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.

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

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

So… not developers, but businessmen.

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.

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

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.

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).

I read this as senior managers at valve…

First line of the article seems fairly contradictory to that.

You don’t own gog games either. Not using drm doesn’t grant ownership.

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.

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

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