Comment on They even do Price Discrimination on video games now
Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
And then I see people complaining about Steam having so much of the market cornered. They 👏 don’t 👏 pull 👏 shit 👏 like 👏 this
When steam came out with the orange box and set it up so that if you already had some of the games in the box, you could gift the other copies to people, I knew they were going to win the war.
I hope gaben lives forever, because I’m terrified of how instantly it will turn to shit when he’s not in charge anymore.
👏 yet
What do you think will happen when Gaben our Lord dies?
You think their successor will be as merciful and follow Gabens vision? Or be blinded by the huge amount of money Steam makes?
Both. Steam is already the market leader in its industry. You just keep doing what you’re doing and you win.
When Miamoto died, Nintendo just had to stay the course. They were never dominant, but they were ubiquitous and everyone enjoyed their products. Now the new guys don’t even play games, and the switch 2 price point is ridiculous, and they never fixed the issue with the joy con sticks, and prices never drop like they used to. You can’t count on new leadership being capable of continuing success, even when all they have to do is keep things on the exact same course.
Nintendo is gonna keep making the same 5 games with ever-improving graphics until they die. Doesn’t hurt that people are fine paying $80 every few years for the same game.
The Switch 2 is selling faster than the Switch 1 during it’s launch period. So Nintendo’s new leadership is not negatively affecting the company. Also even under Yamauchi and Iwata Nintendo never fixed drifting analogue sticks, so that is new leadership continuing the course.
Microsoft were already the dominant operating system in computing. Now they’re losing market share due to frequent bad decision making.
All they had to do was keep windows ticking over. But instead they looked to milk more revenue from their customer base in the form of advertising and telemetry data. That’s because shareholders demand ever increasing profits. Enshittification is always the result of a company going public… Never a question of if, only when; as soon as the passion has died in ownership (usually due to sale or change of management), the only drive becomes profit; and the user experience is stripped to accommodate. The same will be true one day for steam, unfortunately.
but they have shareholders, that demand, with the backing of the law, that the company produces as much profit as possible, otherwise they can sue them
Except you need to make even more money. You can’t do that by simply letting things continue as they are.
I hope he and Linus torvalds both announce successors. Like a sort of "if my product fails you, this person follows my steps
Newell has supposedly said that if ever there were to be a sea change where steam would have to shut down people’s access to games they’ve purchased, he would release code to turn off the ‘check’ for whether you’ve bought the game on steam, thus allowing you to play games without the ‘DRM’ of being online with steam. I wonder if he would do the same if he thought that would be the direction things were going in the event of his death.
This right here. So much space and energy being used to bitch about Steam that could be used for, oh, I dunno… Sony. Microsoft. Nintendo. Giant players that have held tacit monopolies for years and literally engage in anticompetitive behavior on a regular basis.
If I had room for one more conspiracy theory, I could point to a handful of companies that probably would not be above paying people to bitch about Steam…
(points up ^^^)
I bitch about steam because it has issues. I don’t bitch about the others because they have issues severe enough I just don’t use them whereas steam is running anytime my laptop is running
I resent Nintendo so much because I know for a fact that if they just made a red clone of steam with Nintendo branding and put every possible Nintendo game ported to PC on it they would make so much God damn money it would cause some kind of gravitational money Singularity and destroy the world.
Slobbering fanbois like you are what drive me to bitch about steam. Steam is ok but the more people circle-jerk all over themselves about how amazing it is the more I hate it and them. It’s a service that lets you download an executable wrapped up in an application which feels like they took the worst possible parts of every generation of computing in the last 20 years. Its ridiculous to fanboi a downloader.
I don’t think you came from Reddit. I think you came from TruthSocial.
Ok crisis actor
There I think I did it right
Steam doesn’t really have a market cornered? They aren’t stopping you from buying from elsewhere. They even let you add non-steam games to your library
How do I install my non steam games?
However you like. Download it straight from the publisher, buy it on cdrom, buy it on gog, epic or any other platform. There’s no enforced monopoly for PC games, and the only one who could enforce one is Microsoft.
What do you call the business strategy where you just aren’t a huge assholes to your customers to milk maximum profit and your competition keeps shooting itself in the foot?
Pre 1980s capitalism beating its braindead son with a belt? Like that’s the best terminology I can think of. Maybe general wait and see versus the landmine runners IDK.
