this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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Steam is a true “disrupter,” because they do business the way people did for centuries before higher short-term profits became the only goal.
The reason they can “sit back” and count their money is because they’re a private company. As soon as there’s rumblings of going public, then buy a sextant for navigating.
The day that happens we’re all fucked
Eh, GOG is pretty decent, I'd just go there.
I try to buy a few games from them every now and then, but since I'm primarily on Linux, Valve gets most of my money because they make things so convenient.
I find it hilarious that despite competition from a dozen game studios and publishers, steam essentially destroyed all of them by doing basically nothing and merely maintaining their service.
Ditto, and then you see people claiming they're a monopoly despite not doing anything monopolistic, supporting other launchers in steam, and allowing keys purchased through other stores to activate on steam.
Meanwhile epic is throwing around exclusivity deals, but that's fine because they're too incompetent a storefront to make an actual impact I guess?
Steam's business model is convenience first. If someone wants to do something don't get in their way. That's how they can be a monopoly and no one complains, because there's very few walls or barriers. Every time there have been barriers, steam not accepting games, NSFW games, crypto, AI, they either get out of their way, or take a reasonable philosophical/ethical stance. Even if you disagree with their stance its hard to be angry about it and often their stance changes or gains nuance to it as time goes on.
I'm with you for the most part, but they aren't a monopoly. The definition changes depending on who you ask, I'm going by the overwhelming market share + providing barriers to entry to competitors. They do debatably meet the market share, but I'd argue not the practices that bar the existence of competitors.
I feel like they've been very careful to not meet that second criteria and it's been healthy to the games market as a whole. GoG has a different niche, humble bundle sells wholesale discounts, and every company has their own store, for better or worse.
Meanwhile epic gets on my nerves because it's been throwing around exclusivity deals to their platform and throwing around free games, which are both tactics to try to undermine the others in the market. If they had the kind of userbase steam has, yes I'd say that would be a monopoly.
I mostly agree, it's more a matter of exposure and, as you say market share. It's a weird situation to be in, that in order to really get the most sales on PC you need to be on steam.