The most promising Disco Elysium successor studio says workers must unite to topple Valve's 'digital fiefdom' of Steam
The most promising Disco Elysium successor studio says workers must unite to topple Valve's 'digital fiefdom' of Steam
Until any competing store releases a Linux client, I can't really argue against Steam. They are a gatekeeper and almost a monopoly, but they're also the most benevolent and pro-consumer gatekeeper that we have in the PC gaming distribution space. As long as all the competition continue to be Windows-only and, in some cases, actively work against Linux users, I don't want Valve's digital fiefdom to fall.
I'm not sure "gatekeepr" is the right term when all you do is simply being better for your customers than anyone else. Like, Ubisoft, EA, Epic, they all are garbage companies. GOG is the only store I'd mildly consider (ignoring tiny indie ones like Itch here), but they also have 0 interest in Linux support, which is where they lose me. Without Valve, Linux gaming would not be where it is today, and as a Linux user that is already like 85% of my decision making being done in favor of Valve - with the remaining 15% not all strictly being in another camp either. If someone wants to challenge that monopoly, they'd have to do something better than forcing exclusives or luring with "free" games, because that's some shady shit that makes me just want to stay away even more.
Valve isn't perfect though. Especially when it comes to owning games. I couldn't use Asprite on my laptop on my schools wifi because it couldn't verify that I own a 1gb program to draw pixels. Disabling wifi didn't help either. Still made up it's mind on not letting me make sprites for my school assignment till I connected it to my home wifi.
The best part? There's literally a free version that's not on steam that I purposely didn't download because I wanted to support the dev!
How are they a gatekeeper? Near monopoly sure. But they don't force companies to only publish on Steam. They don't have restrictive rules. I'm not sure what gate they are keeping.
Valve is interesting. Enshitification is the standard for something like social media. Corporations are the real customer and users do creative labor to keep it valuable.
Valve flips the script. Developers struggle because they are only expected to labor. Studios don't get the full value of their labor. They might be a huge corporation but they are a worker to valve
Just wanted to say: good work with OpenRGB!
When a monopoly is faced with a smaller, more efficient competitor, they cut prices to keep people from switching, or buy the new competitor, make themselves more efficient, and increase profits.
When Steam was faced with smaller competition that charged lower prices, they did - nothing. They're not the leader because of a trick, or clever marketing, but because they give both publishers and gamers a huge stack of things they want.
Sure, Steam seems fairly okay, especially their Linux support, but I still mostly prefer GOG, wherever possible, because it offers more control to their customer over the product they bought.
It helps that Valve is not publicly traded, but I fear that if the current owner (Gabe Newell) dies, there might be a shift in business practices.
Enshittification can still happen in privately traded/owned companies, it generally happens slower and in case there are other reason for the owner(s) to maximize short term profits (e.g. business built on VC money), it can happen faster.
So more-efficient competitors emerged against the supermajority market leader and didn't impact that company's market share.
Hmm.
This is just silly, is this dev just a salty b?
I may not like some parts of steam (like its ui) but I'd say gaben showed us how a big company should always be run.
They don't buy out anyone (hello epic) they made many proconsuner moves and they are funding alternatives like proton without any guarantee of return.
Your shit doesn't sell without steam not because its YouTube and holding everything and everyone hostage, but because everything else is just that much worse.
If you wanna shoot yourself in the foot go ahead but don't complain nobody is is helping with it.
Digital fiefdoms like who, you ask, as if you don't already know the answer? "Valve is the most egregious example," says Gavrilović. He hopes for a future where devs, not digital feudal lords, have more power, "but I lack the imagination to envision the replacement of Valve with a community owned alternative. That 'winter castle' will not fall as easily, but we should at least start openly discussing alternatives."
Make an opensource game store that's owned by a non-profit and paid for by the game studios that want to sell on it, giving them a say on how things should run.
We will find a unicorn before that simply because such a store isn't easy to keep up and because things turn political real fast, wich is why steam is run like it is.
That could easily be abused by the big players, and would be.
How?
Call me when they show predatory behaviour to establish their monopoly. I don't think steam has exclusive deals as epic has for example.
Loot boxes and what is essentially a market of nft’s. Otherwise they’re pretty cool I guess.
Its about steam itself not what valve does in CS or TF2 and the market isn't their fault.
The loot boxes are entirely cosmetical stuff and the market is 100% player run, when nobody buys the stuff, steam wouldn't loose a penny, they profit from transactions on their platform, but that's because they are acting as payment processors.