I’ll still complain about them having the market cornered. Sure, right now they mostly only do things I agree with. If things change though we’re fucked, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If there’s competition in the market then we can choose to support whoever is doing things right (like Valve currently) and the others will be forced to follow.
I’m glad people use Playstation/Xbox/Epic, so Steam still has competition, but I’m also really glad I’m not using any other store
Long live Steam & GOG in their current moral states.
That you know of
Isthereanydeal.com tracks prices and histories of most PC games. You can always check there to find the best current price and compare to what is being shown. If Steam was showing me something different I would know thanks to this.
Plus family accounts kinda negate any use for such pricing schemes.
Steam is my favorite monopoly. They are not perfect, and probably not good either. but they are the best
jwiggler@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
The fact that they don’t pull this shit is the reason they have the distribution market cornered.
We have to remember that gamers are not Valve’s primary customers. Game devs are. The market you’re referring to is the market of distributors available to game devs – NOT the market of storefronts available to gamers. In the PC space, the market of distributors is cornered by Valve and it allows them to take a big chunk of each sale from the game devs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Steam and I think Valve has done some great things for gaming on PC and for gamers in general. That doesn’t change the fact that they are another cost a game dev must pay in order for them to create their goods, in an economic sense. Valve’s got the shelf space and devs don’t have much choice but to rent it out.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I think you are forgetting the other reason Valve cornered the market;
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue… The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Gabe Newell, CEO Valve - Speaking at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s (WTIA) Tech NW Conference.
jwiggler@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Yeah, no I definitely agree they’re good to gamers. I also love how they have a flat structure, and I think Gabe seems like a smart guy. He’s given some interesting talks about economics. They’ve made a great platform for gamers, but it doesn’t quite change their business model, which is taking a cut from work done by others. In most other scenarios, it’s easy for us to recognize when companies do this – amazon, Walmart, etc, but in Valves case they have such a great reputation among gamers and a fanbase of their own, I think the escape a good amount of warranted scrutiny (game dev side, not gamer side)
Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
“Is based on taking a cut of the product of work done by others.”
That seems like a fair trade off for game developers in turn getting to use the platform who’s work was done by… Valve.
I understand why people make this argument but it’s really undercutting the value that Valve provides developers who utilize steam for distribution.
oxysis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Valve’s fee is more than earned however. Steam as a storefront is highly trusted by users, it has a rock solid reputation that is hard to come by. As a distributor they take a one time fee for each copy sold, then they manage all of the costs from users downloading and downloading again for as long as the platform exists from that one time fee. Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
Sure the developers lose a bit more money than if they either ran their own platform or sold on another platform. But the higher up front cost to access the larger platform is a very worthwhile trade as can be seen by developers continually coming back.
jwiggler@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Maybe. I’m not a game dev, so Im not sure I can say for sure. But it still remains that there isn’t much of a choice for game devs and Valve holds most of the cards. That level of centralization of power isn’t good, earned or otherwise. It’s evident that at least some devs aren’t happy how much of a cut Valve is taking.
I’m not sure this is exactly right. They’d have to buy and maintain their own servers, or rent them from a cloud provider, but it wouldnt necessarily be a charge for every download. But maybe I’m being pedantic – you’re right that it costs some amount of money to store data and keep computers up.
I think probably from a game dev perspective, the issue here is Valve takes far more of a cut than whatever value they add to the experience itself. If you’re a team that just spent years of work on a game, the one-third cut Valve takes is just not proportional considering the amount of dev work, and is therefore considered extractive. Does that make sense?
I’m trying not to cast too much moral judgement here because we live in a capitalist system and corporations are going to seek profit in whatever way possible, and we are all indoctrinated into it, but from a perspective critical to that system, Valve are not good.
From a gamer perspective theyre a fucking godsend lmaooo
Xenny@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You’re drinking all the Microsoft Kool-Aid that the lawyers in paid bots have thrown out there on the internet. Valve has threatened the market dominance of large tech companies and there’s been a ton of negative press pushed for them lately.
There’s lots of platforms to release your game online Minecraft famously ditched steam and it’s one of the largest games of all time.
You can self-publish as a solo Dev and make one of the largest games of all time without steam. Tell me how that’s a monopoly.
You got fortnite out here on the epic game store. Also one of the largest games of all time no steam, no valve. Tell me that’s a monopoly.
You’ve got itch.io, Gog, Microsoft game store, epic game store, and there’s always the option to skip the PC market and go straight to Indy’s on consoles if you wanted. You have choices as a developer. Steam is just simply the best fucking one.