I wouldn’t buy shit on Epic for so many fucking reasons. They’re not a realistic competitor in terms of their DD product. They make money on fortnite and their engine.

Their revenue for their games store for “3rd party titles” was $285 million in 2024, compared to Steam’s 10800 million overall revenue… only 37x higher, clearly epic is a strong competitor. Maybe you wanna claim something silly like valve’s first party sales were 10.5 billion or something.

And where are those millions going, pray tell? Because they’re sure as fuck not going into the development of a good storefront.

Epic has enough resources to make competition against Valve. They would rather cry about how they can’t get away with being cheap.

285m in revenue is not 285m in profits. Their publishing deals with companies probably don’t leave much left for actual income, and i’d be surprised if they operate with profit if you exclude first party titles.

Anywho… Why are you so hyper focused on epic, and not the market as a whole?

They’re one company and everybody hates them. I don’t give a shit about them. GOG is rocking ~40m in 2024 revenue… and they have a bit of a unique offering with 0 DRM and offline installers. Their nature keeps developers away since there’s an assumption that without DRM you won’t sell anything.

What else is there that is even remotely relevant compared to steam? I don’t know of any for PC games (windows/linux/mac) - mobile may make more money but that’s a separate market.

No I can’t say they won’t enshitiffy but I’m not going to bitch all the times they’re not being dicks just so you can enjoy sucking your own dick. Go fight a battle that actually needs fighting right now because Steam is a waste of time and energy now. You’re fighting your imaginary enemy right now

A commodity controlled by one party.

Sometimes, there are many sellers or substitutes, but a single company still retains outsized market power — that’s called monopolistic competition.

A monopoly is a market structure with a single dominant seller in a particular industry.

Sounds like Steam fits that description pretty well. I agree that steam isn’t a strict monopoly, there is competition, but they are so far and ahead they still function as a monopoly in their area.

Since you’d rather throw mud than talk terms, I guess that’s where this ends.

Epic’s incompetence doesn’t matter to me. Find me another alternative that isn’t riding on the coattails of pre-existing billions in revenue.

Fortnite makes exponentially more than their DD platform.

GOG is the closest thing to a competitor imo but their philosophy restricts them from really competing on day 1 game sales outside of a minority of titles.

Everybody else is a seller of adult games, indie titles, or simply a key seller for steam games.

“Comodity controlled by one party”. Except it’s not controlled by one party.

Outsized market power, what left out are the actions taken to make such an outsized market power. Monopolies are not a passive that form all by themselves. They are created through expansion acquisition, and aggressive crushing of competition. Disney and Nintendo do these actions. Valve does basically… Nothing.

A single dominant seller, but again leaving out all the rest I have written above.

There is nothing Valve can stop doing to be less “a monopoly”. All they’ve done is provide a pretty decent service, and nobody else can be arsed to top that, even companies with the resources to do so.

That’s not a monopoly.

Find me another alternative that isn’t riding on the coattails of pre-existing billions in revenue.

Why would I? I’m not making any claims myself, merely pointing out the ridiculousness of yours.

You didn’t do that though. I said for a competitor to come along that they would need to sink tens of billions of dollars, like uber did. I fail to see how this is a ridiculous statement. Epic being incompetent doesn’t have any relation to what a real competitor would need to do to gain a foothold with say a meager 25% of valve’s share.

Epic didn’t do enough to gain serious market share. They haven’t given up but I don’t see them making any inroads without further investment to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. They literally need to build up their platform to be substantially cheaper (e.g. by offering subsidies) while also making it fit for use (by spending way more money on quality devs.) They haven’t… and nobody cares except folks like you who think they’re a serious competitor as justification for white knighting for valve. lol

Love the ad hominems, do keep them coming

folks like you who think they’re a serious competitor

Yeah that’s exactly what my bashing of their pathetic excuse at a storefront was implying.

tens of billions of dollars, like uber did

You’re comparing the cost of building a simple software platform (and face it, Steam isn’t THAT complicated to replicate from a technical perspective) to a company hiring tens of millions of people worldwide for billions of man hours and hardware depreciation. Your estimates are so unrealistic it’s hilarious.

By your definition, lets imagine a world where Amazon had 100% of the market and there were no other competitors, even if it happened naturally, without malicious intent, they wouldn’t be a monopoly? Come on.

I dont see ‘has to act a specific way’ in any definitions of monopoly. A monopoly isnt about being evil, or ‘actions taken to make such an outsized market power’ even if thats often part of the result, but just describes their position in the field.

This isn’t about how a company got there, it’s about where they currently are. Steam may not have crushed competitors aggressively like Disney or Nintendo, but its market dominance and control over PC game distribution still fits the textbook definition of a monopoly.

Steam has ~79.5% of the PC gaming market, I’m one of their customers and love their service, but that doesnt change that “monopoly”fits them.

GOG is not a Steam competitor because they’re offering something different from Steam.

A customer that would buy a game from GOG is not a customer that would regularly buy something from Steam.

That’s not my definition. That’s just the definition. And you’re using a corporation that is actively monopolising the logistics market, even so far as breaking the law to kill any competition, as an example. Nicely done.

So you’re saying Steam has a monopoly on the games people choose to buy on Steam?

…?

Thanks, that was done intentionally, to highlight the absurdity of your argument. I assume we both agree that Amazon is an effective monopoly (though i have had people fight me on that too!)

You say its not your definition, but i linked three different definitions which didn’t use that language. in fact, in all my searching, not a SINGLE definition includes a discussion on how they got there, but on the **CURRENT **state of the market.

Here’s another source:

complete control of the supply of particular goods or services, or a company or group that has such control:

The exclusive possession or control of the trade in a commodity, product, or service;

This is why I say Steam has an effective monopoly.

So yes, it seems like you’re using your personal definition, but it contradicts the actual, widely accepted definitions.

If you want to call me out and say “you initially said it WAS a monopoly, but its only an EFFECTIVE monopoly”, ill take that egg on my face, its earned and i should be more careful with my words.

Yes, that is the type of monopoly they have. It’s one that would probably not attract the attention of anti-trust regulators. If you’re not coming from the free software world I guess it looks like that’s the only way things can be.

The others have been improving for a bit but GOG and itch have been focused on niche markets while Steam has grown broadly using the money from valve’s early successes. If they want to step up to the kind of scale steam operates at, it will take a lot to overcome the innate loyalty of ‘I already have 1000 games worth of time and money invested in the steam system,’ and grow their repertoire outside their niches. Epic and Ubisoft also have tried, but they’re still trying to catch up to where steam has been plugging along for ages. Epic has tried to build out their own version of the ‘1000 games’ moat by giving out constant free games but their moat still isn’t that big, and ubisoft has been relying mostly on having a few exclusives, but that hasn’t really been a winning plan either because it’s not enough to get people to think ‘I want a game,’ means ‘go to origin,’ instead of ‘check to see if i already have it on steam.’

It’s 6 sentences.

Technically, Lemmy was a person.

Being a sole distributor of a specific product does not make you a monopoly by any stretch.