Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

Gamers have gotten quite lucky so far that the company that has been in the position to turn the screws and establish a monopoly has been content to only make gobs of money, instead of trying to make all the money like pretty much every other entertainment industry.

People saying Steam doesn't have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.

While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.

Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.

Is Steam really a monopoly when Valve doesn't try to stifle competition and no other company could be bothered (besides maybe GOG) to make a half decent store?

Competition sounds great, so long as it has all of the following:

• Something better than steam input and the steam controller.
• Something better than steam vr.
• Something better than steam workshop.
• something better than proton
• Something better than steams friends/chat/activity interface.
• Something better than the steam overlay.
• Something better than big picture.
• Absolutely no exclusives, and no deals forcing developers to use it.
• A nicer store interface than valve, with better community pages, curator pages, discussion pages, etc.
• An equivalent to steam fest with a strong demo scene.
• Something better than remote play together

This is of course also ignoring just how efficient, clean, customisable and ergonomic the steam interface is compared to all competition

Oh wait! That doesn't exist. All we need is some way to guarantee valve doesn't become public.

This is a great opportunity to mention 15th Anniversary of GOG.

It's incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.

I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.

But at the same time, they're cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.

So we uncritically give them all the power.

Valve may not be the cheapest by any means, but that's because they're offering a product 30x as valuable. The other launchers companies have are shit, across the board, nothing but shit. It's not even in the same continent. If any one of these companies actually wants to ever see this change, they are going to have to set their greed aside. That's impossible for CEOs in this day and age, so I don't see Steam ever losing their stranglehold unless they do an about-face from everything they've done so far. In the grand scheme of things, Valve is one of the most customer friendly companies on the face of the Earth and they continue to be innovative and supportive to users. Epic on the other hand is everything wrong with capitalism, and much the same can be said for any of the other companies with competing launchers/game stores.

This is literally the most popular opinion.

This opinion is in no way unpopular. Valve is privately owned and headed by a single individual with tremendous purpose of will, which is how they've done so many great things for the gaming industry. The issue lies with said leadership vacating their role (GabeN is getting old) and some greedy bastard taking the company in a wholy different direction. tl;dr: we need a strong competitor, but not now, and ABSOLUTELY not Epic.

But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.

The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.

All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.

But for now.. it’s pretty good.

I'd love competition in the Linux gaming space, but none of them even attempt to support it

Steam's de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can't break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can't move the needle.

Monopoly doesn't mean there's zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.

PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that's how many users each one has.

that's opposite of unpopular opinion lol

that being said, a healthy competition is still necessary as we don't know what valve would become post gabe

ITT: G*mers being Stockholmed.

Needs more GOG

I have no problem with competition, but don't force me to use your inferior product. If any of the major companies developed an actual competitor with the Steam launcher (in terms of features, not just a lousy storefront), it would likely get some use. If they somehow made it better than Steam, plenty of people would likely jump ship.

Epic is just a failure of a launcher. Nobody uses it over Steam by choice, because it's lacking in nearly every way. While I'm not big on exclusives, if the launcher was a reasonable Steam alternative, they wouldn't bother me nearly as much. As things stand, I'm firmly in the "fuck Epic" camp.

I'm one of the few who actually like the existence of Epic. Like, not necessarily Epic itself, but some serious competition is needed. I personally would've loved it if the competition was GOG, but it seems consumers don't particularly care about ownership, so we have Epic.

I d trust a privately own company with Gabe as the head than the asshats that proliferated micro transactions and shitty always online DRM for single player games.

Steam doesn't have a monopoly, other platforms are just shit.

Missing features, badly made features, fucking spyware, some barely working at all (I am looking at you, ubisoft)

Perhaps if the other platforms tried a little bit, they would actually be a competition.

The funny thing is that Valve kickstarted the digital sales with Half Life 2 back in 2004. Steam was an utter piece of shit for, what, some 6 years? It took them a lot of time to make it bearable, then good.

That the EGS launcher is a fucking Unreal app, needlessly bloated as fuck and with barely working UI shows their complete disregard for what is supposed to be their "money givers" (us, customers) and, like every other stupid company with their own launcher which manages to be worse than their fucking website, shows they refuse to learn the obvious.

I hope GOG never goes the enshitification path.

There are so many companies that have all the pieces to make good competition to Steam but their greed gets in the way. Microsoft in particular should have been a shoe-in for it, but GFWL was an embarrassing failure, the WIndows store is rubbish and insists on a new file format that (at least in the past) caused all kinds of issues for games, and now their Game Pass service has no focus on a buying element. This is without going into both Amazon and Google tripping on the starting line when it comes to getting in the gaming space. A launcher that was tied in with Amazon's web store would be a really quick way to get a lot of people in naturally.

I really wish more people used GoG to where it could be a competitor. Unfortunately the game selection is much lower due to companies turning their noses up at no DRM. Also, I will admit that I tend to buy things on Steam in favor of GoG due to a lot of the features Steam has.

Valve supports linux gaming! The Steam Deck is awesome and with an even better configuration (or the rumored valve's own new steam machine) this is only getting better. So, only Valve gets my money.

