Exclusives are a bastard child of oligopoly, where the distribution platform has more power than the publisher.

Before Steam physical games were NEVER sold only in ToysR, they were sold in all shops.

Yeah. Steam is fucking solid.

You make it sound like drm didn’t exist before steam or like steam isn’t a form of drm itself. Old drm was more basic and far less nefarious, like entering a cd key or codes in your manual. This later escalated to online activated cd keys. At the very least, these forms of drm didn’t run all the time like steam did- I remember steam getting huge pushback (from myself included) because it ran like absolute dogshit. Later forms of drm got worse with checks in the discs that collected data on your pc (securom, anyone?). Steam did a lot of good things but it did not erase drm- it merely created another form of it (I.e. You no longer own your games, you are buying licenses they can revoke at any time)

step aside jesus, we have a new savior and his name is gaben

Exclusives are a bastard child of oligopoly, where the distribution platform has more power than the publisher.

Before Steam physical games were NEVER sold only in ToysR, they were sold in all shops.

And while many like our Steam benevolent (almost) monopoly, I do wonder how would the market look like if we had 20 competing companies that cannot gain more than 5% of the market share. Can you imagine the competition between them and how would that benefit us, the consumer?

More comptetion wouldn’t just benefit consumers, it would benefit devs. A dev could shop their game around go with a store front that suits their needs better.

i think personally Steam’s/Valve’s dominance is really good here’s why:

• Improving Linux gaming,improving Wine and DXVK for gaming,so you dont rely on Microsoft for your OS.
• Great client(i like the: inbuilt Chromium based browser,Community features)
• Not so awful and maybe simple DRM methods(eg, needing the Steam client doesnt tank the performance that much,compared to something like denuvo which i think makes modding impossible,needs consistent internet connection,and tanks the game’s fps alot )
• I can buy with cash giftcard to buy games(I wish GOG had that)
• Workshop for modding on supported games.(ik some games have workshop and dont let you mod everything)
• Makes/has good games(Half-life 2 is the best game i ever played)

but the bad things:

• Steam Client is still 32 bit and Steam doesnt target ARM(E,G. For like M1+ macs,those need rosetta )
• third party clients arent a option
• You dont own anything you buy on Steam.
• Having the Steam client open at all times(ik not all games have this, but i assume CEF based Steam will lower the performance like slightly)
• TF2 neglect
• lootboxes/battle pass in some games(i am aware Valve was the first company to have a battle pass and fortnite popularized it)
  alright thats what i think of the Good and bad of Valve/Steam

Edit: Fixed Paragraph break.

None of that is what defines a monopoly.

There’s only one store that matters. They have unthreatened supermajority marketshare. Customers go there by default - sometimes exclusively. Developers can sell there, or they’re basically fucked.

What you’re concerned about are anti-competitive practices. But some businesses don’t need those, to lack any relevant competition. It can just happen. They didn’t do anything wrong. They’re still monopolies.

Steam kinda killed gaming piracy for many. Hope they won’t go the Netflix way in the future.

If they’re not doing anything wrong what’s the problem

I think you switched to cons without saying.

I admit I haven’t tried very many, but I think you can launch any steam app “normally” without steam running. If you can find the executable or startup script, you can just point a shortcut to it. Some games will need Steam Services to run, but it’s not blocked or anything.

Honestly 20 different companies would probably suck for the consumer. That’s 20 different storefronts to compare, 20 different libraries to manage, potentially 20 different sets of logins, 20 sources of data breaches. It’s unlikely they would adopt an open standard to allow a shared library. Maybe you have a 21st company that makes a product like heroic launcher. You’d likely run into regionality issues where a particular store is unavailable, so you may not be able to play purchased games. You would have all sorts of odd exclusive dlc and pre order bonuses so a cosmetic item you like could be locked to a store you haven’t used. Multiplayer likely wouldn’t be global cross play between all companies, you likely get some set of 20 companies working together for multiplayer. Some games may develop a good scene available to a single store, requiring a game to be repurchased. Exclusives or timed exclusives would be annoying to track, as each store would likely have different catalogs.

That’s far to generous to other companies, they were far more like the WiiU.

I think this amount of competition could be good if individual competitors were allowed to fail. All the parts that build vendor lock-in would need to be removed, and more things would need to be interoperable, but it could be quite good and even specialised.

Each storefront could live or die independent of each library and each game service. If one company tried to squeeze money from users, they could just take their elsewhere, without worrying about losing access to games or connections to friends.

Of course no company would create such a system voluntarily, most depend on monopolistic practices to survive. It would take monopoly busting-policy or a foss group to even begin such a thing.

I think you switched to cons without saying.

I admit I haven’t tried very many, but I think you can launch any steam app “normally” without steam running. If you can find the executable or startup script, you can just point a shortcut to it. Some games will need Steam Services to run, but it’s not blocked or anything.

They did for me, then my cost of living went up along with the cost of games. Now I’ll only buy games that I intend to play multiplayer

Maybe there isn’t one.

This is what I’m talking about: people think monopoly = bad, so if I say Valve has a monopoly, I must want them burned to the ground. Nah. They’re mostly fine. Having only one good option is precarious, but it is still a good option. For now.

But they’re still a monopoly. We should say so, because it’s true, and important. It shapes the entire PC gaming market.

For me cost of living went up but cost of games down. I mostly play indie games now since i find big AAA games not that interesting with one maybe two exceptions per year.

Depends on what games you play. I play lots of studio games and don’t play a lot of indies. Now I just pirate. To paraphrase a wise man “this may or may not technically be legal… But 105aud for a new video game is a straight up crime”

Yeah, it sucks. A major reason that I abandoned Nintendo’s Switch 2, and returned to PC after playing in Switch for some years. I used to pay 30-50€ for AAA, but they wanted people to jump to 70-80€.