Madiator's CornerStudy finds 72% of Developers View Steam as Monopoly [from the overall pool, 75% of respondents were senior managers]
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alessandrosteamdeckhq.com/news/pc-game-distribution-devel…
It surprised me that only 10% had tried selling their games on GOG. I guess the thought of going DRM-free was scarier than the monopoly of Steam.
Yeah, of course it would. Senior Manager position is something that basically only exists for bigger studios. From the 306 developers interviewed, probably only a small part are indie developers.
I mean, they’re not really wrong. Valve has a monopoly on game distribution the same way that Google has a monopoly on Internet search. Alternatives exist, but they aren’t really competing with Steam.
Valve has so far been pretty pro-consumer which is how they got to where they are, but yhat doesn’t really change the fact that they essentially get to set the rules for digital distribution of games.
It’s also a big risk, as they could always enshittify. It’s a good platform now, but if Gabe dies or decides to give up his leadership position, that could all change very quickly.
Yeah, the day Gabe leaves is going to be a sad day for gaming, because Steam is probably gonna get real shitty real quick. I’m sure some finance-minded jackasses will do their best to maximize short-term profit and fly the whole ecosystem into the ground at Mach 3.
As long as it remains privately owned, it should be OK. The day shares go public, god forbid, will be the beginning of the end.
Thats not true. Privately owned firms tend to be really bad because they don’t have a feduciary duty to long term value. They suck everything dry. Private equity is the reason why daycare costs so much yet the daycare workers make minimum wage.
Steam just happens to be fine under private ownership because it makes enough profit for Gabe to be satisfied.
Privately owned is not the same thing as private equity. https://irely.com/private-equity-or-privately-owned-does-it-matter/
The first sentence
This article seems to be about the ethos of private equity. Legally they’re nearly identical.
Gross oversimplification of Private vs Public. We are really taking about three kinds of ownership models, if arguing in good faith.
The people that are invested in the company, usually the people that built it, are at the helm.
The people that built it took a payout from Private Equity who now have ownership stake, and who now set the growth agenda.
The compant is now public, and given to the irrational whims if the ENTIRE marketplace, while at the same time primarily being at the whims of the board and the largest few investor stakeholders.
Steam has largely existed exclusively in the first category. So have most of the oldest businesses in the planet, which are often family-owned and maintained operations across generations.
You say that as if publicly traded firms do
Neither do publicly traded companies. All they are required to do is make money for shareholders, and most of them push for short-term value
The profits are taken away from the trading price, yes
Although it still helps the long term price
Thats PE firms, not the same as private owned companies. THERE WAS only one istance of a hybrid of PE and private owned sitaution, SEARS.
How exactly are they different?
Gamers have good reason to love Valve for Steam alone – not even accounting for their amazing games. They really do have the best gamer-oriented platform, and seemingly they care about gamers. I think they’ve done a lot to advance gaming on linux as well which is much appreciated.
But, at least the way I see it, they still extract rents from game devs to an almost feudal degree.
Side note: It’s pretty funny that for a while Valve had Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis on staff to analyze spontaneously emerging markets for digital items on Steam – and he went on to write about the phenomenon above in his recent book Technofeudalism.
Edit: formatting
Really? Has Valve abused their position to specifically further entrench their monopoly or other anti-consumer behavior?
There was a time I would have agreed with that comparison but Google has sucked for a while.
So… not developers, but businessmen.
I read this as senior managers at valve..
First line of the article seems fairly contradictory to that.
Wait now I’m even more confused
There’s nothing in this article that suggests that they polled more than just senior managers.
Maybe they tried to target only senior managers but were only 75% successful.
Also, the conflict of interest is apparent in the first 4 words of your quote, which explains why they picked such a weird study population.
Yeah, who do you think is best equipped to examine the sales and financials?
From what I’ve seen and heard, probably not businessmen.
Irrelevant - the title and graphic says “developers”.
Unless games become something we truly own, steam is going to stay dominant. It’s more like a utility than a storefront. If you want to remove the dominance of steam you need to force a way to move libraries of games to other platforms.
Steam also got their monopoly the honest way by simply being the most consumer friendly option.
