This is a great opportunity to mention 15th Anniversary of GOG.
It’s incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.
I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.
But at the same time, they’re cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.
So we uncritically give them all the power.
Is Steam really a monopoly when Valve doesn’t try to stifle competition and no other company could be bothered (besides maybe GOG) to make a half decent store?
It is a monopoly - they just don’t abuse it as much against their audience.
For developers it’s either take their 30% deal or just don’t sell your game because a lot of people only use steam.
Not even Cyberpunk or the Witcher could sell more on gog than on steam even though you knew that there the developers got 100% of the money spent. Gwent standalone flopped so hard on GOG that it had to be rereleased with limited features on steam and sold more there
People are just fundamentally lazy so it totally is a problem that you have one store with such a massive market share even if it’s very convenient for the end-user they can completely exploit their position against publishers.
Sure EPICs way of making games exclusive to their store is not elegant but without that no-one would choose that store over steam
No, it’s not a monopoly. They aren’t even a gatekeeper as defined recently by the EU.
The most successful PC games (Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox) aren’t even on Steam.
That doesn’t mean anything. Jesus Christ these arguments that valve isn’t a monopoly are just so incredibly weak. They’ve created a fucking cult.
