Study finds 72% of Developers View Steam as Monopoly [from the overall pool, 75% of respondents were senior managers]
![Study finds 72% of Developers View Steam as Monopoly [from the overall pool, 75% of respondents were senior managers]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c3cd91ce-e860-45ae-8aa7-2ac9d201a86a.webp)
https://steamdeckhq.com/news/pc-game-distribution-developer-study/Open linkView original on lemmy.ca186
Comments103https://steamdeckhq.com/news/pc-game-distribution-developer-study/Open linkView original on lemmy.ca
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.
1
Private equity is commonly referring to "owned by a private equity fund" like Blackrock. It often involves extracting unhealthy amount of short term profit to make the numbers look better then sell the business so they can record a profit.
Well done missing the point.
You say that as if publicly traded firms do
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.
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?
I assume they mean private equity vs privately owned. Private equity would mean you have to bow to your investor since they are paying you. Privately owners make their own decisions without needing to answer to an investor
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".
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.
Turns out if you invest in making your platform not suck it ends up paying dividends. Figure it out dumbfucks.
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.
Haven't even bothered making an account on epic for the free games or what ever they are offering. I just don't care, steam is so much better. Got a few games in GoG too but I wish they did a little better in the Linux support side of things.
I've been gaming on Linux for a year now and I have (and run) way more games from GOG than Steam.
Historically I avoided Steam because of the whole "you don't own the games, you just license them at full price" nature of the "phone home" validation they have for most games, so I had a much larger collection in GOG than Steam to begin with since I would only get from Steam the really interesting games which I wouldn't find in GOG (plenty of games I simply did not buy because they were Steam only).
That said, running GOG games in Linux is as least as simple as Steam games, thanks to me using Lutris which does all the heavy lifting of properly configuring Wine and VKDX to run my games and even integrates with GOG to directly download the installers: in practice I have about the same chance of success with click-and-play installing and running a game in Linux from the Steam Store via the Steam App as I do from GOG via Lutris.
Then on top of that, because I'm a techie, I actually prefer Lutris + Wine because it's so much more open for configuration than Steam and to figure out yourself how to run games for which there are no pre-made configuration scripts, such as pirated ones - for example, for one of my Steam games I couldn't at all find a way to run the official version of the game in Linux via the Steam App, but I could get the pirated version of that game to run just fine via Lutris.
I even have a default setting in Lutris which will run my games inside a Firejail sandbox with networking disabled plus a bunch of other security settings, something I can't do in Steam (were I can only do it for the entire Steam App, which won't function with disabled networking).
Many of my favorite games don't have drm, and you can just copy the install folder and boom, you own a copy
Yeah, but the store doesn't actually tell you which is which when you're looking to buy a new game, now does it?!
Further, will that copy of an install folder work if you copy it into a new machine? Maybe, but probably not (it depends on things like how the game handles missing registry keys and/or the graphics card changing whilst there's already a shader cache for the previous graphics cards).
When you're making a purchasing decision, if that factor is very important to you, Steam's possibility that maybe it can be done in an unofficial non-supported way, but you don't get told upfront if it does work, and you're not sure if it will work if you change machines, doesn't count as a real "I get to keep the game no matter what" feature - it's a hack, that sometimes works, usually doesn't.
In GOG that feature is standard.
This wasn't a "hey this is ok because you can sometimes do it in a jank way" comment, more of a "hey in case you didn't know you can go make copies to preserve what you like" comment
Ah, cheers!
It's always good to inform people.
You don't own gog games either. Not using drm doesn't grant ownership.
Two things:
You're confusing ownership of the "copyright of a game" with ownership of the actual instance of a game.
In jurisdictions were the Law is not just bought and paid for by industry lobbyists, you definitely own that copy you got when you downloaded the offline installer from GOG same as you would a game CD. What you don't own is the copyright of the game.
Further, even in the jurisdictions were IP Law is thoroughly bought and thus has been subverted to serve media industry interests, you de facto own that copy you got when you downloaded the offline installer from GOG: because the way things are set up with GOG (meaning, no DRM), the copyright owner would have no recourse but to literally take you to court to take away that copy, which they won't because it's too expensive so not worth the cost - unlike with Steam they can't just switch off you access to it by toggling a flag in a database.
Curiously, with Steam they can block you from accessing the copy of the game you bought even in the non-corrupt legal jurisdictions, because if they just block you from accessing it even if they legally can't, it's now up to you to take them to court to restore access to something you legally should have access to, and you won't do it because it's "too expensive so not worth the cost".
Whilst the whole thing is a bit of a mess with multiple takes on multiple jurisdictions, the praxis side is the same everywhere: "Possession is 9/10 of the law" as the saying goes - so if you have it fully under your control (so, no "phone home" system that can lock you out from using it) THEY have to take you to Court and justify to the Judge why they should be allowed to take it away from you, whilst if it's not under your control and they just take your access to it away from you, YOU have to take them to Court and justify why they should have to restore you access.
Even were you do not have legal ownership of a copy of a game, the way the GOG stuff is set up, once you've downloaded the offline installer you have de facto ownership which is pretty costly for them to overturn.
Meanwhile, the way the Steam stuff is set up you do not have control over that instance of the game and they can just take it away from you, and then it's you who will have trouble overturning it even in jurisdictions were you're legally in the right.
for me, it all boils down to this. The best DRM is making garbage. I won't even sail the seas to find it, I just will never use it.
Epic has offered quite a few decent games for free but their forced client/launcher is such shit that its not even worth installing. I absolutely wouldn't be surprised if people pirate games even after they've gotten them free on epic just to not have to deal with that bullshit.
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
Works on windows, Mac and Linux. Connects to GOG, Epic and Amazon.
absolutely spot on write up, thank you
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.
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?"
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.
I will also say is that major reason why Steam has an monopoly is that they have invested their resources to streamline the PC gaming experience and also make gaming on Linux better as well as Steam controller which also allows us to remap control layout.
None the alternative does that and are just another DRM-Storefront. That's my major pet peeve with Steam alternative like Epic Games Launcher. Closest we have is GOG for to be able to download offline installer and most the games are DRM-free. Otherwise, I just would rather buy games on Steam as it just works for me.. 🤷
Remember when Ubisoft came crawling back to Steam?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're a functional monopoly in my case since I'm on Linux. GOG is the main competitor for my money.
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.
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.
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.
The problem with this "anti-monopoly" rhetoric is that players want to play on the same platform as everyone else.
news are suppose to have new information
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).
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.
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
There is also Safari, Gnome Web, Falkon (don't know the spelling), ladybird, then you got the web browsers that are not fully web compliant... the point is there is a lot. And even if Mozilla wasn't paid large sums of miney by Google, Firefox as code wouldn't vanish all of a sudden. It would likely be picked up by the FOSS community (again).
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.
You're absolutely right, it doesn't make me right. But that's not what I said anyways, so I don't think you did what you think you did with that.
You little radlib you, always confusing being a fan of a thing with that thing being good <3.
If you want an actual breakdown of the points where Valve uses its monopoly to manipulate the market. But I'm not sure you're interested in that, since you haven't even explained a single aspect of economy, but only been telling me ho wrong I am. Shows incompetency.
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.