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 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.

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 has a huge amount of good will to burn and the cynical side of me is waiting for the day they start.

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.

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 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

Turns out if you invest in making your platform not suck it ends up paying dividends. Figure it out dumbfucks.

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.

“Sure – come sell your grain game – but you’ll have to give me a third of your profit because I own the town square platform/servers.”

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

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.

Game distribution platform Rokky has just released the results of a study it conducted with 306 senior managers of PC game developers (all from the US or UK), and it makes for some interesting reading.

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.

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.

deleted

from the overall pool, 75% of respondents were senior managers

So… not developers, but businessmen.

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.

absolutely spot on write up, thank you