Unsurprising that they find this, since that’s what their business is about.
Nailed it, this is an ad for their company, that’s all the poll is, and of course it backs up the purpose of the company, almost like they set out from the beginning to create a poll with the results they wanted. Once they did that, they fired up their email (or hired a PR company) and spammed every news outlet they could to get them to cover. Steamdeckhq was dumb enough to take the bait, literally advertising this company for free, and OP continued that idiocy by posting here.
Turns out if you invest in making your platform not suck it ends up paying dividends. Figure it out dumbfucks.
Valve has a huge amount of good will to burn and the cynical side of me is waiting for the day they start.
Gabe won’t live forever. I guess we have until then
It’s a monopoly that benefits the consumer.
It could easily not be a monopoly if any other company was dedicated to making as good of a customer experience.
If only all monopolies were so user-positive.
I suspect what’s unique in valve’s case is that they don’t have investors and board members and other stakeholders to lead them toward short-term profit maximization.
I dread the day where GabeN is leaving valve
meh, IDK. it won’t change the basic facts of the company, there will still be no stakeholders.
Depends. Whoever will follow up, can charge the company into a public one
certainly possible. I just think Gabe isn’t the only Gabe who works at valve.
All monopolies come into being super user-positive: it’s the moment they need to make money that shit hits the fan.
Is: Google Chrome is an overly appreciate, open source, web browser… then they came to shut down ad blocker “we gotta got +80% web browser share, what are you gonna do about it?”
Remember when Ubisoft came crawling back to Steam?
It’s only a monopoly in that it’s so much more popular than everything else that’s come along, and the main reason for that is because it’s better than competitors. Most others are just publisher stores, and almost all have functionality that users disagree with.
In the OP article, the game distribution platform Rokky is also apparently a publisher store, having recently bought the rights to distribute Chinese games in the west.
I agree. There are other stores you can get your games from, that never got mentioned in this piece. I personally love GOG for that purpose. There aren’t many new games in there but there are big and day one releases
Yes if GOG is an option I go for that.
I avoided signing up for years because I thought it would lead to us only owning a revokable digital license to every new game. Oh how the turn tables.
*Oh, how the turn tables turn.
I laugh when i see this shit.
Imagine creating a platform which is so feature rich, and costs nothing for consumers to use, that other distributors want to legally force you to separate it from your store so they have a chance to sell the consumer the same game, for the same price (or more), but on “an equal playing field”.
I feel like steam entered the market for online distribution pretty early. It initially started as a way for valve to update their own games and morphed into a digital distribution platform. They have had way more time to generate good will. My experiences have been very positive with steam, why would I leave a platform that works for me, to go to other companies that have already fucked me as a consumer prior to releasing digital storefronts? If the wagon ain’t broke don’t fix it.
They’re a functional monopoly in my case since I’m on Linux. GOG is the main competitor for my money.
Valve is “de facto” monopoly, bit the actual monopoly potential is in Microsoft hands.
Microsoft is for PC gaming industry what Google is for the web browser one.
Sure, there may be other cool web browsers, but it’s Google that (through Android base) decide whic web browser will be delivered with the next billions of Android mobile device: some elderly people on smartphone don’t even know what is a web browser ("oh, you mean when I Google? I don’t know: I just Google").
All future new PC will be sold with Microsoft Store and Xbox junk ware: Microsoft has been exceptionally shitty for not being the actual monopoly in the PC gaming industry. But that’s a very feeble protection: break Valve business is just a mandatory “security update” away to happen.
They can break Steam little by little (such as suggested by Tim Sweeney) or just a big blow by sheer monopolized manipulation (such as Google not allowing adblockers to chrome to feed their advertising business)
Microsoft tried to flip the switch years ago to kill anything outside the Microsoft store. That’s when steam released the original steam machines. Combined with general negative response to the messaging Microsoft has backed off, but they absolutely want to do it still.
They never tried to kill anything outside the Microsoft store. That’s just what Tim Sweeney and developers got fearful of and made a big fuss about (not saying it’s not worth making a fuss about, but they never announced they would do it). Microsoft did introduce more limited versions of windows that had sideloading disabled by default, but these were low cost versions of windows generally aimed at children and grandparents / non tech people, not at their gamer user base.
