Humble Bundle Creator Brings Antitrust Lawsuit Against Valve Over Steam (arstechnica.com) 90
Indie developer (and Humble Indie Bundle originator) Wolfire Games has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Steam creator Valve, saying that the company is wielding Steam's monopoly power over the PC gaming market to extract "an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its storeâ"30%." Ars Technica reports: The lawsuit, filed in a Washington state federal court, centers on what it considers an illegal tying of the Steam gaming platform (which provides game library management, social networking, achievement tracking, Steam Workshop mods, etc.) and the Steam game store (which processes online payments and delivers a copy of the game). After years of growth, the vast majority of PC gamers are locked into the Steam platform thanks to "immense network effects" and the high switching costs to move to a new PC platform, the suit argues. That makes the platform "a must-have for game publishers," who need access to the players on Steam to succeed. But games that use the Steam platform also have to be sold on the Steam Store, where Valve takes its 30 percent cut of all sales. By leveraging its monopoly platform power into a "gatekeeper role" for the store, Valve "wield[s] extreme power over publishers of PC Desktop Games" that leads to a "small but significant and non-transitory increase in price" for developers compared to a truly competitive market, the suit argues.
The suit includes a laundry list of competitors that have tried to create their own platforms to take on Steam's monopoly, including CD Projekt Red, EA, Microsoft, Amazon, and Epic (not to mention "pure distributors" with platform-free stores like GameStop, Green Man Gaming, Impulse, and Direct2Drive). But the lawsuit argues that Steam's lock-in effects mean none of these stores have been able to make much of a dent in Valve's monopoly position, despite plenty of well-funded attempts. Even the Epic Games Store, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars securing exclusives and free game giveaways, has a market share of only "a little above 2 percent," according to one cited analysis (in an interview last June, Epic's Tim Sweeney estimated a more robust 15 percent market share for EGS).
"The failure of these companies to meaningfully compete against the Steam Gaming Platform shows it is virtually impossible as an economic matter to compete against the Steam Gaming Platform," the suit argues. "The Steam Gaming Platform has well-cemented dominance in the PC Desktop Gaming Platform Market, and given its unique and strong network effects, that is unlikely to change." The only meaningful way to avoid [Valve's] anticompetitive measures, the suit argues, is "to avoid using the Steam Gaming Platform at all." But Valve's monopoly position means that "there are no economically viable alternatives to the Steam Gaming Platform" for most PC games. While the suit acknowledges a few counterexamples (Riot's League of Legends is cited by name), such titles "typically require a long history of recognition and success before they can attempt to thrive without the Steam Gaming Platform," the suit says.
The suit includes a laundry list of competitors that have tried to create their own platforms to take on Steam's monopoly, including CD Projekt Red, EA, Microsoft, Amazon, and Epic (not to mention "pure distributors" with platform-free stores like GameStop, Green Man Gaming, Impulse, and Direct2Drive). But the lawsuit argues that Steam's lock-in effects mean none of these stores have been able to make much of a dent in Valve's monopoly position, despite plenty of well-funded attempts. Even the Epic Games Store, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars securing exclusives and free game giveaways, has a market share of only "a little above 2 percent," according to one cited analysis (in an interview last June, Epic's Tim Sweeney estimated a more robust 15 percent market share for EGS).
"The failure of these companies to meaningfully compete against the Steam Gaming Platform shows it is virtually impossible as an economic matter to compete against the Steam Gaming Platform," the suit argues. "The Steam Gaming Platform has well-cemented dominance in the PC Desktop Gaming Platform Market, and given its unique and strong network effects, that is unlikely to change." The only meaningful way to avoid [Valve's] anticompetitive measures, the suit argues, is "to avoid using the Steam Gaming Platform at all." But Valve's monopoly position means that "there are no economically viable alternatives to the Steam Gaming Platform" for most PC games. While the suit acknowledges a few counterexamples (Riot's League of Legends is cited by name), such titles "typically require a long history of recognition and success before they can attempt to thrive without the Steam Gaming Platform," the suit says.
Steam doesn't have a monopoly. (Score:3, Informative)
They were just first and still are the best - especially with their current refund policy. There are many worse alternatives. I do wish Valve would stop trying to make VR happen and make Linux not a shit desktop.
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> and make Linux not a shit desktop
They are. Their work has been instrumental at making Linux a viable desktop for everyday use.
