More like it’s compatition is so shit, it doesn’t have to lift a finger to stay in the lead.
Valve lives rent free in Epic’s heads
Atari was saying the exact same thing about “PONG” back in the late 70’s. Hello PONG? Where are you PONG? PONG?
Valve wins by doing absolutely nothing
People are tired of being milked and anti consumer practices.
Steam is the only company doing what we expected.
itch and gog are both great storefronts and I continue to buy games from both of those. At this point the only person who can defeat Steam is Steam itself. You might laugh but I’ve seen a change in leadership absolutely destroy companies before. Let us all pray that Gaben lives forever. The next person might run Steam into the ground to make himself richer, just like all our American CEO’s.
All Steam had to do is something that has long been forgotten by lot of companies these days. Treat customers well and make them feel they are the main priority.
Lot of other companies know they can treat customers like crap and still make money, and even outright reject them like Crucial deciding enterprise customers buying millions to billions in bulk sales is all they need.
Many companies think customers can be forced to buy from them. Like Epic did with exclusives and thinking sounds bites taunting Steam would wins hearts and minds. Meanwhile steam just quietly focused on improvements to their own services without acknowledging Epic.
The performance complaints were also stupid.
Valve had their boot time fixed in beta channel for weeks
Only an idiot would have put out a marketing blitz about it when the sword of Damocles is swinging above them.
What’s with all the shade on GOG and itch? They’re great, and arguably serve other segments of the gaming market better already. The only difference is that Steam has a dominant position in online and AAA PC gaming, which is all corpos actually care about.
They are ignored in conversations like this because their existence undermines the monopoly accusations aimed at Steam. Talk like this isn’t about the reality, but trying to tear Steam down so Epic can compete without having to actually provide a good product.
Wish people would start asking Epic why they aren’t letting Alan Wake 2 be released on GOG and itch, since they act like Steam is the only platform and attack it to avoid being asked why they are holding the game hostage from coming out on other platforms.
100% on point
Epic doesnt want to compete. It wants a to have a nice fat profit to he carved out for it so it can keep its investors happy with forever growth.
epic should fucking die and its c suite should be used to reproduce the Tuskegee experiment.
I guess I could have been more accurate by saying that Epic wants a larger market share without having to provide a quality product.
Tim Sweeney would rather die than see another company get a single cent of income from fortnite.
It‘s a quasi monopoly. Their service cannot be ignored if you want your product to succeed on the market. You cannot choose a valid alternative. This is not about malevolence on Valve’s side, but a market reality.
To maximize sales, you do need to put your product on Steam. That doesn’t mean it is a monopoly.
Steam likely could leverage their market position to become a monopoly, but they aren’t one now. Just because they are a vital part to any large scale game launch doesn’t make them a monopoly, quasi or otherwise.
I don’t think it is a particularly healthy market, and I wish there were even more options. That doesn’t change the fact all the monopoly talk has been driven by bad faith actors trying to attack steam without any real cause.
Not maximizing sales, having any sales to speak of at all.
So people put their games on Epic, GOG, itch, Xbox, PS5 and whatever else for funsies? Definitely not because people buy their game from those places. They can even put their game up on those other marketplaces without any penalty from steam. Almost like there are alternatives available. Having the largest market share and having large influence in a market does not equal a monopoly.
quasi monopoly
Saying it again doesn’t make it less wrong. They are in a position where they could possibly use anticompetitive practices to become a monopoly or close to it. Currently they are not, and are not a quasi monopoly either. They simply have created a well rounded service that is preferred by a majority in the PC space.
If you want the store front to take a smaller cut then you can sell on itch. If you want to buy games without DRM then check out GOG. If you like shitty service, venture capitalists, enshittification, and AI slop then Epic has you covered.
It’s not. The only reason people see it as such is because valve has consumers trust they act in the consumers best interest.
Other companies hate this, because it doesn’t allow them to do some anti consumer practices
It is for publishers as customers, not for users of course. You can’t realistically navigate around their service if you want to make money with your game.
You can’t realistically navigate around their service if you want to make money with your game.
Where are you getting this from? Yes you can absolutely do this. Mojang did this for decades a la Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress did this for decades. Roblox is massive. World of Warcraft, I mean, yes you can absolutely make a hit title, sell well, and have nothing to do with Steam.
Edit: The most recent example right now is Hytale, which is purposely not on Steam and reached 1M+ active players in the first week.
blizzard was really doing well with diablo and overwatch before they decided to be stupid af. now those games are on steam LOL
dear blizzard: too late LOL
Destiny too, like it wasn’t like they were doing bad before bringing titles over to Steam. It’s clear they wanted more money which is why they did that lol. They were already making plenty and decided they wanted to make more
You’re listing absolute unicorns. Ask any dev/publisher that want to release a game and they will 100% not skip Steam.
