One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.

Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.

What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.

Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)

The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.

These comments…

Some day, Steam is going to enshittify, eat game devs for breakfast, and all these Steam fans will wonder how anyone could have possibly seen this coming.

Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.

Not that I don’t enjoy Steam. But I trust them as much as any corporation: not at all.

While the actual monopolies actively making the world a significantly worse place keep getting away.

I see 2 main points against steam in this comment section.

1. Steam is doing price fixing for games: False, this accusation came from Epic Games CEO, but the actual steam policy only blocks the selling of steam keys for a lower price, not the game itself.

2. Steam is a monopoly and monopolies are bad: I agree that monopolies are bad, but in my opinion only if they take action to harm the user and the market. From my knowledge steam is pretty known as being pro customer and haven't taken any monopolistic actions to block other stores from growing.

The reason why the games are not usually cheaper on other platforms is because publishers practice standard prices, so the game publishers take the extra profits from a lower store cut.

I am not trying to be a fanboy, I am just trying to look objectively at the facts, if someone can prove me wrong, I am willing to change my mind.

I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.

They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.

It's the most nothing of nothings.

To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they'd constantly try to switch you back to IE.

No matter how good or bad steam was and is for gaming industry, they made gaming on Linux not only viable but great, and hence made completely ditching windows an achievable thing with little effort.

I'm grateful for that, even though I boycotted them from day 1 (until left4dead came out) for destroying physical and used games.

Mandatory preface to prevent angry fanboys stinking up the replies: I like Steam. I use Steam. And just to be sure, democrats and republicans are not the same.

Some folks in this thread are using American case law to argue that Steam is not a monopoly, or that Steam is a good (??@#!?!?) monopoly. They look at other cases, like Microsoft, and point out how far Microsoft had to go before it was considered a monopoly by American judges, and then point out that Steam is not as bad. There are two problems with that line of reasoning.

The first is that monopoly law has been absolutely gutted by Reagan, and worsened by every administration (dem and rep alike) up until Biden. In the Biden admin, Lina Khan has made some very small steps to tighten up monopoly laws a bit, but obviously Trump happened (although Harris was pretty much the same as the dems before Biden, so not much hope there either). The bar for being a monopoly is unreasonably high, and American monopoly law is an absolute joke.

Secondly, this line of thinking conflates legality with morality, or being good (enough) for society. I hope I don't need to convince you that this idea is false. Slavery was legal.

The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.

Note that "they're not currently doing harm" is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won't be satisfied by "don't worry I'm not currently using it".

Even if Valve's offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven't seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.

Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don't love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don't want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.

People constantly dooming steam are punching themselves in the face instead of pushing for anything better. If they wanted a more competitive market do two things. Buy games on other storefronts. They exist. There have been digital storefronts since before Steam. Second is direct your complaining to competitors to improve their services. Like go complain on every EGS press release for Linux support and a gamepad friendly interface. Something equivalent to Steam input and remote play that isn't using third party software like Sunshine/Moonlight. Something like steam curators and other social features. User reviews. The complainers of Steam are pretty much campaigning for Steam to be worse so others can compete without having to improve as much

When I think of monopolies, I think more of telecomms, of Wal-Mart and their selling at a lose to kill off competition, Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software, and other examples. Unless I'm missing something, Steam didn't do that, they were just first in the game and built a better product than the others did. Offering a better service that attracted customers. Now do I think it's too large and would welcome competition, absolutely. But monopolies typically aren't though just having larger market share with a better product.

If Steam did something like oh, pay developers/publishers to be exclusive to their platform, then yeah you'd have a good argument there.

Remember that you are on Lemmy: a decentralized and open source platform owned by the community.

Steam is a proprietary, closed source, for profit third party software launcher owned by a billionaire.

I mean, this meme is not wrong. Valve is a de facto monopoly because everyone else is shit, and user hostile. But, a monopoly is still a monopoly, and we shouldn't be glazing a billion dollar company, in any circumstances. And it's not like Valve has never done anything wrong.

It's ok to like Valve, I like Valve. But we need to hold them to account, and call them out when they do something wrong. If you think Valve did nothing wrong, why not let them prove it in court? They have a lot of money, they can afford some lawyers.

STOP giving the COnsuMer WHAt they WANTTTTT!!!!!NOOOOOOOO MY SLOPCORE BUSINESS CANT COMPETE WITH ACTUAL GOODS AND SERVICES.

Remember when steam introduced the 2h refund policy out of their own volition rather than being forced by multiple governments? Yeah me neither.

Here's what I don't understand... Say we all agree they are a monopoly, what do you do about it?

It doesn't seem feasible to break them up into smaller companies, how would that even work? What are the dividing lines between what portion of the company goes where? Does that even solve anything?

Force them to charge less money? Okay, now they charge the same as Epic (or even less). Basically every other store is now being undercut by the biggest player on the scene. There is now even less reason to use a storefront that isn't Steam. It doesn't feel like that solves the problem either.

It seems like all the courts have tried to do so far is charge them money for existing, not get them to change what they do, which seems a lot less like the government trying to stop the big bad monopoly and more like the government wanting to get their cut. What does "stopping the monopoly" even mean? Are we happier and better off as consumers if Valve is forced to shut down Steam entirely? Is that the goal?

1. Being a simp for a multi billion dollar company is never a good thing. It's not good for you as a consumer and, frankly, is just incredibly cringe.

2. No, it's not, the main point of the lawsuit is that Steam does not let game Devs sell their game for cheaper on any other platform.

So if you don't like that Steam takes a massive 30% cut of your sales so that Gabe can buy his 27th mega-yatch, and you decide to also put your game on another platform that takes a fairer, smaller cut, then chose to pass on those savings to the consumer, then valve will kick you off the platform and you'll lose access to by far the biggest market in PC gaming.

Fuck valve and fuck you brain dead fanboys simping for a billionaire and making everything worse for the rest of us because your entire worldview comes from memes.