ITT I learn that oligarch gabe nawel is the elon musk of gamers
I do not know if I would say monopoly but if they do, it is because they have the best service, examples: steam features, steam machines, including steam deck, the os is under GNU GPL v2.0 and a linux distro, and they are actively trying to provide the most freedom possible to their customers.
Because they are one of the few mega companies that hasn’t shrinkflated, enshittified, or otherwise crumbled the quality of their offering. Haven’t sold out the privacy of their customer base to advertising companies, and are generally good to deal with for customers and developers.
It’s not a secret formula that no other company can learn from. It’s as simple as not being dicks IMO.
For some reason, most companies seem to grow too a certain threshold at which they sell their souls to profit and will self destruct to get more of it. Steam thankfully isn’t one of them…… yet.
The greedy/entitled morons are mad and try every day to convince us to lower our standards so they can make more money.
Anyone who bitches about Steam being a “monopoly” instead of it being DRM should not be taken seriously.
I’m “mad”. Their business model should be illegal. If you buy a game you shouldn’t be chained to their platform.
That’s not an issue with Steam that is an issue with consumer protection and copy right laws.
It’s definitely as issue with Steam. Once you purchase a game you can’t just launch it…you need to launch it through their platform. I don’t want to have my internet connected and Steam updated just to play a game.
That’s only true if the publisher chooses to use DRM.
A meaningless distinction when none of the games you bought can’t be launched without Steam.
It’s important to know who the bad guys are and what are the tools they use. We (gamers) should be focusing on the DMCA and publishers that use DRM. DRM providers are a simptom of laws that allow people to be screwed, not the problem it’s self.
They’re a private company and thus have resisted many of the enshittification trends that run rampant through the industry.
And also their competitors are absolutely atrocious and are completely tone-deaf to what customers actually want.
This is exactly right. As soon as a company becomes public, it’s all over. Profits at X%, every quarter, no matter the cost. It’s the death of a company.
It doesn’t have to go public to do that. It can get sold to private equity. The original owner can pass the business to their kid who has grown up privileged and huffs their own farts. Going public is a guarantee of enshittification but it isn’t the only way.
Are they a monopoly? They’re definitely huge, but a lot of the games on Steam are non-exclusive, and they don’t actually control the rights to the games. Like, they don’t own the IP, they don’t restrict content to their platform, and they have some pretty functional if smaller competitors like GOG and Epic. They also make their platform compatible with game keys that weren’t actually sold on their platform.
They’re definitely something with substantial market dominance as a platform, not I’m not sure monopoly is really the word.
Monopoly is definitely the word, but they also don’t appear to be overly abusive about their market position.
They take 30% of all PC game sales. If that isn’t abusing their position, idk what is.
You lost 60% when selling physical media in stores, 30% was an amazing deal when steam launched
