I think both Iran and Israel are guilty of atrocities, and Israel has been worse recently in their treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. I don’t think either amounts to genocide, since genocide has the intent of eliminating a race from existence (e.g. Jews in the Holocaust). I don’t think Israel wants to eliminate Palestinians (the people), they just want to eliminate Palestine (the country). I don’t think Iran wants to eliminate Jews or Israelis, they want to eliminate Israel (the country).

Sure, and that’s because:

1. Nobody bothered competing with them for years
2. Those that did eventually compete didn’t get anywhere near feature parity

I think EGS and GOG could get most of Steam’s features with 2-3 years of solid development effort, but instead EGS whines about Steam having unfair market share and GOG just refuses to innovate on their client.

That’s not Valve’s fault, what is in their control is whether they use their market position to kill off competitors, and they don’t do that.

That, or perhaps high ranking Iranian general.

Why would they do that? Then there’d be noone to work the mines…

But there is competition in PC gaming, GOGA, EGS, and Prime (and others) exist. One player being dominant isn’t an issue if that player isn’t being anticompetitive.

The closest thing I’ve seen is the policy that you can’t sell for less than on Steam, while allowing for sales to happen separately from on Steam. Publishers can even generate keys for free and sell them without any profit sharing elsewhere, and customers can still use those keys on Steam.

EGS is acting more like a monopoly than Steam and undercuts Steam on fees, Prime bundles its services, and Microsoft has an inexpensive subscription for unlimited games, yet Steam is still more popular. Why? People prefer Steam’s service, and publishers are willing to pay a premium to sell on Steam, all without anticompetitive behavior.

Valve is a shining example of how to handle having a commanding market share: they invest in their products so customers want to stay.

A store charging 30% has zero impact on the end user if the price is the same, which it is in many cases. And popular titles pay 20%, not 30%.

The moment their monopoly is self perpetuating is the moment we no longer are in a free market

That depends on your definition of “self-perpetuating”.

To me, it’s only problematic if Valve is anticompetitive, such as paying for exclusives (like Epic does), preventing cross-play, or charging a subscription or something for users to keep having access to their games.

Just having a better product isn’t anticompetitive though. I’ve laid out my requirements for a viable competitor, and I’m sure other gamers have their own. If a competitor wants our business, they need to meet our requirements.

Is it that they exist at all? That there are too many of them? That they’re unskippable?

Yes, and they’re in the middle of the video. And they spy on my internet use to manipulate me through targeted ads.

If you were Chief Ad Engineer at YouTube, how would you structure the ads system?

There should be more ways to avoid them. I don’t use YouTube enough to justify a premium sub, but I would be interested in paying either for specific channels or watch time.

Tubular

I get 100 down, 50 up, which is the max for my ISP. They’re putting in fiber this year or next, so I’ll probably upgrade once that happens.

Alan Wake 2 wasn’t profitable until EGS exclusivity expired

Well yeah, because EGS sucks.

If you look at Steam’s competitors, none of them are really developing their feature set. So even if customers were dissatisfied w/ Steam, who is actively trying to earn their business?

aren’t you worried that having one good option is being one good option away from having no good options?

Sure, I’d love it if another platform stepped up to actually compete w/ Steam.

My expectations are fairly low: it needs to work well on Linux. Heroic largely resolves that for EGS and GOG, but I’m not particularly interested in supporting a platform that only works because some community project has done the work for them. So if GOG supported Galaxy on Linux as a first class citizen, I’d probably still use Heroic, but I’d buy a lot more games from them. But as it stands, GOG is one update away from blocking access to my games through a launcher, and dealing w/ WINE/Proton directly is a pain. EGS is so far away from what I care about that I don’t think they could ever earn my business, but who knows, maybe they’ll surprise me.

But the fact that we’re even having this discussion is a testament to Steam’s success. Heroic probably wouldn’t be a thing w/o Valve’s investment into Proton/WINE, so GOG/EGS wouldn’t even be a consideration for me at all. But since that work was done, I now have more options. I’ve played some GOG and EGS games through Heroic, so it’s not even theoretical, they are realistic alternatives.

It’s important to note that at every turn, Valve has earned my trust. When games are pulled from their store, owners of those games still have access (e.g. I bought Rocket League on Steam, and when they went EGS exclusive, I still had the old version of the game). They have a solid refund policy, and they have gone out of their way to make things more pleasant for their customers. Even if they didn’t have a dominant market position, I’d probably still choose them just based on the user experience. So yeah, not having a realistic alternative isn’t great, but I don’t think it’s because of anything nefarious Valve has done, but instead lack of interest by their competitors.

