When I think of monopolies, I think more of telecomms, of Wal-Mart and their selling at a lose to kill off competition, Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software, and other examples. Unless I’m missing something, Steam didn’t do that, they were just first in the game and built a better product than the others did. Offering a better service that attracted customers. Now do I think it’s too large and would welcome competition, absolutely. But monopolies typically aren’t though just having larger market share with a better product.
If Steam did something like oh, pay developers/publishers to be exclusive to their platform, then yeah you’d have a good argument there.
Gabe Newell is still a billionaire and thusly a piece of shit. Just that one the list of billionaires he’s on the lower end of ones needing rectifying.
Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software,
Nope. MS was declared a monopoly because of marketshare and therefore had to add support for competing software.
Offering a better service that attracted customers.
Monopoly is from marketshare. How it is obtained doesn’t matter. Once you are the biggest company you need to have restrictions placed on you so that smaller companies have a chance to compete.
Point two, it’s if they also hamper competition or capabilities to compete. Steam, as shown in this thread and how it operates, hasn’t done that. Now you can give a good thumb of the nose at Epic for their paid exclusives, but that didn’t get them anywhere toward dominating a market. Also, competition exists in various forms as well. It’s not monopolized.
I hate monopolies and no friend of big companies, but come at them with the right cudgel, not made up dross.
It’s funny because last I heard this argument in real life it came down straight from GameStop corporate who were afraid (this was like 20 years ago when I was a gm) of Steam so they went hard on crying about Steam being a monopoly and bad for gamers then banned Steam games from the store.
Fuck all billionaires. Steam is not a concern I have ever, though.
Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.
Now, if Steam was just one amongst many small games stores, the gamedev could just ignore that, but Steam has such much of the Market of digital game sales that gamedevs cannot ignore having their games taken down from the Steam store.
Oh, by the way, this applies to Indies as much as it does to the rest, so we’re not just talking about widelly hated AAA publishers here.
Steam absolutelly is using their dominant market position to shaft both gamers and game devs, including Indies.
Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.
You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.
(…)
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
To me, that reads that this is only about selling steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like humblebundle for example), developers are free to sell non-steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like GOG or epic) for cheaper.
So all of the major ecommerce players do this. I’ll get banned from Amazon if i sell my own products i manufacture on my own website cheaper than Amazon.
So we get around it with a different sku.
That’s all you have to do on Steam.
Now I’d love for this to not be the case but no way anyone wins this case against Steam because it’s not about Steam. It’s about all of ecommerce, and they pay (bezos etc) the fucking president off.
Valve bans developers from selling their games cheaper on other platforms. So if those services want to take a smaller cut than valve does, so Devs can sell their games cheaper on their platform, they can’t or they lose access to steam, by far the biggest platform.
You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.
(…)
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
That, imho, is quite reasonable, because Valve provides these keys to the developer free of charge, i.e. the developer does not have to pay 30% commission on these keys.
Developers are free to sell their games on other storefronts (like Epic or GOG) for a lower price than they do on steam, permanently. Or at least, I was not able to find such a clause in their docs, the only clause that talks about something like a price parity I could find on the keys page, i.e. selling steam copies of the game on other storefronts.
When I think of monopolies, I think more of telecomms, of Wal-Mart and their selling at a lose to kill off competition, Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software, and other examples. Unless I’m missing something, Steam didn’t do that, they were just first in the game and built a better product than the others did. Offering a better service that attracted customers. Now do I think it’s too large and would welcome competition, absolutely. But monopolies typically aren’t though just having larger market share with a better product.
If Steam did something like oh, pay developers/publishers to be exclusive to their platform, then yeah you’d have a good argument there.
Steam has had monopolistic policies. There just so benign compared to other monopolies of the current time, that they seem pedestrian.
Im not anti steam, but i try to never be pro any company.
Gabe Newell is still a billionaire and thusly a piece of shit. Just that one the list of billionaires he’s on the lower end of ones needing rectifying.
Nope. MS was declared a monopoly because of marketshare and therefore had to add support for competing software.
Monopoly is from marketshare. How it is obtained doesn’t matter. Once you are the biggest company you need to have restrictions placed on you so that smaller companies have a chance to compete.
Nope on Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v./_Microsoft_Corp. It was restricting the web browser market.
Point two, it’s if they also hamper competition or capabilities to compete. Steam, as shown in this thread and how it operates, hasn’t done that. Now you can give a good thumb of the nose at Epic for their paid exclusives, but that didn’t get them anywhere toward dominating a market. Also, competition exists in various forms as well. It’s not monopolized.
I hate monopolies and no friend of big companies, but come at them with the right cudgel, not made up dross.
It’s funny because last I heard this argument in real life it came down straight from GameStop corporate who were afraid (this was like 20 years ago when I was a gm) of Steam so they went hard on crying about Steam being a monopoly and bad for gamers then banned Steam games from the store.
Fuck all billionaires. Steam is not a concern I have ever, though.
Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.
Now, if Steam was just one amongst many small games stores, the gamedev could just ignore that, but Steam has such much of the Market of digital game sales that gamedevs cannot ignore having their games taken down from the Steam store.
Oh, by the way, this applies to Indies as much as it does to the rest, so we’re not just talking about widelly hated AAA publishers here.
Steam absolutelly is using their dominant market position to shaft both gamers and game devs, including Indies.
Which is why simping for Steam is so, so sad.
Does anyone have a source on that? I couldn’t find that clause in their docs, all I could find that is in this: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
To me, that reads that this is only about selling steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like humblebundle for example), developers are free to sell non-steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like GOG or epic) for cheaper.
So all of the major ecommerce players do this. I’ll get banned from Amazon if i sell my own products i manufacture on my own website cheaper than Amazon.
So we get around it with a different sku.
That’s all you have to do on Steam.
Now I’d love for this to not be the case but no way anyone wins this case against Steam because it’s not about Steam. It’s about all of ecommerce, and they pay (bezos etc) the fucking president off.
Valve bans developers from selling their games cheaper on other platforms. So if those services want to take a smaller cut than valve does, so Devs can sell their games cheaper on their platform, they can’t or they lose access to steam, by far the biggest platform.
This is blatant monopolistic bullshit.
I’ve just checked their steamworks partner documentation. This only applies to steam keys.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
That, imho, is quite reasonable, because Valve provides these keys to the developer free of charge, i.e. the developer does not have to pay 30% commission on these keys.
Developers are free to sell their games on other storefronts (like Epic or GOG) for a lower price than they do on steam, permanently. Or at least, I was not able to find such a clause in their docs, the only clause that talks about something like a price parity I could find on the keys page, i.e. selling steam copies of the game on other storefronts.