Games
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view the rest of the comments
Steam is the best thing to happen to gaming period.
Steam is the best thing to happen to Gaben. It's better than the other options as a product but the bar is really low and steam takes advantage just as much as the other players. The soft monopoly going on is clearly having an effect imo.
What are the examples of steam "taking advantage just as much as the other players?"
By not competing with them. Gaben has 1.5 billion dollars worth of yachts. Steam doesn't need to be taking 30% and only does so because everyone else does. I guess big companies colluding, each with a billionaire at the helm, is kind of the law of the market tbh but it's not "the best".
how is steam not competing with them? steam outcompeted them.
Everyone's fine with staying in their lane and charging the standard percentage. Keeping the status quo to maximize profits isn't competing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing
you should study a little game theory and industrial design. some markets balance that way
"Price fixing happens, it's a normal part of a healthy market"
Doesn't make it right or legal. Stop defending billionaires please.
i'm not defending them. i've done the math.
Idk, I think 30% is perfectly fair considering what a massive market steam is and the huge amount of publicity you get from putting it on steam. I'll agree that by certain definitions steam is a monopoly, but they aren't committing any anti competition practices, and this is further proven by them taking the standard 30% if they wanted to they could only take 10%, and that would probably be seen as anti competition by quite a few countries, as many other companies couldn't deal with trying to make their percentage lower. Steam is essentially being the standard here, and if any other service wanted to take a smaller cut they could, and developers would turn to it more often. For instance, itch.io. if steam were a true monopoly, you could be certain that itch.io wouldn't exist anymore. Ill change my mind on this when steam loses a SINGLE monopoly lawsuit, and until then you guys need to do more research on actual monopolies.
There's only a handful of companies and the smallest one (itch.io) takes between 0% and 10%. The companies that "couldn't deal with it" are Microsoft (for Xbox, they actually take 12% on PC), Nintendo, Sony.
Look up what a soft monopoly is. In any case, they have market dominance and are abusing it. Steam is currently dealing with more than one anti trust lawsuit, including a 900$ million one in the UK.
It's weird seeing people defend billionaires and their money sucking machine. You could defend Airbnb or Amazon with that same kind of energy and arguments. They haven't lost a single monopoly lawsuit either.
30% is a disgusting cut for a few gb of data on a virtual store front. It's having a negative impact on devs, and it only helps makes rich people richer. You don't get a networth of 9 to 11 billion by being fair and having consumers at heart. Steam and Gaben aren't your friends, they actively treat you and the industry as a bag of money to be exploited. They just have a really good marketing team.
I defend it because I love the service, and have used it for over a decade. I again will wait until the results of these lawsuits, as steam has won every other monopoly lawsuit in the past, and I personally believe for good reason as described in my comment above.
You can say the same thing about Amazon and Airbnb. None of them are bad products and they are all convenient, but they are having a negative impact. You don't directly feel it but the devs do and in the end, it does mean less quality and overall games for us.
I'm not calling for a boycott here but the minimum would be calling them out on it.
Nah, Amazon and airbndn do not remotely have comparable service to steam, I've personally had shitty experiences with both and know many others who have as well. I have many personal gripes with numerous of their business models, and they honestly deserve the hate they recieve. I've never personally had any negative experience with steam, nor has any singular person I know or have met and talked to steam about. I use the service daily, along with all of my friends, and its has been nothing but amazing, and has provided stellar service to me and all my friends for over a decade. The second a better service comes along, I'd be willing to switch, but as it stands every single other online gaming service is straight shit compared to steam, even Gog is going down the drain. I owe the ability to even play a third of the games I own to the work steam has done with proton. Everything I know and have seen about their work flow is also incredibly respectable, it seems to be an incredibly healthy Democratic work environment that promotes innovation and quality of content over pumping out bullshit. So far, the only reasoning I've seen you give as to why steam is bad is that they're a monopoly, which not only is false, but the accusations have only come on because of how massively successful they are due to having an objectively better service than anything else out there.
Okay, you seem to be missing the point.
It isn't about the effect on you but the effect on the industry as a whole. That's why they are similar.
Amazon and Airbnb both dominate the market. They both have a better product than their competitors. Exactly like steam, they abuse their position and have a long term negative impact on their respective scenes.
The article above is literally about how hard the gaming industry is having it. You would have a good product in any case, because the lion's share of the money being made isn't going to making steam better but going to filthy rich people like Gaben.
They have like 100 employees (the financial Times estimates they made about 11 million per employee in 2021), steam probably only needs to charge less then 1% to cover it's current expenses and salaries. All that money is being taken from devs (less games for us, more bankrupt studios) and being given to the top dogs (Gaben to buy boats).
I don't think there's much more to say. You seem to be really enthusiastic about supporting a billionaire's money extraction machine and can't understand that the effects of a company go further than your enjoyment of their product. You are defending the boot because it's fluffy and soft.
https://archive.ph/dmHDP (FT article)