They absolutely were heading that direction with both windows and Xbox until the massive backlash from the public forced them to tone down their plans. It’s still the same company that tried to kill used games on consoles, and they basically have with the creation of game pass. Valve built an escape hatch to Linux for gaming, which has forced them to be a bit nicer on the PC front, but that’s not a sign of Microsoft being good.
Lol, they didn’t try to kill used games on console, when they announced the Xbox One they also announced that you would be able to digitally sell and transfer your games licenses and share you digital library with friends.
Gamers didn’t hear that though, and then those plans got scrapped when they had to rework everything before launch.
How’d they get their polling pool? Sitting outside the Valve corporate office?
What makes Steam so compelling for consumers is that it’s more than just a digital storefront and launcher. They’ve expanded into so many different areas: Steam Input, Steam Remote Play, Steam Friends, Steam Workshop, Proton, Steam Marketplace, etc.
There is so much they do that it’s not really just a store anymore – it’s an all-in-one platform. Most competitors do not come close to equal in any of these features; they usually just have basic launchers and maybe decent friend systems.
In my opinion, GOG is the best competitor yet because of their DRM-free installers and GOG Galaxy on windows which allowed you to have all your games in one place.
They really need to split all those things off.
Are they a store? A launcher? A forum?
They should pick one thing and let other people do the others.
When you buy something digital, since it’s expensive, you want an assurance that the platform would honor your access for many years.
Valve has the best chance of that.
Technically, I’d say that GOG does, as you can just download and back up all the installers for the games. Wouldn’t even matter if the company went bankrupt or even if the entire internet died completely. You could still install and play the games just fine.
Is it a monopoly though. Monopolies are there to protect the consumer, not really the seller. A developer does not need to use steam at all. I really don’t think steam can control the pricing like that. Like, if steam started to raise prices on people buying the games, then I feel like people would still jump ship. Places like gog and itch.io exist. There are plenty of game stores as well, Microsoft, Nintendo, ea.
The problem developers have is they feel if they make a PC game, that they have to put it on steam and no other platform or they won’t make money. But the developer still has choices and I feel like steam is pretty reasonable with their cut and the tools they offer developers. A developer can even sell their game on a different platform at the same time they sell it on steam. They can even sell steam keys on their own website if they wanted to.
To call steam a monopoly is a bit of a stretch. People still have plenty of choices and steam isn’t circle jerking their consumers.
Bullshit. There are many other PC games stores and launchers. Only reason they don’t have lot of users is because they are just not very good. In my view, Valve is not actively trying to establish any monopoly, their competition is mostly incompetent, especially EGS. Of course, I understand that if devs want their games to succeed, they have to play by Valve’s rules, but let’s face it, that’s where customers are. This is not by some trickery of Valve. It’s because Valve happens to be very pro-consumer. So, I don’t agree with the assertion that Steam is a monopoly.
Epic games store could have been great and yet, Epic’s disdain for gamers has caused it to fail. Now EGS is just a glorified Fortnite launcher for the most part.
I am not saying that Steam or even Valve is perfect. They are not. They are just leagues better than their competition.
This study has a chance of being reasonable, but this article is junk. No word on methodology. I’m sure(/s) that the 306 managers aren’t skewed because they’re known by a non-steam platform.
The problem with this “anti-monopoly” rhetoric is that players want to play on the same platform as everyone else.
In one sense yes they are a monopoly. But there are alternative game stores. However Valve has earned their cut of money by actually trying to make a platform that works for game developers, game players and themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, they have a high risk of turning bad and extorting the market they have captured. But the truth is that every equally or greater sized competitor (Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Epic) has already skipped to the extortion part of the cycle and Valve simply hasn’t, and hasn’t really expressed any intention to do that. Being a privately owned company, Valve is allowed to sit back, enjoy the money they do make and not have to constantly ask for more, and develop what the staff feel like making without strict deadlines.
