Games

Gamers have gotten quite lucky so far that the company that has been in the position to turn the screws and establish a monopoly has been content to only make gobs of money, instead of trying to make all the money like pretty much every other entertainment industry.

People saying Steam doesn't have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.

While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.

Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.

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?

Competition sounds great, so long as it has all of the following:

• Something better than steam input and the steam controller.
• Something better than steam vr.
• Something better than steam workshop.
• something better than proton
• Something better than steams friends/chat/activity interface.
• Something better than the steam overlay.
• Something better than big picture.
• Absolutely no exclusives, and no deals forcing developers to use it.
• A nicer store interface than valve, with better community pages, curator pages, discussion pages, etc.
• An equivalent to steam fest with a strong demo scene.
• Something better than remote play together

This is of course also ignoring just how efficient, clean, customisable and ergonomic the steam interface is compared to all competition

Oh wait! That doesn't exist. All we need is some way to guarantee valve doesn't become public.

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.

This is a great opportunity to mention 15th Anniversary of GOG.

This is literally the most popular opinion.

Valve may not be the cheapest by any means, but that's because they're offering a product 30x as valuable. The other launchers companies have are shit, across the board, nothing but shit. It's not even in the same continent. If any one of these companies actually wants to ever see this change, they are going to have to set their greed aside. That's impossible for CEOs in this day and age, so I don't see Steam ever losing their stranglehold unless they do an about-face from everything they've done so far. In the grand scheme of things, Valve is one of the most customer friendly companies on the face of the Earth and they continue to be innovative and supportive to users. Epic on the other hand is everything wrong with capitalism, and much the same can be said for any of the other companies with competing launchers/game stores.

This opinion is in no way unpopular. Valve is privately owned and headed by a single individual with tremendous purpose of will, which is how they've done so many great things for the gaming industry. The issue lies with said leadership vacating their role (GabeN is getting old) and some greedy bastard taking the company in a wholy different direction. tl;dr: we need a strong competitor, but not now, and ABSOLUTELY not Epic.

I'd love competition in the Linux gaming space, but none of them even attempt to support it

Steam's de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can't break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can't move the needle.

Monopoly doesn't mean there's zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.

PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that's how many users each one has.

that's opposite of unpopular opinion lol

that being said, a healthy competition is still necessary as we don't know what valve would become post gabe

But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.

The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.

All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.

But for now.. it’s pretty good.

Needs more GOG

There are so many companies that have all the pieces to make good competition to Steam but their greed gets in the way. Microsoft in particular should have been a shoe-in for it, but GFWL was an embarrassing failure, the WIndows store is rubbish and insists on a new file format that (at least in the past) caused all kinds of issues for games, and now their Game Pass service has no focus on a buying element. This is without going into both Amazon and Google tripping on the starting line when it comes to getting in the gaming space. A launcher that was tied in with Amazon's web store would be a really quick way to get a lot of people in naturally.

I really wish more people used GoG to where it could be a competitor. Unfortunately the game selection is much lower due to companies turning their noses up at no DRM. Also, I will admit that I tend to buy things on Steam in favor of GoG due to a lot of the features Steam has.

I have no problem with competition, but don't force me to use your inferior product. If any of the major companies developed an actual competitor with the Steam launcher (in terms of features, not just a lousy storefront), it would likely get some use. If they somehow made it better than Steam, plenty of people would likely jump ship.

Epic is just a failure of a launcher. Nobody uses it over Steam by choice, because it's lacking in nearly every way. While I'm not big on exclusives, if the launcher was a reasonable Steam alternative, they wouldn't bother me nearly as much. As things stand, I'm firmly in the "fuck Epic" camp.

I d trust a privately own company with Gabe as the head than the asshats that proliferated micro transactions and shitty always online DRM for single player games.

The funny thing is that Valve kickstarted the digital sales with Half Life 2 back in 2004. Steam was an utter piece of shit for, what, some 6 years? It took them a lot of time to make it bearable, then good.

That the EGS launcher is a fucking Unreal app, needlessly bloated as fuck and with barely working UI shows their complete disregard for what is supposed to be their "money givers" (us, customers) and, like every other stupid company with their own launcher which manages to be worse than their fucking website, shows they refuse to learn the obvious.

I hope GOG never goes the enshitification path.

I'm one of the few who actually like the existence of Epic. Like, not necessarily Epic itself, but some serious competition is needed. I personally would've loved it if the competition was GOG, but it seems consumers don't particularly care about ownership, so we have Epic.

Valve supports linux gaming! The Steam Deck is awesome and with an even better configuration (or the rumored valve's own new steam machine) this is only getting better. So, only Valve gets my money.

I will always support valve because of their amazing Linux support but if GOG finally made a client for Linux then I would try to use that more. I wish Epic would also support Linux but with massive douchebag Tim Sweeney running the company, that will never happen.