If you want a non shitty desktop manager that is managed for you just get ChromeOS or Fedora and stop complaining.
Re: Steam doesn't have a monopoly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Steam doesn't have a monopoly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Put it another way, what percentage of the retail sale price ever went to the developer?
I'm sure once you factored in cost of physical media, transportation costs, margins taken by the store etc that you ended up with a lot less than 70% of the original sale price.
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Re: Steam doesn't have a monopoly. (Score:2)
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30% is not a high amount to pay for sales, marketing, distribution, and payment processing.
Aside from marketing, the true cost of the other 3 are essentially zero (cost of electricity). So in a competitive market, the price should approach zero.
Besides, the argument you're making for 30% applies just as much to 90%. After all, your are getting all of that done for you, without which you'd make 0%.
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If you think you could do it for less, try. To say marketing costs should be 0%, given the fact that Facebook and Google's entire practical revenue stems from ads, I think you are underestimating it.
Maybe you should read what I wrote:
Aside from marketing, the true cost of the other 3 are essentially zero (cost of electricity).
If you do include marketing, there's no upper limit to the amount a middleman can charge. See the music industry for example, where artists topping the charts still makes barely any money from music sales.
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Terrible analogy. You can't get Coke at Taco Bell and you can't get Pepsi at McDonald's and the same reason is why EA can start their own store and say 'screw you if you don't like how we do business'. The difference you're missing is a rather important one: customer demand for the product allows the producer of said products to dictate terms and the store either concedes or loses the product. The same thing applies to both locations you can buy certain sodas and the locations you can buy certain softwares.
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Holy shit you really are that dense aren't you? The markup on Coke is already around 400% to the wholesale location then another 50% on top of that total price just to buy in bulk from the wholesaler. A single bottle at retail level is around a 100% markup from the wholesaler"s cost depending on volume.
lol 30%...
You keep trying to sound smart but lack even the most basic understanding of how these markets work. The devs stuck with a 30% profit share with Steam are the bottom of the barrel devs pulling almos
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... I do wish Valve would stop trying to make VR happen and make Linux not a shit desktop.
If you don't want to play VR games then don't play them. Valve working to bring and improve VR to the gaming world has absolutely zero impact on your non-VR gaming experience. And Valve, unless they start to work on their own distro or DE can do nothing for the Linux desktop. If you think it's shit, then continue on with the Windows 10 spyware you're obviously using.
Re: Steam doesn't have a monopoly. (Score:2)
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Re: Steam doesn't have a monopoly. (Score:2)
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Re: Steam doesn't have a monopoly. (Score:2)
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When youre talking about your average user; not power user, not hardcore gamer; Windows offers little over Linux and even less over Mac. This is, of course, before you consider WINE, which I dont, as its not seamless for a mostly dumb user.
Everything you said is true, but the above is mooted by the fact that, unless your buying a Mac or Chromebook, you're getting a Windows machine. Your average user has little to no idea what an OS is, let alone how to search for and purchase one With a Linux distro preinstalled, and they damn sure don't know how to install it themselves even though it's pretty much a three click and a form away. Office is still king in the business world and LibreOffice isn't a plug and play replacement for it. Again, you
Re: Steam doesn't have a monopoly. (Score:2)
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Are you somehow not aware of gog.com, which lets me download and keep my installation binaries and doesn't make me play mother-may-I with single player offline game, nor force me in to using their weird launcher applications? In what way can I possibly call those terms worse than Steam?
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Are you somehow not aware of gog.com, which lets me download and keep my installation binaries and doesn't make me play mother-may-I with single player offline game, nor force me in to using their weird launcher applications? In what way can I possibly call those terms worse than Steam?
Are you somehow not aware you can launch a Steam game directly from the exe file, if it doesn't have DRM.
If a publisher decides to include DRM on steam you can't avoid launching the game through the Steam launcher, but that's a decision the publisher makes, not Valve.
Otherwise, with no DRM, you can open the game directly from its executable, no launcher required.
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Why should Valve work on making a linux desktop? They're a game distribution company.
And for what it's worth, I game exclusively on a linux box, and almost all of the games I play come from Steam. Their compatibility layer is fantastic. I haven't used any of the other game stores because they don't offer that. If they don't want Steam eating their lunch, they need to step up their game.
