Maybe “technically”, but not practice or in law. Google was not being prevented from becoming a monopoly, they were declared a monopoly.

Technically but not technically…

Given how anti capitalist Lenny is purported to be I’m surprised how vehemently valve gets defended. There’s no good billionaire

It’s true though, Steam has a monopoly on Steam games.

alright then Valve uses their market dominance to negatively impact other companies, much better

Except they don’t do that, which is what separates valve from nearly every other comparable company with a massive market share.

Depends on the context.

A very “gamer” headline and title card. Not in a good way.

Not on games per se but almost on mods. Yes, there are other platforms, but the majory and newest are on Workshop. And they make it hard to download them, if you don’t own the game on Steam (and Valve has it in their terms that they own the mods hosted on Workshop).

So one could argue that they use the indirect peer-pressure approach to market dominance, similiar to Google on Android.

I wouldn’t complain if they just had a “Download” button on their web version. But they don’t, you have to use the finicky steamcmd intended for server administration.

Steam does not limit games to only steam.

Yeah, that difference in market share could be used to declare Steam a monopoly. For devs it means they have to publish their games there and accept that Steam will take 30% ofthe revenue.

Keeping in mind Valve is a for profit company. Why would they host anything that adds extra bandwith cost and does not increase revenue on their platform? Alternative “appstores” on Android are not hosted by Google, as far as I know.

“Almost” a monopoly, by definition, is not a monopoly. Your concerns are valid, but there are legal ramifications associated with these terms.

They literally never went a millimeter out of their way to negatively impact another competing storefront.

Valve’s success can be almost summed up as “does nothing, wins” because the competition to steam has been piss poor.

YongYea has habit of first going over all the opinions and written stuff in articles before giving his own opinions and conclusions. It’s… Just the way he does things. Some people consider that an in-depth overview.

I think it’s… Alright. I usually don’t finish watching his vids when I get the point.

Oh there’s plenty said about Valve, like their dirty skin gambling underbelly.

I mean… There are so many games that use Nexus as their preferred platform. And for older games Mod.db is still king.

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I do a fair bit of modding, and actually almost never interact with steam workshop. Nexus mods, thunderstore and r2modman, or something game specific like Everest (Celeste) or Lumafly mod manager (Hollow Knight). Not to mention modding like ReShade or OptiScaler, or custom proton versions with extra features.

I tend to associate Steam Workshop with very simple mods, like skin swaps, or mods with dedicated game support, like Rivals of Aether characters. Most of the more serious game modifications are hosted elsewhere, at least in my experience, and I usually forget to even bother checking what steam has available.

That said, I agree that an easier download button for using those mods on other platforms would be a good feature.

Steam will get the social media warrior upvote brigade on their side every time, despite being a single point of failure that at any moment can change it’s operations to restrict anything and everything they wish unless you pay up.

Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else. We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library to GOG I would.

There’s no good competitors because the money isn’t there to build one. Developers don’t want to maintain yet another platform and gamers don’t want another application to manage all their shit. Would take tens of billions of dollars today to get in there on top of having near feature parity.

I’ve been worried for a long time about what will happen when GabeN dies and someone else takes the reins. The only reason why the platform isn’t royal shit is because it’s his company and no grubby MBAs have managed to take it public. That can change on a whim.

Potential enshittifications:

• Subscriptions. MBAs love them!

• Advertisements. Think on-launch forced ads that play in steam before launching a game unless you pony up perhaps $15/mo in platform fees to bypass it. Maybe they’ll start with a much lower insignificant price to make it whatever for users to add a credit card and allow autobilling… for later price increases.

• Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)