Why Valve actually gets less than 30 percent of Steam game sales - Sensationalist Headlines

Competition is always better for the consumer.

we aren't terribly bad to be honest, or even bad

As much as I love Steam, like every method of distribution, it's not without its faults. Are these faults enough to stop me from using Steam and switch to an alternative though? Of course not. Valve would literally have to do something absolutely appalling to get me to stop using it. I'd rather not leave my library of games behind. Personally, I do miss how Steam was regarding its policies before Greenlight became a thing. I miss the storefront having actual curation, and I miss there being a clear policy as to what does and doesn't belong on Steam. I totally get the arguments for a system like Greenlight or Steam Direct though. Having the community decide what they want on Steam is a noble and a pro-consumer cause, and ideally, a system like that but not as open to abuse or manipulation would be perfect. As for policies, I think Valve's rather loose approach to them is not ideal. It's proven many times to basically just be at the whims of whatever outraged groups of people at the time yell the loudest at Valve, and that's not really the best way to run a storefront. I feel there should be a set in stone and perfectly clear list of guidelines to abide by if you want your game on Steam. Just because you disagree with a game being on Steam, or being censored by Steam, should not serve as grounds to decide the game's fate. Just in a general sense though, competition when done well (aka not how Epic is currently doing) breeds innovation and improvements, and before EGS became a thing, I clearly remember many a "Steam needs to impove/fix [insert here]" threads and posts. Maybe these posts were just made by people who were bored or bored with Steam's state at the time, or maybe they had actual legit grievances. I wouldn't know, but I do know that narrative completely flipped on its head when EGS started fucking up. Maybe it's a case of "you don't know how good you have it."

What are you talking about? I quoted myself giving an example of other distributors doing what the epic store does, and I'm saying that the epic store buying titles is not a monopoly. Steam is obviously not a monopoly.

Where it says "service". IRONIC

At first I thought Greenlight was gonna be for older games, but yeah turns out its for indies. Which is a very good thing yes, but there really isn't much curation. I think people still exagerate this as being a huge problem when it isn't, and can't help but roll my eyes away from developers that complain about their game "being next door to an anime harem" or something of the sort. I don't feel like thats a problem. If their game is good, it could be next to a place that sells real life hitmen, I'd still buy it. I think this ends up being much like support. The support system isn't great, and IMO its because they don't have enough staff to do it. Greenlight imo falls into the exact same problem, and the community isn't enough. I think Valve wasn't ready for the shock culture of nowadays. They didn't expect people to suddenly look at it and go "Oh its perfectly fair play to have anime tiddy games on steam" or games with shock content that actually are shocking or in very bad taste. Hatred imo was an edgy entry of a game, specificaly made to be edgy and make people look at it. Interesting mechanics here and there, edgelord character, but the idea and execution (heh) was imo PURELY for shock. And in the end you'd just need to go "THE RULES SAY THIS IS FINE c:". Ok, the rules say its fine, because the rules are the equivalent of the patch to the 1887 akimbo shotguns in MW2: fixed the akimbo bug, but not the AKIMBO FMJ VARIANT. In other words, they didn't expect people to actually do something like that. But I honestly don't know how people will fix that without making other people mad. Basicaly a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" It's obvious that Steam has its problems, but IMO, it really can be a situation of "you don't know how good you have it". The reason for me to say this, was the outage a few days ago. I haven't seen one of those in who knows how much time. And in general, I haven't had a single problem with Steam. I don't think I'm using it in such a basic way that I'm sure that I won't get in trouble, but I can't really say. Reminds me of people complaining about specific cars being bad. Some say it fell apart as it was being driven off the lot, others say it has run for 200.000 miles just with maintenance parts.

It actually fulfills two of the markers of a monopoly, per your own source. High or no barriers to entry: Other competitors are not able to enter the market This applies to what Epic is doing. If a competitor to the Epic store wants to start, the question isn't "how can we build a better platform", but "do we have more money than Epic with which to bribe publishers?" The answer will always be no. Single seller: There is only one seller in the market. In this instance, the company becomes the same as the industry it serves. I don't need to explain to you how exclusivity deals make Epic the only seller.

And I'm one of them, the only reason I'd go to GoG to buy a game is probably if there was a game on there that isn't on steam.

I'm still here. Code's a big boy, he doesn't need me to speak for him to explain his posts. Besides, even if I did leave it'd at least show that I know when a battle is lost, unlike you who can't clue in that their arguments are terrible and people have demolished them multiple times over. Gotta keep moving those goal posts!

