• mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    You forced it on people by demanding it for a must-have game… which came on discs. To some extent, even now, fuck you.

    Other comments talk about great sale prices, which is often an anticompetitive practice called “dumping.”

    I’d be less blunt if people could admit it’s a monopoly. ‘Oh I never even consider other stores.’ Uh-huh. ‘I mean there’s competitors, but they hardly matter. Even billion-dollar companies can’t make theirs relevant.’ You don’t say. ‘Valve can even afford to let devs sell keys wherever, and the customers still get their ecosystem!’ Yeah, wow. We have a word for that. ‘How dare you.’

    • webpack@ani.social
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      1 month ago

      I think most ppl agree that it’s a monopoly, it’s just that they are a monopoly not because of anticompetitive practices but because everyone else sucks. steam does give a lot of value to small game devs cause it makes it easy for ppl to find your game (but I’m not sure if that’s worth the 30% revenue cut). if there was a better platform that took less revenue then devs would simply use that instead.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        29 days ago

        This, I mean… Epic tried and had a storefront so terrible they had to bribe developers into making their games exclusive. Something that never fucking worked for any game that wasn’t Kingdom Hearts; Only resulting in the games bombing because they released on a constantly malfunctioning storefront that constantly got bad publicity.

        And Origin was literally ran by EA, so… yeah…

        GOG is the only real competitor Steam has, and most people’s opinion of it is “This is nerd shit”, which is a take even I agree with because the only games it really has are older than dirt, meaning I’m the only one who gives a shit about them.

    • Virkkunen@fedia.io
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      30 days ago

      Steam is a monopoly surely, but it’s a rare case, or maybe the only case, where it became a monopoly both because it is actually a good service that is not enshittified, and because the competitors kept shooting themselves in the foot.

      I guess that’s what you get when you don’t have any obligation to shareholders.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        29 days ago

        Netflix was also a preferable monopoly, because this warring fiefdom bullshit is not competition. You wanna watch a show? Fuck you, $20/mo and another password to lose.

        We broke up movie theaters for that shit.

        • Virkkunen@fedia.io
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          29 days ago

          Netflix was always bound to the shareholders desires, Valve was never and as far as Gabe and his successor are concerned, it won’t. This and Valve’s unique hierarchy are big factors into why they haven’t enshittified.

          • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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            29 days ago

            Netflix didn’t do anything wrong. They got fucked over by everyone they licensed from deciding they’d steal Netflix’s business model, and then they would be the biggest fish in the pond. All of them. At the same time.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      29 days ago

      The problem is everyone who tries to do what Steam does does it incompetently so it’s not viable.

      GOG Galaxy is the closest I’ve seen to a viable competitor though and I respect the work they put into making older games run on newer hardware.