Study finds 72% of Developers View Steam as Monopoly [from the overall pool, 75% of respondents were senior managers]
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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.
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news are suppose to have new information
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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?
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.
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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
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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.
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How’d they get their polling pool? Sitting outside the Valve corporate office?
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from the overall pool, 75% of respondents were senior managers
So… not developers, but businessmen.
I read this as senior managers at valve…
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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).
You don’t own gog games either. Not using drm doesn’t grant ownership.
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I read this as senior managers at valve…
First line of the article seems fairly contradictory to that.
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First line of the article seems fairly contradictory to that.
Wait now I’m even more confused
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)
There’s nothing in this article that suggests that they polled more than just senior managers.
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You don’t own gog games either. Not using drm doesn’t grant ownership.
Two things:
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Remember when Ubisoft came crawling back to Steam?
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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