The smaller competitors are still great even if not as feature filled (GOG, itch) and you should support them too. So while I reject that Valve is the big bad, I also reject that Valve could never enshittify. My position is that Valve has earned a trust no one else has (even itch had to cave to Credit Card companies), and that trust is Valve’s to break.
Steam is the reason I was able to get away from windows without having to give up a lot of games (and probably would need to do annoying troubleshooting for the ones that do work, since most of the compatibility issues I have seen were because the game tried to run natively instead of via proton).
news are suppose to have new information
It’s a free market, right? Customers choosing what they prefer and all that? And then eventually the one that provides the best price-for-service ratio comes out on top? Something like that, right?
If you want to stop Steam from being so ubiquitous with PC gaming, then create some proper competition. The only one that comes close in my eyes is GOG.
You do not understand the issues around monopolies and it shows.
You do not understand what a monopoly is.
Unlike yourself apparently, I learned that in school: Monopoly is made up of two greek words “monos”, meaning single, kinda like mono and “polein”, meaning sell. It’s a market where there is a single seller. But unlike what you think, it is not possible to simply “create better competition”. A monopoly is controlled by a single entity. You can not enter a market controlled by a singular entity without ludicrous amounts of luck or wealth. There is a reason why even the US, the country with the most, largest monopolies in the world, has antitrust laws.
I had a reason to call you out, you didn’t even get any insight to my thought.
Very smart. You learned how to repeat words written in books. You’re probably very proud of yourself.
You still don’t know what a monopoly is, however, considering this is a discussion about Valve and Steam.
But keep trying.
I don’t need to keep trying, as this isn’t about me convincing you, but simply about me showing that you are wrong, which according to our like/dislike ratio I successfully did. You do not matter here. The academic truth does.
You put value in a like-dislike ratio and you think you can educate me?
You haven’t proven me wrong, you’re just another brainlet preaching to a choir of people who seem to be adamant at painting Valve as having a monopoly.
I mean, everyone has their preferred little dillusions, I guess, but an argument of popularity fallacy doesn’t make you right.
Steam isnt a single seller though. There is GOG, there is Microsoft store, and other wasys to purchase games.
Right, and everybody buys their games over microsoft store. I don’t even know what the hell GOG is supposed to be. A monopoly is not characterized by no other players, it’s chracterized by a lack of seriously competing players. There is a serious difference. Chrome isn’t the only player. It’s still a monopoly with 70% of market share. It can move the market at will with little meaningful resistance.
If I go and sell lemonade, that doesn’t do anything to CocaCola.
Chrome/google is a monopoly because they actually pay to keep Firefox and apple Browsers running. Firefoxes major funder is google. This is so Google can claim they aren’t a monopoly.
Gog is the games store most people use if they don’t want steam.
https://www.gog.com/en/games
Yeah, that’s lead to monopolies before numerous times. That does not change the fact that a monopoly is still a bad thing as as soon as there’s no competitors, the monopoly can jack up it’s prices or keep them artificially high.
Assuming there’s up front costs you have to pay to be able to compete with that monopoly (infrastructure, marketing, etc), then you’re looking at losing a lot of money trying to break into a market where everyone defaults to your competitor. And in that time, your monopolistic competitor can afford to lose even more money to bleed you out of the market and then go back to high prices.
And that’s just the financial barrier, that doesn’t count networks effects and platform lock in that can prevent customers from leaving.
Monopolies are always a bad thing, and inherently need to be heavily regulated as they structurally break capitalism. Quite frankly any industry that creates walled-garden or relies on network effects needs to be heavily regulated as well, and steam checks all three of those boxes. There’s a reason that they are THE most profitable tech company per employee, and that’s not because they’re charging fair prices.
But Steam isn’t a walled garden, or a monopoly.
Valve has done nothing that monopolistic corporations have done (i.e. Disney or Nintendo). They have kept themselves relatively small, private, and focused on providing one service really well.
Every other competition has only ever tried approaching what Valve does with Steam with shortcuts and quick money grabs.
It’s all fine and dandy to cry and complain about monopolies, but nobody even really tried. Epic’s store was, and still is, a laughing stock. That is what Valve is up against.