When my Mac using friend and myself on linux right click on our Windows 10 friend and select, "Join game", we join their ga
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i have 6+ milllion Valheim-ers who vote Steam here, none of them was complaining, not even the developers (i wonder why with that HUGE cut ? ahem
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A little late (Score:2)
When we had Impulse back in the day, we knew it was Steamworks more than Steam itself that was the key competitive advantage. But people forget that back then, multiplayer connectivity and the like was a significant hurdle for most game developers. Valve, more than anyone else, brought robust PC multiplayer to the mainstream. Requiring Steam to use Steamworks was very competitive at the time but given that Valve wasn't charging for it, it is also arguably a fair play.
But now, in 2021, there are plenty o
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Where is Steamworks mentioned?
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Steamworks is the mechanism under the covers that causes these games to require installing Steam.
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Until this fact changes in some meaningful way, there isnt a good reason to eliminate the monopoly from the end-user angle. It is only from the production side that this mon
Re: A little late (Score:1)
Except they have and they are doing well see epic
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Epic doesn't work on Linux.
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90% of popular software doesn't run on linux, why give a fuck now
Cry me a river and restore charity share (Score:2, Informative)
This is nothing but another attempt by the new owners of Humble Bumble to extract more of the money for themselves, especially after they capped the maximum that can be donated to charity (defeating their only reason to buy from them) If I want EA to get zero, I want EA to get zero, and all the cash to the charity.
Kinda a pity that Humble didn't do this before they blew it by leaking their capping of donations to 15%.
Re:Cry me a river and restore charity share (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this labelled as informative? The lawsuit is being done by the old owners of Humble Bundle, not the new owners.
Jeff Rosen and John Graham both stood down as CEO and COO respectively in March 2019 and are now president and CEO of Wolfire Games. That means they had absolutely nothing to do with the recent decision to remove the payment sliders from Humble, and IGN/Humble has nothing to do with this lawsuit.
Oh no, 15%! (Score:1)
They got the wrong monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
Origin, MS's store, Epic's store, GoG Impulse, Apple's store, physical stores, etc and most of these from companies that dwarf Valve in size.
You can install literally any other store you like on your machine and very few Steam games are exclusive to them (outside their games which are mostly 10-20 years old) nor are prices generally lower than other stores.
Steam only dominates because they are better, easier, and less intrusive.
If they're going to bust digital stores, Nintendo's store, Playstation Store, Xbox Live, Apple's App Store, etc where you can't install alternatives should be much, much higher on the list.
Actually different, or whiny babies? (Score:3)
Back in the day, companies would make games and sell them in the retail stores. I bought many a game from the nearby Target store. I wonder what percentage they were getting. You want prime retail placement for your product, be prepared to pay for it.
Also, if a company makes a good game, does the legwork with the press, and puts out a decent demo, I'll be glad to fork over full price, provided they don't want me to install THEIR OWN $#@%! game store. Just make a good game and sell it.
AFAIK, Humble bundle is just another middleman anyway.
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They don't have a case (Score:2)
by their own admission. From TFA:
"The failure of these companies to meaningfully compete against the Steam Gaming Platform shows it is virtually impossible as an economic matter to compete against the Steam Gaming Platform,"
Yeah, either that or none of the competition has managed to create an alternative offering good enough to entice players away from Steam.
What this indie development firm is complaining about is lack of venue choice to publish their work, understandably (and they're way too small to roll their own, obviously) but they fail to establish the anti-competitive practice bit from Valve. Strictly-speaking, it may just be that Steam just is better than anything that's come since.
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> and they're way too small to roll their own, obviously
Why can't people download their game from their website?
Many software developers sell direct.
Steam deserves its monopoly (Score:2)
Steam provides prices based on the purchasing-power-parity of the country it is selling in. Sure valve is evil, but the so-called "serious attempts" have never even attempted to breach any market that is outside of the richest countries, including Humble Bundle. How difficult is it? Not at all. Is Valve evil? Sure. But Steam has a huge market share because it provides services that others chose not to. That means they are not competing in the same market, which means Steam isn't a monopoly.
"Switching costs" is a canard (Score:2, Informative)
There's no "switching costs" for gamers, because there's no "switching". You can very easily have and use multiple games platforms installed at the same time.
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Not really. I mean, sure I can, but really I want a centralized repository of games. Now, if Steam by default installed games so they were launched the same as other programs, your OS app launching UI would be that centralized repository. But Steam specifically makes it harder by inserting it as a different UI to choose among games.
