I’m not mad because they go above and beyond to support Linux, which I prefer to use.
None of the other stores do even the bare minimum for Linux users, while Valve has helped make it easier to play almost every game.
Because they aren’t a true monopoly. They are only a functional monopoly because their competitors refuse to be competitive. Nothing except corporate greed is preventing other storefronts like Epic from being utterly ass.
I mean what, am I supposed to be ‘preemptively mad’ because they might become worse one day?
Like I don’t understand why I’m supposed to be mad, it’s a service that’s useful and good, maybe it won’t be one day but what am I going to do about that?
“preemptively mad” got a chuckle out of me, yeah it’s premature to say that we should get big angy at Steam.
The word we should be looking for is “Critical.” Valve is a huge company, they are not saints, and we should treat them with skepticism as a matter of course. But that doesn’t mean they don’t do positive, thankless work for consumers too (in the form of Proton, Linux support, etc).
All these concern trolling articles about Valve’s “monopoly”. We never get this shit about Youtube, Windows, local ISPs and other utilities, etc. Super subtle, guys.
Valve literally released hardware and said “hey, competitors, feel free to add your own stores and even OS”. None of their competitors even bothered to try.
Valve doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics to secure their monopoly like other monopolies. They just know that they provide a good service.
They’re a private company and thus have resisted many of the enshittification trends that run rampant through the industry.
And also their competitors are absolutely atrocious and are completely tone-deaf to what customers actually want.
This is exactly right. As soon as a company becomes public, it’s all over. Profits at X%, every quarter, no matter the cost. It’s the death of a company.
Every other company could challenge Steam, but instead is enshittified within an inch of its life from the get-go. It’s as much that Steam is doing so much right as it is that competitors are doing so much wrong.
Not you, GOG.
GoG was my second digital store, I resisted Steam for so long, but over the years, Steam has become my #1 source for games. It’s just so easy, plus they are relatively consumer friendly. With the revamp of Steam Families, it’s just so so much easier to have everyone playing on Steam. Plus I have a Steam Deck.
I try and buy games on GoG, set them up with Heroic, and it works great, better than EA, Epic and other storefronts, but just not quite as slick as Steam.
One day St. Gabe will be martyred, and Steam will undergo the unavoidable descent into enshittification, as to will GoG. I do not pledge undying loyalty to any platform, but Steam and GoG have been awesome for so long.
Besides, other than Itch and Humble Bundle, who even comes close in being good to use?
Because they gained their monopoly by, yes, being first, but also by continuously being the best. And they don’t exploit their monopoly. They don’t do anything that could be construed as anti-competitive, despite certainly having every opportunity. They’re an intermediary between publishers and consumers, and generally speaking they are good stewards of that intermediary, generally operating in favor of the consumer, rather than the big game publishers.
Because they are one of the few mega companies that hasn’t shrinkflated, enshittified, or otherwise crumbled the quality of their offering. Haven’t sold out the privacy of their customer base to advertising companies, and are generally good to deal with for customers and developers.
It’s not a secret formula that no other company can learn from. It’s as simple as not being dicks IMO.
For some reason, most companies seem to grow too a certain threshold at which they sell their souls to profit and will self destruct to get more of it. Steam thankfully isn’t one of them…… yet.
They’re not beholden to public investors. If they go public or sell to a public company it will change.
If Gaben leaves or dies, Valve is probably fucked.
He has a son who will supposedly take over, but we’ll have to see how that goes when it happens.
I thought his son has already taken the helm and had the same mentality as his dad?
That will be like a whale-fall event for all the skittering bottom feeders of the finance abyss.
Because it’s one of the only functional monopolies that got there by attracting users rather than M&As to quash competitors and regulatory capture. Monopolies shouldn’t just intrinsically make you angry, they just are usually bad because they will have done anticompetitive things in order to become a monopoly.
As the article concludes:
Valve Corporation didn’t win by locking people in. It won by making sure they never really wanted to leave.
The other contenders mostly are bad.
Drm-free still exists.
They provide a lot of value without charging the end user very much.
Microsoft could have done this except they’re run by idiots and assholes. Nothing technical stopped them from launching a good store platform. They just didn’t want to.
Valve doesn’t abuse the monopoly.
Because of all the other companies in that picture (except GOG, they’re cool).
What about itch vor humble bundle?
itch.io is okay, but they used to be much better back when they first emerged right after Desura collapsed in 2013, and everyone moved their indie titles there, and before Steam had GreenLight and now Early Access. Now they’ve fallen into a weird space where half of their games’ installers aren’t even hosted on their site and you get redirected to the game’s own website. Humble Bundle has really crappy download speeds, so it’s hard to justify using them over Steam for anything larger than a VN, and half the games you buy on HB they actually just give you Steam keys to redeem anyways.
Steam, GoG, Humble Bundle, and Itch are the platforms I regularly buy PC games on. By far and away, Steam is #1. It’s got the games, it’s well integrated into everything, easy to use (especially on Linux). GoG is good, although I set up Heroic to use with GoG. It’s close, but not as many games that I want, and Heroic+GoG is a little less polished than Steam. Humble Bundle and Itch are generally too niche, although so much of my Steam library has come from Humble.
It works, and since this is PC, we can very quickly pivot to something else if we need to.
The other options are shit
