efforts.
Zooming in, we benefit from a strong Valve because their strength becomes our strength (for now).
Zooming out, I agree that Valve’s position as the de facto App Store for games makes them dangerous. At some point, they may become a bigger problem than Microsoft. That is not today, in my view, but we need to be mindful. Valve is not our friend. But Valve is a better friend than Microsoft.
I don't care about the developer experience, clearly the things Valve wants are acceptable because developers keep accepting it.
Valve is a private company dedicated to the customer. If that changes one day, my opinion will change.
If other companies want a slice of the pie they can offer a competitive service. But they don't
I like cheap games, i prefer a situation where I can pay less.
I like all my games being on one account.
Honestly, the people who whine about Steam should go be mad about a real problem.
You might be "pretty sure" but you're wrong. The people who wrote our carefully thought out antitrust laws didn't just go with the first definition that came to mind.
ITT: people who don't know the legal definition of a monopoly, and are going off the Hasbro definition.
But don't worry fellow gamers, the Trump administration would never allow the FTC to enforce antitrust law.
That is a very shortsighted and egoistic view. Market dominance brought us Google (ubersurveillance), Apple (e-waste production galore), Microsoft, Oracle, Shell, a bunch of "AAA" studios that set the standards for treatment of developers and other staff, and much more.
As a consumer, I want more than just a cheap product. Looking at the price alone is literally a one dimensional view of a complex problem. For example, back in the olden days you could also say "I got cheap cotton" and completely ignore that it was picked by slaves.
As a consumer that is a good thing for me.
Guys, steam is a corporation. They aren't your friends or anything. Stop defending them without doing research. Market dominance is not a good thing, whichever way you slice it.
Steam forced publishers to ensure that the cheapest price for their game would be on steam. No other marketplace was allowed to have a cheaper price. If that isn't anticompetitive, I dont know what is.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for a GOG Linux client, a Uplay Linux client, a Linux client from Epic etc.
One could argue Steam is a case of monopoly that is mostly "caused" because the users keep choosing it even though there are plenty of options to buy from. But, as you pointed out, most of those options don't offer the quality of service Steam does, even the ones that can financially invest to bring them on par, it really feels like they don't want to. Like Ubisoft store is shit, but people have to download it because their game only works through it even when you buy from Steam
Under what definition of the word?
I didn't realize that people choosing 1 option out of several is what defined a monopoly. I'm pretty sure it's when there is no other choice but to use that 1 thing.
Devs want to release their game on as many platforms as possible, but your game is always somewhere in the steam ecosystem in the backend.
Uh, interesting take seeing as how they could just host a website to distribute, or go through a site like itch.io.
From the article:
That's according to a new whitepaper from PC distribution platform Rokky titled 'The State of PC Game Distribution.'
Oh, and they aren't biased at all, I'm sure.
From the referenced paper:
88% of studios say Steam accounts for over 75% of their revenue. 72% feel Steam effectively exists as a monopoly and 53% are concerned about their level of reliance on that single platform.
48% have distributed a title to the Epic Games Store, 30% to marketplaces such as G2A and Kinguin, 38% to e-stores such as Fanatical or Humble Bundle, 10% have distributed with GOG, and 8% with itch.io.
I'm not going to make an account to read their paper, but I'm dubious about the methodology, and they don't seem to understand the definition of the word 'monopoly', when they list so many alternatives in the summary.
And a cherry on top from the blurb on the Rokky site showing in search results:
Rokky has acquired ChinaPlay, unlocking access to over 1M Chinese gamers for global publishers.
Steam being the most ethical and practical choice is not a monopoly.
These devs aren't lining up to release their games on the Epic store or itch.io, they want their games on the marketplace where most of the users shop, and the users aren't locked into steam either, they just prefer it.
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A popup is a bit much for me. I would prefer it at the top of the page in 40 size bold font.
Yes! The world needs more things like this. Is this in the chrome store?
have been playing this with some friends. runs a bit heavy (substantially more so than peak, for example), though offers more in the way of gfx fidelity settings.
It runs pretty poorly overall for how the game is presented (this is with granite ridge 3d + nv48xtx), but works perfectly well given the nature of the game on Fedora 42 😊🥰
chug ur beers, hack on yer darts and winch your way home!
Doesn't mean they were bad.
Just means the market is oversaturated :/
The market situation is really difficult, unless you are really really lucky. We've continued with a college project and eventually managed to release a hand-drawn coop top-down shooter, around 2 hours of story-based gameplay, that was locally pretty successful as far as marketing goes - we were in local national television, have several "best indie game" awards from conferences, even including Czech Game of the Year in student category. We had czech streamers playing the game, had reviews and even were featured in a Microsoft article about student gamedev, and we were featured in the New and Noteworthy on Steam for quite a bit.
We've eventually managed to get around 6000 wishlists, and the reception was generally positive.
After almost half a year after realease, we have only dozens of sales.
We don't have any investors we own money to, and never really made it for profit, but it is still difficult to see 6 years of your work that you though was going pretty well end up like this. I'm not really surprised, because it is local-multiplayer only story based game (although Steam Remote works), which will limit the target audience size by quite a bit, but I definitely won't be ever making a game where I expect that it will sell, and rather focus on smaller experiements, gamejams, and making games for making games sake.
Tying money into your gamedev is a recipe for disappointment.
The best thing I ever done in relation to my gamedev dream/career was to make sure I don't ever get into a situation, where my livelygood depends on the art/games I make. That's a recipe for disapointment.
It doesn't matter if it's only working in gamedev instead of general software development, because that's where you get way less money for basically the same code-monkey crunching Jira tickets job, only there's now a bunch of exec exploiting your passion and underpaying you, or if it's more bold attempt to save up money and be able to afford to make a game on my own, because then you have to sell it, and that sucks if your livelyhood is on the line.
The best course of action I could come up with is to just go work to a generic corporate in software development/cybersecurity, get a part time job (which will get you basically the same money as fulltime in a gamedev company), and use the free time for my own personal gamedev projects that I don't have to tie in any way to my income. Finding a comunity of similarly minded students or art collectives also helps.
I've mostly given up on larger projects, because that exactly a ton more work, and now focus on a short gamejams here and there (usually two to three days, a week or two max). Being extremely limited by time means that the project usually fits into my short attention span, I can experiment with the obscurest of game designs, and you get to meet cool people, especially when the gamejam is onsite. So, if you're at all interrested in trying out gamedev, I highly recommend looking into those - it will take a weekend of your time, and if it doesn't work or isn't fun for you, then you won't loose much.