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What do you think of this prediction?
(programming.dev)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Steam
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I don't understand this mentality. If we oppose monopolistic sales platforms when it's Amazon, Google Play, or the Apple store why should we turn a blind eye when suddenly we like a particular company.
I'm not contesting that Steam offers the best user experience by a mile (it truly beats Epic and Gog by miles), but that doesn't erase the downsides of having a single entity with a grip on the entire market.
I don't think it's quite as simple as "let's crack down on steam like other monopolies" as what do you crack down on?
They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).
All these other monopolies do lots of shady stuff to get and maintain their monopoly, so you generally want to stop them doing those things. Steam doesn't do anything shady to maintain it's monopoly it just carries on improving it's platform and ironically improving the users experience and other platforms outside of their own.
Like what do you do to stop steam being so popular outside of just arbitrarily making them shitter to make the other store fronts seem ok by comparison?
The 30% cut is often something cited and maybe that could be dropped slightly, but I'm happy for them to keep taking that cut if they continue to invest some of it back into the eco system.
Look at other platforms like Sony, MS who take 30% to sell on their stores, THEN charge you like £5 a month if you want multiplayer and cloud saves etc. Steam just gives you all this as part of the same 30%.
Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.
Steam has improved how I play games, it has cloud saves, virtual controllers, streaming, game sharing, remote play together, VR support, Mod support and this is all part of their 30%, the other platforms take same and do less, or take less but barely function as a platform.
Anti monopoly is great when a company is abusing it's position, but I don't feel Valve is, they are just genuinely good for pc gaming and have single handily made PC gaming a mainstream platform.
It is very much not clutching at straws to claim that. That policy is a major element of the Wolfire v. Valve case. You can also look at how despite charging a 12% platform fee, Epic Games Store does not sell games 18% cheaper.
It's an abuse of Steam's established market share and consumer habits to coerce publishers into not offering consumers a fair price on other platforms. It very literally stops EGS from competing on price, which is pretty much the only area where Epic can beat out Steam, since Steam otherwise is much more convenient, provides more functionality, and has more community-generated content (i.e. workshop material).
It's hard to say that isn't anti-competitive, especially because such a policy is only effective due to Steam's existing market share.
This is a fair complaint against Epic, I agree.
Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn't successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.
To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn't the case.
In terms of what is a "fair deal" we could quibble about the 30% but that's literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that's an "industry standard" so by all means lower it if they can, I'm all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.
For example if Valve personally came to me and said "you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features" I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.
Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn't change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.
Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don't see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.
I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front... Why wouldnt you?
Oh wow, lots to unpack here. Bear with me.
AFAIK still ongoing, looks like most recent filings were on 06/12.
The actual terms of the Steam Distribution Agreement are behind an NDA so we can't publicly know for sure, but Wolfire alleges that it applies to non-key sales (see points 204, 205, 207 of the Wolfire v. Valve filing)
Bit of a chicken and egg situation. Is Steam charging 30% because that's standard, or is the 30% standard because Steam charges it? Epic's attempt at 12% at the very least indicates the "industry standard" is much higher than it has to be, which is a good indicator of non-competitive behavior.
There is some slop in this argument because obviously the quality of platforms could influence this; but that is a bit moot due to the price policy preventing competitive pricing (see below).
That's great for you, but I'm sure we could find plenty of consumers who would make that trade. The choice should be available to them.
You can't point to current publisher behavior on EGS, because their behavior at present is influenced by Valve's price policy (called the "Platform Most Favored Nation" or "PMFN" clause in the court filing) which is the foundation of the anti-competitive case against Valve.
Re: concerns about publishers eating the difference. An ideal greedy publisher would drop the price on Epic by some amount in the middle—cheap enough to convince consumers to buy on Epic instead of Steam (since it yields more revenue to them) without making it too cheap that the difference in profit between a sale on Epic and a sale on Steam goes to 0.
This is how competition between platforms should work. It drives down the cost by some amount, but the publisher isn't going to pass up the chance to profit where they can.
I'm confused by your response here since this is addressed in my prior comment. Is there something not quite clear enough?
Steam clearly wins on features, the only metric to beat them on is price. Epic is trying to do so, but publishers are not actually lowering the cost on their platform because of Valve's policies—policies which are only effective because a publisher cannot afford to be delisted from Steam due its large market share.
There is too much to respond to all, will be interesting to see how the wolfire case continues then.
I just wanted to chime in on the last bit.
So as you say steam wins on features, and Epic and MS have both chosen not to compete on features. It's not that they can't, they both have the means and money to do so, they just don't want to invest the money on the infrastructure incase it's a big flop I guess.
Either way you are making out like the only valid perspective here is focusing on the game price, but as I said to me the feature set is VERY important. Literally the only reason I use steam over other platforms is the features, being able to use any controller and remap it to however I want. Knowing my saves can be transfered to any computer, streaming to the TV so the kids can play games on it etc.
I appreciate not everyone else uses these features, but some of us do, and this is why steam is the better platform. If MS let me stream games to my TV and use controllers properly etc I would happily get game pass, but their platform is rubbish, same for EGS.
This whole thing is just crap platforms complaining they can't compete when they havent even tried, they just want the free publicity in the hope they can get more users "in the door".