EGS's uselessness and Timmy Tencent's antics have only driven more people to Steam. It's hard to feel bad about a "monopoly" when the "competition" is this catastrophically incompetent.
Steam is more or less a monopoly, but that really isn't the problem in this particular case it's just a natural development of a service that is just better than the others.
A monopoly is only problematic if the monopoly was created by killing off the other services.
I mean steam does force you to sell the game everywhere for the same price ( so you cant for example offer it for cheaper on gog or epic ) which you can argue kills other services beacuse they cant offer price advantage.
Obviusly it still dosent change the fact thay the competition in this case is at best incompetent.
Other than a specific ongoing court case, there is no evidence that Valve requires people to sell their games for the same price everywhere.
If there are found that there are back door policies for this - then yes - that needs to be stopped, because people should have the right to sell anywhere at any price
But even if found to be true, thats not proof of a monopoly, its anti-competitive behavior. (which is also bad)
A monopoly means there is only one person in town who sells a good or service, and literally no-one else offers that product or service
Steam is not a monopoly.
What everyone should be debating instead is "Does steam abuse its market power and instill anti-competive practices on the market to stifle competition" - Thats what the wolfire case is about, and it has nothing to do with monopoly
Monopoly is the smoking gun everyone wants to catch Valve with - but as long as people can run stand alone games, Steam will never have a monopoly.
What is the anti competitive behavior that they are claiming though? Being a monopoly is not a crime. Being anti-competitive is.
I don't see Valve buying smaller companies or promoting their own games or pushing for Steam-exclusive games.
Literally every big company in the gaming industry other than Valve is anti competitive. Sony is notorious for exclusives and Epic is also trying to replicate that strategy.
There is an ongoing court case (wolfire) where they claim that Valve pressures developers to sell their games at the same price across all platforms. Its not part of Valves official policies, but Wolfire claim its a secret unhidden rule they enforce.
Im a big supporter of Valve, but if this is actually true, then they need to stop this behaviour.
For example, a developer should be able to sell their game on their own website for $10, and $15 on steam if they want to.
Isnt actual steam competition gog ? They are actually doing something interesting that makes it worth buying games from them wheras esg just bribed its way into launcher space by using fortnite and free games and it seems no one uses it for anything else.
GoG is competition in the sense that they provide a meaningful alternative: they're the best source of retro PC games and DRM-free gaming. However, after buying a few games on GoG, I found I wasn't actually PLAYING them, and rebought a couple (Alpha Centauri, Frostpunk 1, and Saboteur) on Steam.
What I don't understand is how they have so many competent devs working on Unreal Engine and how they can't hire a proper team of 5-10 developers for the Epic Games store. I have never seen a horribly crippled app stay crippled for this long (5+ years), while their user base is probably in millions.
There is no way to play games while appearing offline in chat. There is no profile customization. There is no way to submit a text review for a game. There are no community forums, mods, workshop, guides, etc. (have they EVER played a game themselves?).
On the mobile store, you can't even see which games you bought. There is NO library (what the fuck). The only way to know if you own something is to try downloading it again and see if the store asks for payment.
I feel like most of this can be blamed on either Timmy Tencent being pathologically afraid of anything that would make EGS look and feel like Steam, or Tencent proper being afraid of anything that could give users free expression. What if users start posting pro-Taiwan memes?
I mean they could just auto-ban any review that expresses political views against their ideology. It's pretty easy to do these days with AI. At least the majority of people actually reviewing the game could still post their review if they had that feature.
Right now the situation is so bad that whenever a new free game drops on Epic, it instantly becomes the most searched game on steam (just click on the search bar and it'll show up as trending). Imagine being so horrible as a distributor that people physically cannot tell what kind of product you're selling so people look elsewhere just to understand the product before getting it from you for free.
Yeah if you have a launcher and you literally have one job which is a good store page for games but you can't even get that right, you should fail. Fucken hate the fact that the store page lacks any details and I have to go to Steam to find my details.
The entire thrust of Epic's argument was that they were going to be the "competition" and take Steam's market share; so far they have dismally failed to do so. If someone is opposed to both Epic AND Steam, the only remaining options are GoG, or piracy.
https://preview.redd.it/63ebtmixircg1.jpeg?width=1210&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1cc617d8cf77f6502c897f06b046b4f3a9097ffa
LOL this is how I imagine the battle between Steam and Epig
i love the pig nose... great touch!!!
Hahahaha Oh yay baby ... Fuck Timmy, fuck epig. Fuck Fortnite.....
EGS's uselessness and Timmy Tencent's antics have only driven more people to Steam. It's hard to feel bad about a "monopoly" when the "competition" is this catastrophically incompetent.
