I epic hasn’t done anything but the bare minimum plus trying to buy their way into the market. Additionally, I don’t trust them a single bit. If they actually managed to get market share they should enshittify before you could blink.
I have even less nice things to say about all the other publisher run marketplaces.
GoG is cool because of their DRM policy and preservation. Steam provides labels for anticonsumer practices so consumers can be informed and does the cool stuff for Linux compatibility.
What exactly are you wanting regulators to do that you think will make people want to use EGS?
EGS is used as an example. They don’t charge devs until they earn $1M so you’d think games would release there at least but we now have many many Steam exclusives. It’s gotten to the point where indie games release demos on Itch.io but don’t release full games outside of Steam because they need algorithmic momentum there.
Check out EU DMA and how it impacts gatekeepers like Valve (even if Valve somehow dodged that label, probably because their finances are private).
Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).
Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.
If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.
Thank you. I’m not against any of that, except maybe some definition needs to be applied to what is infra and what is store. For instance, a big part of what people like about steam is that they have reliable reviews. That would need to remain true with this split. I think there is a fine line to walk between enforcing interoperability and compromising or letting other companies leech on steam for no reason. You also seem to be implying that regardless of what store you purchase something on, you can access it from any other store because steam manages the licenses? Seems strange to me.
It’s not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Valve owners were rewarded handsomely for this already, there’s no reason for this to continue until heat death of the universe because there’s not that much value added that they provide now.
It’s cool that they pay salaries of like 3 Linux devs and piggyback on Wine work that Codeweavers funded for the past 30 years. You’d think there’s so much more they could do with 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales however which is why they need competition.
Details of such breakup can be ironed out but it’s important to keep in mind that this option exists and was used before successfuly.
I epic hasn’t done anything but the bare minimum plus trying to buy their way into the market. Additionally, I don’t trust them a single bit. If they actually managed to get market share they should enshittify before you could blink.
I have even less nice things to say about all the other publisher run marketplaces.
GoG is cool because of their DRM policy and preservation. Steam provides labels for anticonsumer practices so consumers can be informed and does the cool stuff for Linux compatibility.
What exactly are you wanting regulators to do that you think will make people want to use EGS?
EGS is used as an example. They don’t charge devs until they earn $1M so you’d think games would release there at least but we now have many many Steam exclusives. It’s gotten to the point where indie games release demos on Itch.io but don’t release full games outside of Steam because they need algorithmic momentum there.
Check out EU DMA and how it impacts gatekeepers like Valve (even if Valve somehow dodged that label, probably because their finances are private).
Would you buy a game on EGS instead of Steam? And why?
Or, you could just answer by question directly
I’ve done so in this community it repeatedly over the course of ~2 years. If you don’t want to make an effort why would I.
If you already have an answer then copy paste it. If you already have an answer then why do this weasel dance? You clearly don’t have an answer.
Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).
Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.
If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.
Thank you. I’m not against any of that, except maybe some definition needs to be applied to what is infra and what is store. For instance, a big part of what people like about steam is that they have reliable reviews. That would need to remain true with this split. I think there is a fine line to walk between enforcing interoperability and compromising or letting other companies leech on steam for no reason. You also seem to be implying that regardless of what store you purchase something on, you can access it from any other store because steam manages the licenses? Seems strange to me.
It’s not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Valve owners were rewarded handsomely for this already, there’s no reason for this to continue until heat death of the universe because there’s not that much value added that they provide now.
It’s cool that they pay salaries of like 3 Linux devs and piggyback on Wine work that Codeweavers funded for the past 30 years. You’d think there’s so much more they could do with 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales however which is why they need competition.
Details of such breakup can be ironed out but it’s important to keep in mind that this option exists and was used before successfuly.