this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Ouch. I didn't realize they took such a big cut. On the other hand, authors trying to publish to Amazon's kindle get hit with commissions from 30%-65% before any other fees, so Steam seems downright reasonable for that particular comparison.
Is it really a monopoly with everyone from EA to GoG delivering games? I guess it is dominant enough to count. I have a hard time complaining when employees are getting good pay and I've continued to get good service from them. It might get scarey if/when Gabe steps down, but this all feels pretty fair for now.
I've been thinking about the 30% cut and I think to some extent Valve earn it. They're not just hosting the download for your game and managing updates and payments. They're also running your forum, running your multiplayer (if you take advantage of the Steam Datagram Relay), making mods easy to manage and share, making controller support easy to implement and making it easy to port to Linux and MacOS.
Apple and Google also take a 30% cut (+$100 USD/year and semi-recent Mac for Apple). In comparison I think Valve to a lot more to earn your 30% (even if I still think its a bit high considering how much money they make)
The unusual though possibly wrong thing that differentiates steam is they don't appear to engage in all that much anti competitive behavior. Possibly some, but not really that much. Ultimately if it's better for the consumer but worse for 'the economy' who's really losing out? By what metric?
For now, at least. But the secret to valves success here doesn't appear to be very closed source. A fairly flat internal structure, moderately functional store and community reputation building, mostly keeping promises and having which reputation that when they don't they can weather the storm. Nothing there seems unachievable unless your design philosophy is so cut throat and monetized that you just build a bad product.
If your proposal is some sort of grant program to make that infrastructure easier to come by then that could be neat. Nothing about steams actual technology is unique though.
A federated indie store could also be neat, though like other federated systems with money involved especially you'll need to be extra careful about how it's all set up to make sure the result is any good.
The point is, steam competitors don't do badly because they lack the man hours of steams Dev team. They do badly because of terrible company vision and incentives. Open sourcing a tech doesn't solve a problem that doesn't exist. I don't even think open sourcing steam really does.. Anything, for developers. Philosophically cool, practically useless, everything that steam is exists in piecewise form already. Turning steam into a federated service is not meaningfully faster because you make steam open source.
Gog is the closest and does fine. The technology is about on par with steam, the philosophy of the service better, and they are doing fine. Not overwhelming steam no, but fine.
The barrier to entry is an online store, something many small businesses set up. You could barely stretch it to include an application and download servers. None of those things are things steam does uniquely nor are particularly difficult. Barrier to entry is hardly the issue.
Monopoly's themselves are not necessarily bad. Its when they use the monopoly to spread into other areas where it becomes the problem.
Just because monopolies can have a fanbase, doesn't mean they don't negatively impact society.
The cult behind Steam doesn't understand the problem that will arrive once Gabe retires. The amount of power they gave this single entity will come to.bite them in the ass.
It's not like there are any better options.
GOG perhaps, but that doesn't strive to deliver the conveniency, and ignores Linux players.
Epic? Lol.
Any other private company launcher? Well, just no.
Everyone will be gone one day, Gabe, Linus Torvalds... but that doesn't mean other people don't share their values and the original idea will be gone too.
Steam isn't a monopoly; they have competition. As far as I'm aware, they also don't have a mechanism to lock people out of the market, so there's probably no danger of them becoming a monopoly. I have no idea why people are going around saying they're a monopoly when they demonstrably aren't.