And yet Epic is going to lobby that Steam is infact a monopoly because they're doing the best
Steam is more or less a monopoly, but that really isn't the problem in this particular case it's just a natural development of a service that is just better than the others.
A monopoly is only problematic if the monopoly was created by killing off the other services.
I mean steam does force you to sell the game everywhere for the same price ( so you cant for example offer it for cheaper on gog or epic ) which you can argue kills other services beacuse they cant offer price advantage.
Obviusly it still dosent change the fact thay the competition in this case is at best incompetent.
Other than a specific ongoing court case, there is no evidence that Valve requires people to sell their games for the same price everywhere.
If there are found that there are back door policies for this - then yes - that needs to be stopped, because people should have the right to sell anywhere at any price
But even if found to be true, thats not proof of a monopoly, its anti-competitive behavior. (which is also bad)
A monopoly means there is only one person in town who sells a good or service, and literally no-one else offers that product or service
Steam is not a monopoly.
What everyone should be debating instead is "Does steam abuse its market power and instill anti-competive practices on the market to stifle competition" - Thats what the wolfire case is about, and it has nothing to do with monopoly
Monopoly is the smoking gun everyone wants to catch Valve with - but as long as people can run stand alone games, Steam will never have a monopoly.
What is the anti competitive behavior that they are claiming though? Being a monopoly is not a crime. Being anti-competitive is.
I don't see Valve buying smaller companies or promoting their own games or pushing for Steam-exclusive games.
Literally every big company in the gaming industry other than Valve is anti competitive. Sony is notorious for exclusives and Epic is also trying to replicate that strategy.
There is an ongoing court case (wolfire) where they claim that Valve pressures developers to sell their games at the same price across all platforms. Its not part of Valves official policies, but Wolfire claim its a secret unhidden rule they enforce.
Im a big supporter of Valve, but if this is actually true, then they need to stop this behaviour.
For example, a developer should be able to sell their game on their own website for $10, and $15 on steam if they want to.
The Wolfire case has been going on for half a decade now with basically no new evidence presented. How can Wolfire afford it?
Isnt actual steam competition gog ? They are actually doing something interesting that makes it worth buying games from them wheras esg just bribed its way into launcher space by using fortnite and free games and it seems no one uses it for anything else.
GoG is competition in the sense that they provide a meaningful alternative: they're the best source of retro PC games and DRM-free gaming. However, after buying a few games on GoG, I found I wasn't actually PLAYING them, and rebought a couple (Alpha Centauri, Frostpunk 1, and Saboteur) on Steam.
What I don't understand is how they have so many competent devs working on Unreal Engine and how they can't hire a proper team of 5-10 developers for the Epic Games store. I have never seen a horribly crippled app stay crippled for this long (5+ years), while their user base is probably in millions.
There is no way to play games while appearing offline in chat. There is no profile customization. There is no way to submit a text review for a game. There are no community forums, mods, workshop, guides, etc. (have they EVER played a game themselves?).
On the mobile store, you can't even see which games you bought. There is NO library (what the fuck). The only way to know if you own something is to try downloading it again and see if the store asks for payment.
I feel like most of this can be blamed on either Timmy Tencent being pathologically afraid of anything that would make EGS look and feel like Steam, or Tencent proper being afraid of anything that could give users free expression. What if users start posting pro-Taiwan memes?
I mean they could just auto-ban any review that expresses political views against their ideology. It's pretty easy to do these days with AI. At least the majority of people actually reviewing the game could still post their review if they had that feature.
Right now the situation is so bad that whenever a new free game drops on Epic, it instantly becomes the most searched game on steam (just click on the search bar and it'll show up as trending). Imagine being so horrible as a distributor that people physically cannot tell what kind of product you're selling so people look elsewhere just to understand the product before getting it from you for free.
It's pretty wild how often this happens, That's a lot of damn people.
Damn, Steams growing? Crazy how a good service will generally have growth.
Yeah if you have a launcher and you literally have one job which is a good store page for games but you can't even get that right, you should fail. Fucken hate the fact that the store page lacks any details and I have to go to Steam to find my details.
ye fuck epic
u love to see it, folks
and thats why we all know gabe newell is superior in the gaming community
Did something new Launch? Why today?
[deleted]
Are you Tim's alt account?
The entire thrust of Epic's argument was that they were going to be the "competition" and take Steam's market share; so far they have dismally failed to do so. If someone is opposed to both Epic AND Steam, the only remaining options are GoG, or piracy.
even itchio and zoom platform are not bad https://www.zoom-platform.com/
What I thought as well