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Only if the developer designed it that way. I've got a bunch of games purchased through Steam that run just fine without the Steam client running. A lot of indie studios just make a game and aren't thinking about Steam integration. All Steam does is call their executable, and maybe pass it an IP address or password.
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Yes, the software still exists and you can navigate to the executable. But the creation of shortcuts into the same location as my other shortcuts isn't automatic like it is with every other program installer.
I'm not saying that I like Steam's monopoly, what I'm saying is the boring argument that anyone can build another store ignores that aspect.
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I can, sure. But a surprising number of people cannot. And markets need mass numbers.
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That was exactly my point. Most people will load it through he launcher and Steam hijacked that. There is only room in the market for one of those.
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The big caveat on there is that they don't have all games, because some publishers think that not having DRM damages their profit. That one is on the publishers to be honest.
And the games that you get on there might not have all multi-player features enabled (if they were developed for Steamworks for example). That one is on the developers. Though I can understand their decision here as they will have to go with the platform that has the highest market share first. All the other platforms ar
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really I want a centralized repository of games.
That's what GoG Galaxy offers. Steam isn't stopping anybody from building such a platform.
But Steam specifically makes it harder by inserting it as a different UI to choose among games.
It doesn't. There are tons of DRM free games on Steam and once you have downloaded the game you can just uninstall Steam and run the game on it's own by whatever means your OS provides. Steam doesn't force developers to make use of any Steam-specific features in their games and many developers don't.
I really don't see how one can make an argument for a monopoly, when de facto there are tons of games that not only are s
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Every half serious gamer will already have Uplay, Origin, GoG Galaxy, Epic Game Launcher, Oculus App or Viveport on their system along with Steam. The choice is already there, it's not Steam's fault that most of those other launchers and shops aren't any good.
Just Steam here. The others do not offer enough of an incentive to create an account with their services.
Re:"Switching costs" is a canard (Score:4, Insightful)
And the other games platforms are generally crap in comparison to steam, which is why hardly anyone voluntarily installs them. Most people who have them installed do so only because it's required by some games, either because of platform-exclusive games or because it's bundled with a game.
In fact, if there's any anti-competitive activity, it's the bundling going by the operators of other game stores.
I can't buy EA, Epic, or Microsoft games on steam without it being bundled with their shitty game store software (which doesn't even run natively on my OS, Linux) and their shitty DRM & their shitty spyware.
If I buy games from any of those producers on steam, I don't want to be forced to have an account on their service, I don't want them to have my personal information to spam and abuse, and I don't want to be forced to fuck around trying to run their shitty app-store under Proton or directly with WINE. If I buy a game in steam, I expect it to either run natively on linux or from steam with proton, without their shitty, unwanted app store being forced on me.
But I can't for games from those companies....so, I don't buy those games.
It's why, for example, I've only played Mass Effect 1 & 2, and Dead Space 1 & 2, and Crysis 1 & 2, but not any of the later sequels. It's why I've never played several other games that were never made available on Steam because their producers decided they wanted to run their own online game stores and thought that fucking over potential customers with exclusive-content bullshit was a good idea.
For years, the newer sequels of those games weren't even available on Steam. Now some of them are, but only bundled with app stores that I don't want and that either don't work at all in proton/wine or require far more fucking around to get working than they're worth. So, I'm still not going to buy them.
(and fuck Rockstar games too, for forcing me to have an account on their shitty Rockstar Social Club - which prevented me, for several weeks, from playing the La Noire and Max Payne 3 and other games that I bought because of their incompetence and broken servers during their launch of GTA V - a game which I hadn't bought and still have no interest in ever buying or playing. Rockstar, EA, and Epic are all on my "fuck 'em, don't buy" list for egregious arseholery).
Re: "Switching costs" is a canard (Score:2)
And the other games platforms are generally crap in comparison to steam, which is why hardly anyone voluntarily installs them.
Nobody installs Steam because Steam is awesome, and that hasn't changed much since its launch. "I need to install WHAT to play Day of Defeat now?"
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A game store/launcher doesn't have to be "awesome". It just has to not suck.