That’s a lot of Unicorns that don’t fit your narrative lol. I could list more, but I think I already proved my point. Yes it’s possible to publish a game and be successful without Steam, and yes it’s been done multiple times across the existence of Steam.
There is definitely a strong network effect. If Valve started enshittifying, it is impossible for customers to completely switch to a competitor without losing their community, their game library, their game controller, their gaming portable, and access to steam-exclusive games.
It is very much an early Facebook situation, but Valve has never enshittified.
Sorry home slice, but those facts you’re dropping are a little too accurate for ol’ Timbo’s liking.
Haven’t had someone hit me with ‘home slice’ in a minute. Flameo, hotman.
People use capitalism to mean anything involving commerce, I guess.
The fact that valve is privately owned and the profits go to the owner instead of the labor isn’t really the reason steam is dominant. A worker owned co-op could have succeeded by making the same product. Though if they were beholden to shareholders who demanded a profit, it probably would have resulted in a worse product. An argument against capitalism, with uninvolved owners taking profits, if anything.
They made a product people like. Boo-boo. Epic could have made a good product. They didn’t.
To be fair, by nearly all accounts, Valve treats (and compensates) their employees very well. I think that compensation may also include profit-sharing but I might be wrong.
Witness the efficiency of capitalism
-> a whiny man baby at the very tippity top of a shitty corporation complains about his rivals offering too good of a product repeatedly over and over again.
It’s the logical continuation of Gabe’s law. He said piracy was a service issue and that people would be willing to pay for the product is the service was good.
Epic tried and win by the venture capitalist playbook and give away free shit and undercut the incumbents to steal away their customers. Unfortunately that doesn’t work because their service is shit, and Valve has incredible soft capital built up.
I probably have 30 free games on Epic. I have literally ended up buying some of those same games on Steam because the user experience of Epic is so bad.
The epic games launcher looks and feels like a virus. I tried to grab a free game from them once and had a visceral reaction to the launcher lol
It’s like Walmart vs Costco.
Yours is definitely the best explanation of the circumstances. Epic saw games as the product they were selling. Gamers can pirate games, so the free game you want with some hoops to jump through vs a free game you didn’t ask for with some hoops to jump through is a weak value proposition. Valve sees Steam as the product. It’s not just a good library manager, it’s a store with decent discovery and relatively accurate user reviews, and a moderately useful multiplayer experience. If they had felt the pressure to incorporate TeamSpeak, then Discord wouldn’t even exist, but that was money Valve didn’t have to spend to still be more convenient than piracy.
I don’t make a lot of money, so I’ve gotten value out of the free games on Epic, but their launcher is terrible for figuring out what I’d like to play next. Playnite has ended up being an incredibly useful launcher, because it can consolidate launcher libraries, then show me which games I haven’t played, then sort them by critic score or user score.
Keeping customers happy, no bullshit, that’s all.
Kiaran Ritchie, former principal animation engineer at Epic Games kicked off discussions surrounding Steam’s 30% sales cut last week (with the assertion that “you could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week”).
It turns out “some other company will make more money” isn’t a compelling sales pitch for your store. Who knew
It took Steam so long to add a shopping cart, because there weren’t many games in Steam at that time anyway. And it took so long for Epic Games to add a shopping cart, because nobody wanted to buy many games on Epic anyway (due to either Fortnite only play or just to grab Free Game giveaways).
Lol, the only real competition would be GoG, not fucking Epic
Itch.io has a lot of games too. 😊
That’s a different breed of game though. Itcho is indie dialed to 11. It can be difficult for a lot of people to get into the games there.
It’s also really hard to find things on itch if you don’t know what you’re looking for by name when you go. I can go to Steam and just browse the storefront and find things that’re relevant to my interests, but that’s almost impossible on itch. Partly it’s because there’s just so MUCH content that filtering it down to what I want to see is difficult, partly it’s because their filtering and search tools are absolutely trash tier, and partly it’s because they have zero discoverability built into their platform.
Agreed. GoG is the Nintendo of the consoles, where it does not try to compete on the same level as the other two. Off course not at the same success and without the exclusives, I just mean they try to be different and offer something the others don’t.
Epic actually make a good product challenge
level: impossible
No wonder they think its impossible, because they vibe code everything now.
No disagreement hating on vibe-coding, but that has nothing to do with it. Making a good product went directly against Epic’s customer-exploitation goals long before that became a thing.
I know, I was just making a cheeky comment. What I actually meant is, it won’t change by just vibe coding it.