I don't know if a spiritual successor will be as good. I mean, it wasn't exactly the gameplay that made it so compelling; it was the writing. None of the supposed successors being made rn have the writers from the original game.
It also is a shame it wouldn't be set within Elysium; a very well built world that is as exciting as it is mysterious.
Summer Eternal has Tuulik and Red Info has Rostov and Kurvitz
I feel like some journalist got high as fuck with a dev, wrote out a fucking fever dream of... drivel and then the editors were like fuck it, Tim Sweeney pays us to post some hit pieces against Valve and this is all we got this month so we'll just run with this.
Let's save it for when Gabe bites it and it gets shity.
Right on. I enjoy steam and I find Valve are mostly responsible gatekeepers, but at the end of the day, they’re still a gatekeeper
Are they gatekeepers though? It's not like they own Windows or Linux and stop you from using any other store. Just having the biggest audience doesn't make them gatekeepers to the market.
I never see people talking about what valve should change other than lowering the 30% cut, but arbitrarily forcing that would set a bad precedent.
Instead of virtue signalling here's reasonable things Valve could do:
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure proton is free to use and you can install stores and games not from steam on a Steam Deck, so again I really don't know what they're gatekeeping.
For specifics, I'd like to see consistent, transparent censorship standards, and Steam Workshop files made publicly available.
Steam's censorship issues are only going to be more of a problem as the Japanese PC market continues its explosive growth. The platform's inconsistency is surely frustrating Japanese developers, and the lack of transparency is giving fuel to a (not unearned) narrative that its content reviewers are arbitrary and xenophobic.
The Workshop matter is far smaller in comparison, but Steam is gatekeeping crowdsourced work product.
I see why steam doesn't let people inherit a account and why they don't let people chose what features they use.
The inheritance is likely a legal issue with the license, officially they don't let you do it, but just logging in changing the account email and taking it will nither be noticed nor do they care.
And the features is likely because they have running costs, the small stuff like cloud save and community cost them almost nothing, what is costly is the games distribution itself and that's what they get the money for (also the advertising on the Front page). You need to send all the data from a server as close as possible to the user downloading it, steam operates in almost any country in the world. Its a huge amount of data they need to store, backup, secure and transmit, they do cut their share after a certain amount of copys are sold because they are then in the plus with less money, but they also pay for all the free games, all the mods and all the other stuff.
publishing on steam costs nothing, they just take a share, and thats a fair share in my opinion, when you don't sell, steam gets nothing and eats the costs, when you sell they gain from it as well and probability recommend people your game that are willing to buy it.
Having the biggest audience to the degree that they do absolutely makes them a gatekeeper. If Steam became predatory tomorrow it would have a catastrophic effect on the consumer friendliness of the current PC market because you wouldn't have anywhere else to turn for many games. GOG and Itch don't have nearly as large of a selection of mainstream stuff.
I find it really interesting how Valve hired Yanis Varoufakis to analyze the markets that were spontaneously emerging from games on their platform, and how he went on to write a book about the feudalistic nature of internet platforms that is being referred to here. I wonder what Gaben thinks of that and what Yanis thinks about Steam.
Then there is the aspect of Valve being a flat company, no hierarchy, and how Gaben has talked about avoiding rent-seeking that other companies were taking part in, how he wants to make good products for gamers, doesn't look at sales numbers.
Valve has some really great philosophy running behind it, and then there is the fiefdom of Steam extracting rents from publishers.
I agree and hope that what comes after it is even better at supporting gaming on GNU/Linux and contributing to various libre and opensource projects like KDE and Proton and Mesa and such.
Even Avalon fell eventually.
Dont buy your game codes on steam if you use steam!
Gamestop sells them among others.
Hard to walk away from steam services but GoG is non drm, so once they get better linux integration going start a library there.
Bottom line everyone should be disturbing their spend among various players.
While steam is great, once gabe is ded, we are cooked frogs.
Eh… I have a 500+ game library on GOG and moved back to Steam in 2020. Steam just has too many good features. I’m at the point where I don’t really care about DRM anymore. I know that’s an unpopular opinion but after 20+ years I realize it’s just a boogeyman.
When DRM is implemented without problems (unlike denassvu) its generally absolutely not relevant when you buy a game.
I would not call it a booegyman... it is a non burger for avg gamer tho.
But for people who think bigger, it is a valid concern IMHO. Also, if it is not for people who think bigger, we would never big here tech wise.
If we keep accepting current trends, everything will get shittier...
Steam is an exception to this maxim, but for how long?
I've been waiting for Galaxy for Linux for 10 years, since they announced it in 2014. They obviously don't care.