And a huge part of not sucking is not treating you as a captive audience to spam and force advertising and spyware on. And another huge part of not sucking is NOT trying to force me to be a customer with monopolistic crap like exclusive games, and NOT forcing me to install their store/launcher/spyware by bundling it with games I buy on another platform (i.e. steam). And NOT forcing "always online" even for single-player games (st
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There's no "switching costs" for gamers, because there's no "switching". You can very easily have and use multiple games platforms installed at the same time.
There is because in pre steam days you got the entire game with multiplayer code inside the exe, they started stealing networking code out of games in 97 with ultima online. You don't seem to grasp the industry has been engaged in industrial level PC game theft since the 90's because there is no reason for any game to be divided into two sets of files and programmed client server unless they were trying to steal the game.
Since the ignorant mmo, steam and windows 10 loving masses have fucked over the PC as
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There's no "switching costs" for gamers, because there's no "switching". You can very easily have and use multiple games platforms installed at the same time.
Yes and no. In some case there are no costs. In others there are. Some examples:
Non online games:
- Without user content there are no additional costs. The game will run the same on different platforms. Sure Epic games and Microsoft have both horribly screwed up cloud saves resulting in users losing progress, but beyond that it's all window dressing such as achievements.
- For games with user content on the other hand there is a huge cost to the end user. For example you can buy Cities Skylines from Epic Game
I'm super anti-monopoly, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
...in this case, it really and truly is a matter of (nearly) all the Steam alternatives completely and utterly sucking shit.
GOG, arguably Battle.net. Those are the two alternatives with a functional launcher and a storefront that doesn't induce vomiting. If we're including just-storefronts, then Gamersgate too, I guess. Everything else is pathetically-transparently the result of a bunch of suit-wearing dipshits who haven't actually played a game outside a tech demo context in years if not decades - the repugnant sort of creatures who have almost certainly popped boners looking at spreadsheets - looking at Steam and going "we need one of those", then demanding tons of intrusive advertisements ("we need brand awareness", "the consumer needs to be reminded where they are"), cheaping out on the server power required to achieve 99% uptime (note how even when Steam storefront goes down during the big sales, the client you use to actually launch the games nearly always remains functional - because Valve understands the order of operations and won't redirect/repurpose their auth servers to try and squeeze a few more store views (sales) out of the cluster), and offering no reason whatsoever to believe that they won't bail out after a few unprofitable years, leaving customers stuck with unplayable games.
I sort of hate myself for writing that, because I think corporate brand fanboyism is absolutely gross, and that paragraph really sounds like it's being spoken from around Valve's dick, but it is true, and it's hard to honestly compare Steam to the competitors without sounding like a massive fanboy. Steam might not be perfect, but it does a lot of things very, very right.
And there's the tiny little issue that unlike, say, Apple's App Store, companies are always free to release their games on other services as well as Steam. And unlike Netflix or Hulu, there's no "exclusivity contracts" or similar incentives to politely-coerce a pseudo-monopoly - it doesn't matter if I release a game on twenty different storefronts as well as Steam and even take out a Super Bowl commercial touting their availability on every single storefront but Steam, Valve takes the same cut as they would if I released exclusively on Steam.
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So very true.
I have Steam, GOG, Epic Game Store, Origin, Battle.net and a few others installed on my PC.
Now let's take a look at third parties. Isthereanydeal.com allows me to sign in using Steam account. No others. I don't know why. Do other stores allow signing in to 3rd parties using the store ID (via API, OAuth, whatever)? No idea. I can then link my Steam wishlist to isthereanydeal and be notified when games' prices dip below a certain threshold which I set up (per game, if I want to). I can do the sam
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Bingo. Steam is the only platform so far that understands that they're in a two-way transaction with gamers and actually tries to be worth people's ram and processor cycles. The crazy sales wouldn't be worth shit if steam were a bloated resource hog that took forever to start up and made actually playing your games a pain in the ass.
Re:I'm super anti-monopoly, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
The last paragraph is the real meat of this comment.
Valve is doing literally nothing to lock developers into their platform. They don't mandate DRM. They don't mandate that you take payments through Steam. They aren't the only source of games for any platform, even the Steam Machines. You can even stream non-Steam games through their streaming functionality, in many cases.
Valve is doing nothing anticompetitive.
I rubbed an editor the wrong way already (Score:2)
Comment score down 1 point with no comment history available.
This is why we can't have nice things. Like sensible conversations.
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Sour grapes much? (Score:2)
The thing is, for PC gamers, Steam just works.
