It’s incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.
I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.
But at the same time, they’re cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.
So we uncritically give them all the power.
This is a great opportunity to mention 15th Anniversary of GOG.
I’d love competition in the Linux gaming space, but none of them even attempt to support it
Itch and GOG have
decentlinux supportNo they don’t lol. GOG doesn’t even have a client, you have to use Lutris or Heroic Launcher that support it.
Itch has a half implemented Linux client that they gave up years ago and is straight up unusable/broken. The client is worse then a web wrapper and nas no support for Wine, so if the game doesn’t have native Linux support, it just won’t run through the client. It will download exe’s that won’t actually run and silently fail, and doesn’t have any wine support.
They don’t have a client but both allow you to just download the game and run it from a
.shthat installs it in the local folder. That’s enough for me but I agree it may not be for everyone.
Gamers have gotten quite lucky so far that the company that has been in the position to turn the screws and establish a monopoly has been content to only make gobs of money, instead of trying to make all the money like pretty much every other entertainment industry.
Yeah, the reason why Valve can do that is that they are not a publicly traded company but a privately owned one. Gabe Newell doesn’t have a fiduciary duty to any shareholders, so they don’t have to squeeze every penny from their users or abuse their quasi monopoly.
If Gabe ever leaves Valve and the powers that be decide to go public I hope it’s done in a way that gives power to the users instead of faceless investment firms. I don’t even know what that would look like but I fear the day that Valve comes under control of an ex-AAA game company CEO or the like.
Bro what do you think those Steam levels and experience are for? Obviously they’re gonna divest the company across the playerbase and divvy it up based on Steam levels!
/s
I wish something like that existed, once you go public you are obligated to grow and that has limits so you always end up squeezing your users! :/
I said this elsewhere but that’s not true. The idea that publicly traded companies have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a myth, and anyone privileged enough to sit on a board of directors likely knows this. See this article for an explanation. Every time a board squeezes a company for short term profits at the cost of long term good will, long term profits, etc., that is because they chose to do so.
Well the relation is wrong but it’s a real thing, they have a duty to grow infinitely or the sroxk price will crash and since that’s impossible to achive they essentially have to squeeze their users for short term gains to seem like they still grow sooner or later
it’s a real thing, they have a duty to grow infinitely or the sroxk price will crash
This isn’t a thing.
Here’s another article explaining why and how it isn’t a thing, and also why people like you think it is.
Honestly, I don’t care to continue this conversation, even the attempt to convince people like you is rather pointless
Is Steam really a monopoly when Valve doesn’t try to stifle competition and no other company could be bothered (besides maybe GOG) to make a half decent store?
It is a monopoly - they just don’t abuse it as much against their audience.
For developers it’s either take their 30% deal or just don’t sell your game because a lot of people only use steam.
Not even Cyberpunk or the Witcher could sell more on gog than on steam even though you knew that there the developers got 100% of the money spent. Gwent standalone flopped so hard on GOG that it had to be rereleased with limited features on steam and sold more there
People are just fundamentally lazy so it totally is a problem that you have one store with such a massive market share even if it’s very convenient for the end-user they can completely exploit their position against publishers.
Sure EPICs way of making games exclusive to their store is not elegant but without that no-one would choose that store over steam
No, it’s not a monopoly. They aren’t even a gatekeeper as defined recently by the EU.
The most successful PC games (Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox) aren’t even on Steam.
That doesn’t mean anything. Jesus Christ these arguments that valve isn’t a monopoly are just so incredibly weak. They’ve created a fucking cult.
