Remedy took money up-front, expecting it to be more money than they would make later.
Being on Steam means access to customers, and more sales. You said so. So Epic, to promote the Epic Game Store, estimated how much revenue Alan Wake 2 would lose by not being on Steam, doubled it, and wrote that on a check.
Standard Oil never had an absolute monopoly. Look me in the eyes and tell me they don't count.
Argumentum ad Webster is a fallacy. Words mean what they are used to mean, and what they are understood to mean. The goddang FTC has a page explaining: "Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct." The kind of monopoly we break up still has competition. It's only about market share and power.
When a company dominates any industry, they obviously have power that could easily be abused, even if they do not abuse it. Do you understand that the potential for abuse is a problem, even if it's a different kind of problem than abuse occurring? You can't prevent things by waiting until they happen.
Was that Walmart exploiting it’s market share
Yes. Obviously. It was preachy corporate censorship on a scale we hardly recognize today. One company being so big means some art doesn't get made.
Walmart's an excellent example for how absolute monopoly is not required. Obviously there's other supermarkets. But some companies drop entire product lines if Walmart doesn't pick them up. This one store represents enough of the market that any investment is immediately considered a loss. Being in or out is such a big fucking deal that products are tailored to that store, rather than to customers.
Again, what should we do about that?
Practically speaking? Nothing, because this monopoly has not abused its power. They don't seem likely to. And yet: it's still there. Things change. Shit happens. If Gabe's yacht sinks and Larry Ellison buys the company, maybe everyone decides EGS ain't so bad, but there's a world of lesser horrors that wouldn't spook the herd.
Careful, you'll summon Smartman Apps (with emojis) to insist mathematics has exactly one perfect unambiguous syntax, where 2*(1+3) is somehow different from 2(1+3), and also reverse Polish notation does-too have parentheses.
An anime called Chargeman Ken where "animation" is a generous compliment. Some action shots are three frames long. Most shots are static - with one alternating mouth motion, when characters aren't just framed, positioned, or turned to avoid animating them at all. But it works. You are watching a clear story take place. It's not a radio drama or narration. The story is terrible, because these broke fools were animating every first draft that could fill twenty minutes, but events occur onscreen in a sequence that you can follow with your eyeballs.
And the result is some dramatic presentation. One episode starts with characters watching a Godzilla knockoff. Buildings take time to draw, so you get two frames of an upward angle conveying Cheapogodzilla's size. When the hero bursts into a room for an accusation, they're framed at a distance, to avoid animating their face. The show is rife with all this dynamic perspective and foreshortening that even cheap CGI today won't do, because they think they have to fill the entire frame with someone's head. Cartoons with budgets get flat presentation because they're trying to be sitcoms and clearly show off nuance and subtlety. Making absolute garbage for a fraction of the price takes so much more creativity.
Here's the funny part: it's probably fine. AND YET, people will twist themselves inside-out to deny the premise.
Your root post fully admitted the accusation:
If you're not in this one store, you lose access to most customers.
That's a fucking monopoly.
As I've explained to people, over and over and over and over, anti-competitive practice is a separate thing. Monopoly just means market share. It's enough power to become a problem. It is the ability to fuck people over. We need to recognize these situations, before they ruin everything.
For comparison, Netflix was a monopoly, and I think the entire world would be happier if that was still the case. But saying so doesn't mean they weren't a monopoly. For a good while there, your choices for legal streaming video were Netflix, or lying to yourself about legality. The desirable solution would be multiple services offering all the same shows for competitive... not the exclusivity hellscape we got. And gaming would be better-off if every game was in every storefront, like boxes on shelves, instead of one store being a huge fucking deal and the rest being nearly irrelevant.
why would any studio choose not to release on Steam?
Epic gave Remedy a shitload of money, up-front. All exclusivity these days works like that. Nobody wants to reach fewer customers. Some of them are convinced to - some of them are forced to. Alan Wake exemplifies the former, and there's a good chance Remedy regrets the decision.
If Valve bumped their cut from 30% to 40%, do you imagine publishers would rush to EGS? Epic's cut is already 15 points lower than Valve's. It hasn't moved the needle.
Valve kills studios by saying 'no thank you.' They have immense power. They just don't use it in any way that freaks people out. The mere possibility shapes the entire industry. Only niche studios try weird shit, because large studios don't risk poking the bear. Games want to feature nudity and intimacy, but most are so self-censored, they could be televised. The cultural prevalence of nude mods is proof of demand that has been frustrated.
If you'd rather blame Mastercard and Visa openly dictating what art can and can't be sold, by all means, we can talk about their joint control of online payment. But it might get blunt if you insist one store taking Bitcoin means that's not a duopoly.
If Steam not hosting your game causes your studio to shut down, it’s not because Steam is being some unreasonable gatekeeper. It’s because you’re making something that there isn’t any market for, or so little of a market that your only hope is to get it visible to as many people as possible so the tiny fraction of them that are interested can keep you afloat.
You know being on Steam means crucial access to more customers. To most customers, in fact.
The games that do well, despite being invisible to the supermajority of customers, are the exceptions. Nobody gets dropped from EGS or Itch and goes "oh no, we're ruined, we're only on Steam now." But the opposite happens repeatedly. The reason is not complicated.
Ability. Not a history of doing anticompetitive behavior, just the ability to do it. Monopoly is a precondition to that abuse.
From the same page: "Obtaining a monopoly by superior products, innovation, or business acumen is legal; however, the same result achieved by exclusionary or predatory acts may raise antitrust concerns." "Finally, the monopolist may have a legitimate business justification for behaving in a way that prevents other firms from succeeding in the marketplace. For instance, the monopolist may be competing on the merits in a way that benefits consumers through greater efficiency or a unique set of products or services."
Is it a fnord? Is there some other word you would understand to mean, there's only one big-ass store people treat as the default, and if they start being dicks, we're all in deep shit?
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
Absolute monopolies do not exist. If there's one asshole selling PC games out of a car boot, Steam does not have a literal absolute monopoly. And yet: not even Epic Games, a bajillion dollar company, has any meaningful impact on Steam's superdupermajority control of the PC gaming market. Steam competitors existing does not mean they matter.
Strawman. It is demonstrably much harder for games to profit, when they're not on Steam. Exceptions are rare viral hits. Alan Wake 2 was a popular and acclaimed game, and it did terribly on PC specifically, because it wasn't on the one storefront that handles an overwhelming majority of PC sales. The difference between PC games not on Steam and iOS games not on the App Store is slim.
So yes, there are games exclusive to Epic that do just fine, but not many. Odds say, fucked. Being unavailable on Steam means most PC gamers will not consider buying it, and may never even be aware of it. We have a word for that.
Standard Oil only ever controlled 85% of America's oil.
Monopoly is when your competition does not matter - not when it does not exist. There will always be someone competing with you. But if I open Mindbleach's Video Emporium and move six units per quarter, the impact on Steam is approximately dick.
Is there an asset flip disclosure?