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Yeah I do have a similar fear. Valve is something special. I tried to hate them, they're filthy-rich corpos after all, but I can't. Something of value will be lost when Valve finally succumbs to enshittification, which cannot be said of a lot of other big companies.
But my fear isn't necessarily about Steam. I have like 20-30 games in my library. Steam is simply the least shit way to play games you have/want to pay for.
If you don't expect enshitification these days you are dumb. Very rational fear
He has 2 sons
maybe they can take over - and not fuck it up (they literally have to do nothing to achieve success!)
Can't even count to three when it comes to sons either.
Valve is numerically challenged.
And that one "old fat guy" is constantly under attack from degenerates because "sTeAm mOnoPoLy".
I don't understand this mentality. If we oppose monopolistic sales platforms when it's Amazon, Google Play, or the Apple store why should we turn a blind eye when suddenly we like a particular company.
I'm not contesting that Steam offers the best user experience by a mile (it truly beats Epic and Gog by miles), but that doesn't erase the downsides of having a single entity with a grip on the entire market.
I think the whole "monopoly bad" notion is a bit off. You start opposing monopolies, but then people realized that duopolies are also bad, and next thing you know we talk about triopolies and centiopolies and whatnot.
So I think the actual number is not the thing that matters, and instead the thing we should be worrying about is cartels.
The defining feature of a cartel is the ruthless action it takes to kill competition. The monopolies everyone are so mad about are cartels of single companies, but the bad thing about them is their cartellic behavior - not the fact they are along in the market.
Steam is not a cartel.
See my other comment in this thread. Steam does exhibit what you call "cartellic behavior".
Steam isn't a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don't, and it generally hasn't abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we've seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn't something they wanted, it's them backing down from a stand-off.
I want competition, but there's good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.
For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don't want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn't to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.
I think it's easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.
See my other comment
I don't think it's quite as simple as "let's crack down on steam like other monopolies" as what do you crack down on?
They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).
All these other monopolies do lots of shady stuff to get and maintain their monopoly, so you generally want to stop them doing those things. Steam doesn't do anything shady to maintain it's monopoly it just carries on improving it's platform and ironically improving the users experience and other platforms outside of their own.
Like what do you do to stop steam being so popular outside of just arbitrarily making them shitter to make the other store fronts seem ok by comparison?
The 30% cut is often something cited and maybe that could be dropped slightly, but I'm happy for them to keep taking that cut if they continue to invest some of it back into the eco system.
Look at other platforms like Sony, MS who take 30% to sell on their stores, THEN charge you like £5 a month if you want multiplayer and cloud saves etc. Steam just gives you all this as part of the same 30%.
Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.
Steam has improved how I play games, it has cloud saves, virtual controllers, streaming, game sharing, remote play together, VR support, Mod support and this is all part of their 30%, the other platforms take same and do less, or take less but barely function as a platform.
Anti monopoly is great when a company is abusing it's position, but I don't feel Valve is, they are just genuinely good for pc gaming and have single handily made PC gaming a mainstream platform.
They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).
It is very much not clutching at straws to claim that. That policy is a major element of the Wolfire v. Valve case. You can also look at how despite charging a 12% platform fee, Epic Games Store does not sell games 18% cheaper.
It's an abuse of Steam's established market share and consumer habits to coerce publishers into not offering consumers a fair price on other platforms. It very literally stops EGS from competing on price, which is pretty much the only area where Epic can beat out Steam, since Steam otherwise is much more convenient, provides more functionality, and has more community-generated content (i.e. workshop material).
It's hard to say that isn't anti-competitive, especially because such a policy is only effective due to Steam's existing market share.
Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.
This is a fair complaint against Epic, I agree.
Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn't successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.
To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn't the case.
In terms of what is a "fair deal" we could quibble about the 30% but that's literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that's an "industry standard" so by all means lower it if they can, I'm all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.
For example if Valve personally came to me and said "you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features" I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.
Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn't change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.
Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don't see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.
I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front... Why wouldnt you?
Because it isn't a monopoly, shut up already.
Steam/Valve is pretty much one of the only companies I actually am perfectly willing to let be a monopoly as they currently stand. Especially since they have come a long ways towards making gaming so much more accessible to Linux users, like me, who don't know how to take full advantage of wine.
Whenever you are afraid of the negative impact on your life of a corporation's possible failure, it means that you have become reliant on someone you can't trust. You must act accordingly.
I think this post massively overestimates the power a CEO has. The CEO is beholden to the shareholders. Valve is private, so its shareholders are its workers. It would be useful to know how many shares Gaben has of valve, but I still don't think the next CEO would suddenly also be the majority owner.
Also, I know things have changed a lot in the last 12 years, but 12 years ago regarding the total dissolution of Valve, Gaben said:
“It’s way more likely we would head in that direction than say, ‘Let’s find some giant company that wants to cash us out and wait two or three years to have our employment agreements terminate."
Also, forcing users onto windows is THE way to kill valve's profits. The whole point of the Linux push was a direct response to the windows store, and msft's threat of forcing valve to give them a cut of purchase through steam. Msft will still do that the first chance it gets. So even the most profit-minded new leader wouldn't make that choice, as it's plainly shortsighted.
Shareholders is the owners and since they are private we don't know who they are. Right now it could be all Gaben or it could be a mix but Gaben is majority resulting in the culture is what he wants. Private companies don't have to be maximizing profits focused but will die if they don't make money. When people die it is whoever inherits or has majority share that pushes what happens.
I had briefly searched to see if it was known how much ownership Gaben had. Did you find it somewhere, or are you just assuming he's majority?
I do know the employees are compensated in shares of the company, but you're right that I don't know what proportion is owned by employees.
Employees are stakeholder, not necessarily shareholder. Management, likely. The grunts, I think not so much.
"Valve is private, so its shareholders are its workers."
I don't know who keeps telling you libs this, but they're lying.
I don't think that misunderstanding is limited to the libs.
Sorry, I forgot about the useful idiot breed of fascist, compared to the "lies as a strategy" breed.
Also Valve isn't the charity they believe it is. It's a de-facto monopoly, and it has serious moderation issues (basically if you bought enough games, they will less likely ban you for hatespeech and such).
They're not a defacto monopoly? There's many different ways to buy games online and valve does not have anti-consumer practices like exclusivity deals. I have not heard anything about them not banning for hate speech? Every time I've ever reported something its been taken down within 48hrs
Valve isn't pulling any anticompetitive moves though. They just try to secure profits by being the best instead of destroying everyone else that dares to compete with them.
Beeing not assholes against their own users are basically anticompetitive these days. ;)