PC gamers aren’t “stuck with Steam,” they very much have options. And Steam is likely way better than whatever Battle.net would’ve become, so I’m quite happy with how things turned out.

And yeah, Valve was quite lucky in nailing the timing, however, that was also a very conscious choice since they filled a need they saw. Valve is perhaps the best company you could ask for to have such a dominant position, pretty much any other company would’ve resulted in a way worse situation for gamers.

It was proposed, but Blizzard rejected it:

Schreier reports in the book that a few years before Steam launched, a group of employees pitched the company on a plan “to turn Battle.net into a digital store for a variety of PC games.”

Battle.net basically approached the same problem as Steam but from the multiplayer side, whereas Steam approached from the distribution side.

Valve supports Linux just to safeguard their monopoly.

I wouldn’t put it like that. They support Linux to safeguard against Microsoft pushing their monopoly, and they did seem to be gearing up to do just that. Epic had similar concerns, hence the lawsuits against Google and Apple.

All of this is pointless for most of the

How is Linux support pointless? Having more options to play your games is a good thing! I don’t think Heroic would’ve had as much of an impact w/o Valve’s investment into Proton/WINE, and that gives customers a choice on which platform to buy and play their games on. It also allowed for the Steam OS market, and competitors are absolutely welcome to create their own spin with their own store, they just don’t for whatever reason.

Downloading and updating games, for me, is actually the least important part of what Steam offers. I care far more about Linux support (I was a Linux user before I was a Steam user), Steam Input (Steam Deck, and I prefer controller on PC), and consolidating sales to one store. Whether I need to launch it separately or whatever isn’t a big deal.

I have a Macbook Pro at work, and I honestly hate it, largely for this reason. Mouse button rock, and TrackPoint is good enough that I largely don’t use the trackpad. My workflow is very keyboard-centric, so it’s a really good fit.

Give me the same workflow and I’ll become a Framework customer. Otherwise, I’ll probably still get one, but only once my laptop is no longer functional.

No, it is where it is because Valve decided it wanted to invest in it outside of it being a launcher/updater for Valve games.

And it’s not really the first. The first was probably Battle.net by Blizzard, which initially was a way to connect players (chat and join games) back in the mid-90s. It wasn’t a game sales/distribution service for many years, but it got there w/ the release of the dedicated desktop app in 2013 and had some of the core features that makes Steam special (chat and match making). In fact, I had the desktop app before I had a Steam account, which I created in ~2013 when Steam came to Linux (I switched to Linux in ~2009, and had played games on Windows for years before that). Blizzard was never interested in becoming a game distribution network, so Battle.net remained largely exclusive to Blizzard titles.

I wouldn’t have bothered w/ Steam if it didn’t provide value. I was fine managing games individually, and I bought many games from Humble Bundle and directly from devs for years before Steam became a thing. I only started preferring Steam when it provided features I couldn’t get elsewhere. These days, it provides so much value since I’m a Linux user, that I honestly don’t consider alternatives, because everything else is painful. Heroic launcher closes that gap substantially, so I’m actually considering buying more from GOG (outside of a handful of old games I can’t find elsewhere).

If another launcher provided better value vs Steam, I’d switch in a heartbeat. I use both Steam and Heroic, and I still prefer Steam because it has great features like controller mapping. But if, say, GOG supported the features I care about on the platform I use, I’d probably switch to GOG because I also care about DRM-free games. But they don’t, so I largely stick to Steam.

If I don’t like what Comcast charges I don’t do a class action lawsuit.

That’s a poor example, because in many markets, Comcast (or another cable provider) is the only option, or there’s only one other option with much lower top-end speeds (e.g. DSL). So a class-action against Comcast may be a reasonable idea, since they’re an actual monopoly in many markets.

The games industry is different. Steam does have a commanding share of the market, but there’s no real lock-in there, a developer can choose to not publish there and succeed. Minecraft, famously, never released on Steam, and it has been wildly successful. Likewise for Blizzard games, like Starcraft and World of Warcraft.

Maybe a better comparison is grocery store chains? Walmart has something like 60% market share in the US, yet I have successfully been able to completely avoid shopping there.

Same with my 2017 Thinkpad.

If they release one with a TrackPoint and mouse buttons, I’ll upgrade early.

Tell your rep(s) you’re in favor of it, and if you have a time, visit in person.

Are you sure? There’s at least one lump I hope they find, but it’s kind of deep up in there.

I’m still mad Galaxy doesn’t support Linux. I’d probably still use Heroic, but the mere fact of being a second class citizen doesn’t feel great.

That’s exactly what they said:

I tend to do my Steam shopping in the browser