points to all of human history

Maybe this will be one of the exceptions. At least I hope so.

I used to be the same.

I have changed to prioritizing GOG though since I try to limit purchases from US companies and I despise how Steam knowingly profits from making children addicted to gambling.

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.

You always could, but they don’t get to take credit for that

Weird. I can fibd no source on it. However I seem to distinctly remember that GOG announced to help heroic implement more cloud features.

I mean that although the good shows got removed by the other competitors and streaming got downhill with that, they increased prices, put ads, removed account sharing and their only focus is profit.

Edit: also they removed shows by themselves to countries that the particular shows were not that popular just to save money. That started before the rise of other streaming platforms.

There are millions of successful companies and businesses on this planet and a lot (historically almost all) are taken over by the children or protégés. I‘d argue that nepo babies who got pampered up until adulthood (like probably Gabe‘s kids) have a worse track record of leading a business, that’s probably the examples you’ve been thinking of.

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.

That would be amaze balls, but hard to see happening in reality.

How cool would it be if Steam split* into a non-profit, giving rebates back to developers for platform fees collected in excess of costs (including generous salaries for their employees, of course) with directives to make the platform as good for gamers and developers as possible?

One can dream.

• I’m assuming a split because game development and sales don’t really mesh with a non-profit in the same way. Hard to make competitive multiplayer-only live-service games (let alone The International for DOTA 2) and loot crates your business model that way, at any rate.

I simply do not understand the sentiment that not being a total bastard is something celebrated and not expected or required.

It’s simple really. If you don’t give positive feedback, you’ve lost the major lever that can be used to get what you want.

Using negative feedback is a useful tool but it’ll never achieve the same outcomes if used by itself.

How to explain Steam’s success on PC for console players: “Think of it like the X1 vs PS4 era. Steam is the PS4 and every competitor was the Xbox One”

That does not mean it never happened, we just can’t find the source. I had this with my own statements in the past too, sometimes it was true sometimes I was wrong. Therefore I cannot trust everyone in the internet. What I can imagine is, that GOG worked on the GOG API (the programming interface for other tools) to add access to the Cloud features in example. It might came out of a request from the Heroic Launcher project. So in a sense GOG would cooperate. But this is just speculation on my part here.

Still the Heroic Launcher is a separate project doing all the work on their own.

This is directly from the comment I replied to:

I would buy from GOG too, if they provided Linux support in form of an official launcher

No need for an official launcher when you can just use Steam as a launcher.

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)

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.

i kinda agree:
but its still possible to pirate some Steam games without the Steam Client,
and some still require it.

Steam does more than launch games, you realize this, right? They want gog to have a launcher on Linux that will manage their library for them, not just launch their game.

Hold on, IT DOES?

While Steam is more or less the best big solution we have, it does leave a lot to be desired. The only reason they are the best is because they clawed their way to the top early, kept themselves “good enough” compared to the competition, and haven’t yet sold out their entire customer base.

At this point, they completely dominate. It’s insanely difficult to compete with them. So long as they make half of an effort to improve things and continue to be somewhat benevolent they’ll likely keep their crown.

However, Valve is not ideal. They are still looking out for themselves, primarily. Many of Valves improvements have just been reactions to competitors and other threats not an inherent desire to deliver the best product possible or do the right thing. It’s just the fact that most competitors are more obviously greedy and immoral that makes Valve look like the heroes.

Without Epic and others throwing cash on the fire trying to compete I doubt we’d have seen even the slow upgrades to the Steam experience we’ve seen in recent years.

Without the Australian lawsuit, we’d have no return policy.

Without the clever abuse of arbitration by a group of lawyers, Valve would still have forced arbitration in the agreements.

Steam OS was only a thing, and Proton only got backed by Valve, when Microsoft first started positioning itself to eat Valve’s lunch by exerting control over Windows and pushing for things like UWP and the MS/Windows/XBOX storefronts on PC.

The vast majority of Valve’s storefront improvements are algorithms and crowd sourcing solutions. They want to be as hands off as possible because being hands on is hard and comes with liability. The whole skins market and gambling fiasco kind of shows that they’d much rather just not get involved if possible - same risk/reward cost/benefit analysis used by every greedy company. If that means lying about how aware they are of it that’s what they’ll do.

Don’t get me wrong. The least worst is, unfortunately, the best we’ve got. I love gaming and use Steam a lot. It’s just that the other big players are just so terrible that I think Valve gets a free pass. Hell, much of the tech industry is swallowing tactical nukes hoping that the radiation will somehow mutate them into a good business. In the meantime they are using the illusion of “expansion” from the resulting explosions to make themselves look bigger for investors. I support anyone not doing that.

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