Lmao valve is hardly a defacto monopoly unless you want to be so incredibly granular about what specific market they're a monopoly in as to be entirely pointless.

I will always support valve because of their amazing Linux support but if GOG finally made a client for Linux then I would try to use that more. I wish Epic would also support Linux but with massive douchebag Tim Sweeney running the company, that will never happen.

I personally get most of my games from GOG and itch.io these days. And I've never bought anything from the Epic store whatsoever.

I will say though that I find it kind of weird how much hate Epic gets for their store. Like, I understand that someone prefers Steam, or doesn't want to buy stuff from Epic etc. - but what we see goes way beyond that. Epic has people actively campaigning against it, as if its mere existence is insulting. I don't really get why.

As for the 30% cut... Developers will try to price their games competitively, and within customer expectations. So with or without Steam's 30% cut, you can expect games to be similarly priced. The large 30% cut from Steam is basically coming out of the developer's revenue rather than from your pocket. (I'm under the impression that GOG also has a similar 30% fee. Epic has a lower fee. And on itch.io the seller gets to choose how money goes to itch.io anywhere from 0% to 100%. So itch.io is the best deal for developers in terms of fees.)

I get it. Steam doesn't seem to do exclusivity deals with 3rd party titles. So you could still sell your game on gog and humble without issue.

A monopoly is a monopoly. Just because Steam is a good store today doesn’t mean they deserve to hold a monopoly over the pc gaming market. So what happens when Valve has crushed every competitor? Gamers and devs have nowhere to go if Steam turns to shit. Eventually there will be a change of guards at Valve’s C-suite when Gaben retires or is dead. There is a good chance that those new execs will hollow out Steam and extract all the value out of it for their own benefit by screwing over the customers and developers. And they can get away with that if there is no competition. Competition is what keeps Valve in check.

Actual unpopular opinion: I don't give a fuck, I want my launcher to launch my games, all of them do it, Steam just comes with a shit load of extra stuff I don't care about. I buy my games where they're the cheapest and with all the free games on Epic I rarely use Steam anymore. If they're the same price I'll go with the platform that give the devs the biggest share of the profit and that's not Steam.

Edit: See? That was the unpopular opinion..

I buy all my games on Epic Games Launcher becomes it has less DRM than steam. If you have kids, they can't play 2 completely different games on two different computers.

It's like your kid not being able to play Mario kart on her switch because her brother is playing Halo on Xbox in another room. Steam doesn't support that. Epic games doesn't have a problem with you having 2 different games being played on 2 different computers, so I buy my games there whenever I have the choice because it's the more consumer-friendly platform.

Eh, more competition is good. This opinion is pretty basic.

From memory Epic has improved rates for developers/publishers - why the fuck wouldn't you want that/just be ok with a base 30% cut because of some shitty ideal?

Imagine thinking that Valve has a monopoly.

Monopoly doesn't mean "Largest market share". It's a real term with a real meaning.

Monopoly:

the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.

What, exactly, does Valve control? They don't require exclusivity, they don't require their DRM, they don't require the use of their network system. Hell, they don't even require you to to give them 30% if you sell your own key.

Valve is also not a publicly traded company, while this doesn't mean you can fully trust them it does mean they aren't required to seek profit at all costs. This allows then to do things like, support Linux, make their own hardware (twice after their first attempt was a failure), work on Proton, develope games that make them no money, etc.

Itch.io, GOG, EA, Epic, Windows Store, Game Pass, Humble Bundle, personal websites. These are all examples of places you can buy video games on computers.

Timmy Tencent's propaganda is working on you if you think Valve is any sort of monopoly.

Just like I am happy with Apple and Google taking a cut and running their app stores. If these big companies could make their own store, they would. Apple would lose a cut, but that does not affect me as a consumer. What does affect me is a gate keeper keeping terrible practices in check. Making it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription instead of having a handy menu to just turn it off. Having places to put credit cards that are not secure. Collecting personal data nonstop. Etc etc.

I just hope Steam can be broken up

Make the workshop and community their own company

I don't see what people have against Epic, they're just another company running a storefront, right? Or are they union busters or something?

Any competition that can take on Stream's monopoly is good, it's been a long time coming.

You might think Steam are the good guys because they don't abuse their customers yet, but all good things come to an end, eventually. A company with their level of monopolistic grasp doesn't remain benign forever.

You just claimed 2 companies are monopolies of the same industry lol but I agree larger companies are not the way to go

People don’t remember what pc gaming was like before Steam. Between the reviews, discussions, guides, workshops, achievement and playtime tracking, friend functionality, and shopping options (gifting, wishlist, instant return, etc.), Steam was, is and remains to be a fucking god send. I wouldn’t be pc gaming right now if it wasn’t for Steam.

Wait, this is unpopular? Well shit, I'm right there with you. I was already not liking Epic for many reasons, but the Satisfactory exclusivity deal seared them to a cinder for me. At least Valve is not publicly traded and the owner never has any intent on doing so. He is able to base his decisions on what he wants and is able to treat employees, customers, and content creators more fairly, even if it hurts his bottom line. Honestly, that is all I need to know about the man. He could go public and make billions, but he doesn't. He wants the control and wants the closed company. In the modern world it is rare and, to me, laudable.