Rule 1: "No Tux, No Bucks"
💯
Rule 1: "No Tux, No Bucks"
Yes
I'd really like it if Valve waits for until after I get a pile of external hard drives before they go under.
They won't go under. They are managed with good knowledge and in good faith towards all people involved in the game processes (devs, publishers, gamers and themselves)
Steam obsessed people always cry about the lack of "features" in other stores, as if a game store + launcher needs features other than being able to buy and launch games.
Hell, I don't even want to launch games. Just let me buy and download an exe (oh yeah, GoG does that, which is why I use GoG whenever I can...)
Sucks for devs that people just won't buy their game if it isn't on Steam though :/ Idk how to change peoples' behaviour, unless Steam does something egregiously bad to users
One of those features is Proton. Thanks to Steam I can play every game I am interested in, without the need to install Windows.
GoG sometimes pushes out Linux installers that they immediately stop supporting, resulting in non-working games. Fuck that.
Your wants and needs are different from other people's wants and needs, doesn't mean other people are wrong.
Steam was around for long enough, with it's array of features, that I have grown accustomed to having them. Even when it first launched, Steam was more than just a store and library. It had Friends and, while not yet integrated into the app itself, they also provided the User Forums for every single individual game.
Even as just a store and ignoring all the other periphery features, it has more features for actually finding things than any other digital market for buying games. Not to mention sales, user reviews, and more.
Steam is widely regarded as the best option because they do things in the interest of their customers, instead of shareholders with a stake in the company.
The problem here is you think other stores actually let you buy and launch games reliably.
Steam is fast. Epic is slow. Epic is always asking me to 2FA to access my library of free games. Epic takes minutes to load their store homepage.
One of the only good stores is suddenly the asshole but not because they did something wrong, its because everyone else sucks.
Fuck that. They aren't responsible for other's failures. GOG and itch.io are around and doing fine and aren't hated, if GOG would finally make a Linux GOG Galaxy without having to go through troublesome third Party tinkering (compared to steam) it would be a great competitor. But Epic and the other "stores" just suck ass lack features lack community lack privacy and generally suck ass. That's not valves fault.
I still think this is a huge blunder by GOG. There has to be a very significant overlap in the user base of DRM free software and Linux.
At least Heroic has matured very well and GOG partnered up with them so something is moving.
By far not enough sadly, and they could literally just integrate proton into a store that runs on Linux, proton is open source (besides some steam API stuff).
Its not hard and them not doing it shows how little CDPR actually cares about GOG, its either running or not they don't really give a fuck. And for that it works good all things considered.
Glad to hear Gog is partnering with Heroic. Heroic is pretty slick, and only getting slicker. Shame to waste effort, and much better than forking and not contributing to upstream.
"They have a monopoly" doesn't mean they're the asshole.
But they still have a monopoly.
People get so fucking weird trying to deny this. They insist there's good reasons none of their competitors matter, when the question was, do their competitors matter. They proudly state they never consider buying from anywhere else... end of thought. No amount of explanation for why they're the PC gaming store will change that they are the PC gaming store. But the label doesn't mean it's their fault. The label means, it is so.
I think there's a difference between them being a good company for customers and them being a digital fief. Similar to how Amazon could be seen as a "good" company by customers (return policy, cheap stuff, etc), but they essentially own an entire marketplace and decides who sells products, and extracts rents from people who are making good innovative stuff. Steam is the same way.
Of course, Valve doesn't have the mistreatment of employees Amazon does. They have no internal hierarchy, which is cool and I imagine means less management involvement. Their president seems to just want to make gamers happy, and thats great too.
Theyre an anomaly in the business world because they're seemingly a great company that doesn't follow monetization trends, while still being hugely financially successful. But they still extract rents from videogame makers, so leftists see that as a black eye.
Agree with most you say. Just two things
Steam doesn't own the market place, as said, gog and itch.io do their stuff, epic is also there (nobody with a brain likes them but they still have a share) and then a publisher could just make a website for their game, Minecraft for example.
They don't decide either, the algorithms within steam work very clearly and their seasonal sales are from my knollage open sign up for the devs and publishers. The player specific feeds also work according to tags, play a lot of builder games recently? Steam recommends similar games you might like, sometimes mixes between tags you haven't played like that.
In reality it's almost exclusively up to the devs/publishers and the players what gets sold steam does push indie stuff a little more in recent years but I don't see the downside of that.
And secondly.
"Leftist" real left people would be happy that steam is how it is and would bring constructive criticism. The people screaming Steam bad, are the same people that scream everything else when they get cloud from it.