The argument over DRM and not being able to actually sell second hand games anymore, is one for another time - the entire industry is up to their necks in that debacle.
I've never actually questioned whether Steam is good or bad for the PC game industry, because it seems to be pretty damn healthy to me.
The sheer volume of unique, independently produced games actually managing to cut through the behemoths is testament to the success of the platform.
Many of these w
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Steam is a fair bit older than Half-Life 2 and actually started out as optional. Back then it was called "tracker" iirc.
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Oh - thanks for that, teach me not to do my homework!
I guess, for many, Half-Life2 was the first introduction to Steam - and many remember cursing it heavily.
"What, you mean I can't play this store bought game until I get Steam to actually connect?"
I recall at the time, there was a huge furore about it, as high speed internet was exceptionally rare.
It was taking days for many folk to actually be able to play a game they purchased.
One other thing I should mention in favour of Valve and Steam, is cross platfo
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For the rest, yes, it just works. Including streaming game
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You can work around that limitation by entering offline mode or by manually starting the .exe without Steam in case of DRM-free games.
But generally speaking, this isn't really an isolated Steam issue, but really an industry wide issue in that it's not clear how much you "own" digital goods. Selling your "used copies" is hardly ever possible, so is lending them and if you die, all your digital library dies with you, as transferring accounts is explicitly forbidden in most of the ToSs. Even transferring licen
I'm either too sleepy or (Score:2)
is this company seriously arguing the steam store has a monopoly over the steam workshop, and possibly wanting free access to the steam workshop?
I seem to recall (Score:2)
Buying a few games on GOG, itch.io, and Humble. And I even bought a couple last year directly from the developer. Obviously there is a calculation developers and publishers do in the lower margins on Steam versus the higher sales volume.
Nintendo, Sony, Xbox, Google, and Apple have far more of a monopoly on their console and mobile platforms. It's a real challenge for end-users to buy games outside of their respective walled garden.
Sounds like an advertising problem. (Score:2)
It's a tough, but fundamental issue across the board. At what point in a gatekeepers lifecycle are they required to play fair with the underlings? I get what these folks are saying. This isn't much different than the arguments about Google or Alibaba.
It really comes down to the anti-trust laws. How far do you want to dial them up or down? The more regulations, the slower you build businesses. Too many regulations will stifle the small guy without the cash. Not enough and you're stifled by the lar
thanks to epic i doubt the suit can go anywhere (Score:2)
These other platforms are not angels (Score:2)
If game companies had sense they'd step back and think of a
This comes from the same company that just...... (Score:1)
This comes from the same company that just this month introduced a **mandatory 30%** humble "tip" which previously was voluntary.
They should be very quiet at this point.
Story here: https://games.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
Bogus Complaint (Score:2)
To be honest, it would be pretty easy to address: all the FTC would need to do would be to outlaw the practice of allowing the platforms to force exclusives. In other words, any game developer should be fr
Translation for those who don't speak bulls*** (Score:2)
centers on what it considers an illegal tying of the Steam gaming platform (which provides game library management, social networking, achievement tracking, Steam Workshop mods, etc.) and the Steam game store (which processes online payments and delivers a copy of the game).
Translation: We don't seem to realise that every other store has or is developing social features, and that Steam just offers more, and we want the courts to help our "sales only" platform succeed.
After years of growth, the vast majority of PC gamers are locked into the Steam platform thanks to "immense network effects"
Translation: We offer no compelling alternative to Steam, but that doesn't sound like a good legal argument so we'll claim network effects instead and hope the courts buy our bullshit.
But games that use the Steam platform also have to be sold on the Steam Store, where Valve takes its 30 percent cut of all sales.
Translation: We've never heard of the concept of Steam keys which do not take a 30% cut, we don't realise that the 30% is not a fla
Maybe if they would make something better... (Score:2)
The suit includes a laundry list of competitors that have tried to create their own platforms to take on Steam's monopoly, including CD Projekt Red, EA, Microsoft, Amazon, and Epic
CD Projekt Red has problems making games so that is no surprise
EA doesn't have the library to justify Origin.
The Windows Store is a fucking mess that doesn't run well at all and is full of fucking spam.
Amazon doesn't have a library either, and it an extra charge on top of the Prime sub
Epic doesn't have the library to compete and uses money from children gambling addictions to fund exclusives. Which just pushing me to TPB and not Epic.