Im literally not going to argue with a person who refuses to read basic definitions. You have spent pages arguing against a standard definition and implimenting your own warped one that fits your argument. Arguing with you is basically arguing with someine like this: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/517593183010422795/563871013977194506/sign.jpg

"They're just a newer storefront attempting to get a foothold." this just reeks of "small indie dev company btw"

I'd agree if we were to see Steam and Valve pulling actual ludicrous shit, like gouging out 50% from devs and giving us bad services to work with. But atm, I really can't complain about Steam in such a huge way. Right now, it seems like whenever I see an extra launcher popping up, it just smells of "we want to maximize profits and not pay Steam a goddamn thing, with the bonus of not doing much with our own services". Mind you, the last bit only applies to Bethesda.net, seeing how they backpeddaled into selling their stuff on Steam lol. Origin isn't bad at all, curiously, just don't really like the UI, and neither is UPlay apparently. Wouldn't hold a candle to Battle.net though. Epic apparently is throwing money at the problem and not really giving anyone reasons to use their service though. IMO, the best competition is GOG, because it gives you the option of running games without DRM (that I know of?) and has some nice relics.

Just to try and clear something up because everyone is posting massive paragraphs of content and tensions are high - as far as I can see SKS isn't trying to say this at all. SKS's argument is that what Epic is doing does not constitute a monopoly. And I'm not giving out my own opinion on the subject personally here. Just from an lurker's perspective it seems like a lot of people on both sides of this argument are misinterpreting a lot of statements.

People dumb this post out yet the sentiment of "Steam being a monopoly" has been going on on this very forum for a looong loong time.

And people have been refuting those claims for as long. It's just that for some their view of what a monopoly is has changed.

Which is why I fear for GOG's future and try and support it the best I can by buying shittons of older titles from them instead of Steam. The only reason I don't buy newer titles is I don't like using Galaxy and having to manually download patches is an arse. I still try and contribute to them and direct others to them as much as possible, though. GOG is the only place you can legally get Wages of SiN for like, less than your entire wage packet, and that's not the only clincher for why I love them but it's one of the many clinchers. I don't really like CDPR's games generally (just preference) but I'll do my best beyond that to support them because fuuuck, I waited literally a decade for something like GOG. Knowing I couldn't install Caesar 3 AT ALL because the internet was the Wild West and Windows XP didn't support it was heart crushing so to see something like GOG come up genuinely bolstered my faith in the games community. Not to say that fan patching isn't also a big reason this shit exists but GOG centralizes it and makes it a lot easier, plus it gives you a legal avenue to buy a game that's gone ghost. Who the fuck even sells copies of BloodNet anymore?

I feel like the discussion about what it means to be a monopoly is kinda unimportant in the grand scheme, someone could bring up numbers to prove me wrong but as far as I'm aware Steam has a huge portion of the PC market, and that's all fine as long as Steam is a decent platform which it is, but competition is hardly unhealthy is it.

having the largest marketshare does not make one a monopoly. they would have to engage in monopolistic practices while having the largest market share to actually qualify as one. And no one here is against competition, can we stop with that stupid line??? People just don't want one platform buying exclusivity for games instead of these games being available on all platforms. Why is this concept difficult to grasp?

Easy there, bud, I'm not arguing Steam is a monopoly. And I guess you're right, it'd be great if the games were available on all platforms but I mean there are tons of games that are exclusive to steam already, which people seem to be okay with, not to mention that console exclusives that require you to cash out hundreds of bucks on a means to play certain games. Exclusives are hardly good for the consumers, but neither is lack of competition, and again I'll make the argument that you're not gonna stand a chance trying to compete with steam unless you've got exclusives, so to me that part about it all just doesn't sting as bad.

No there actually aren't. The only exclusives are the ones developed by Valve, or else like Gmod and derived from the Source engine (and even then those could be separated from Steam, look at Titanfall.) The games that only released on Steam for PC is a case of developer/publisher inaction. Not an exclusivity agreement. Pretty sure people don't like these either in most cases. Although generally they are ones developed by the console manufacturer or the project was funded by them, or else a case of proprietary hardware. There has been competition. If the only way you can exist is through anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices, you probably don't deserve to exist. And I've mentioned this before but why is the goal "compete with Steam" and not "Offer the best storefront" with competiting with Steam being a byproduct?

People are fine with it because the publisher chose to only launch on steam. Steam isnt going out buying exclusivity deals to knock out other competitors, they just offer the best service or the largest userbase. People are free to compete with steam, but stomping on the end user and forcing their hand is a horrible way to do it, while ironically being anti-competitive. Uplay/Origin/battle.net are easily competing with steam by having their own exclusives and offering great systems like origin access that allow you to try any game on the catalogue with a monthly charge. Allowing one company to do anti consumer practices and say its "a way to get a foot in the market" is promoting bad practices regardless of context. Theres ways to compete without fucking the user in the ass repeatedly, such as having a feature complete platform.

That doesnt make it true.