So, you don't see a problem in the fact that the majority of the devs who took Epic's offer still happily using Steam infrastructure for marketing and support purposes?
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Supergiant about Epic Store: "Competition is good for everybody. It's good for customers. It's good for people working in the industry"
- Thread starter benzopil
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Sure. There's a huge difference between funding the development of a game (and taking the full risk that it fails) or moneyhatting a promising game right before release.
What's your opinion of Hades? The game is not completed, so would you say that Epic is funding the game?
If Valve allows it, then no?
I'm going to accuse anyone of lying but in a few posts in this thread I've seen the hand waving of steams services and general unfamiliarity with the various storefronts and AAA offerings as evidence toward someone's lack of first hand experience with the platform.
I'd also say that for the rhetoric of "the tyranny of the 30% cut" to carry any weight, I'd want to see the game not made available on any stores that take a 30% cut, so an actual epic store exclusive would be more convincing of that.
There were games literally days from launch that announced all of a sudden they were no longer launching on Steam but now an an Epic Store exclusive.
The announcement of Metro moving to Epic was so short notice the retail boxes had to have stickers placed over them because they had already printed Steam logos on them.
You can not sit there and tell me these are not anti-consumer moves. Epic literally signing checks to ensure that people cannot actually purchase these games anywhere but their own store. Buying out the exclusive rights to games you did not develop and would have already existed otherwise is an anti-consumer move. It always has been and always will be.
You could argue back in the PS3/360 days (and all generations before that) when there was still a significant architectural difference between the major consoles that buying out exclusivity wasn't as big of a deal, as the effort to port games between the platforms might have been beyond the developer's means.
But on the PC that is much less of a significant problem, with the only things holding you up is how deeply you integrated some features from any given release platform (like Steamworks stuff), or if you intend to release the game under the Windows Store.
For the vast majority of games on the PC, there is nothing stopping a third party dev from releasing their game thru a variety of platforms, and consumers will get the CHOICE of who they want to support, and businesses will have the OPTION of competing with each other for your dollar.
Right now Epic competes with no one when it comes to games like Metro, or any other games they've bought the exclusive rights to. Even for games that aren't out yet, releasing on Steam or other platforms allows competitions and for the consumer to actually save money:
Where was this competition when Metro released? Who was willing to offer me the best deal for my money at the time?
What level of competition is Epic actually "bringing" to the market?
That's actually incorrect. What you're describing is a 'pure monopoly'. Steam is still very much a monopoly accounting for around 30% of people playing games .
Monopoly... and 30%
Wow that's stretching the definition all right just to label Steam this.
So by definition Sony has a monopoly on the console market.
The post you quoted.... bravo.
I guess Nintendo has a monopoly on the handheld gaming market then.
Even if you tell them with facts that Steam isn't a monopoly, they still want to believe Steam is a monopoly.
That is absolutely true. But I hope we can agree that you have elaborated in your issue with this situation much more than the average poster.
Steam does not maintain the exclusive ability to sell PC video games on the market.
They are definitely the market leader in terms of selling a general assortment of video games, but there are not the only option, nor are they (to our knowledge) working in cooperation with their "competitors" to ensure it stays that way (aka this is not a cartel, nor is it a oligopoly, although it's not too far off from being one if the industry chose to go that way).
If there were 2 other competitors that also had around 30% market share, the PC market would be an oligopoly. This is the case with Sony as their market share doesn't dwarf Microsoft and Nintendo.
But in this case yes, Steam is a monopoly in the PC games market as there are no other competitors with market share close to theirs.
That's not the definition of a monopoly.
Market share as a launcher/distributor or seller of games/game keys?
mo·nop·o·lyDictionary result for monopoly
/məˈnäpəlē/
Learn to pronounce
noun
the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.
Alternatively:
Characteristics of a Monopoly
- High or no barriers to entry: Other competitors are not able to enter the market
- Single seller: There is only one seller in the market. In this instance, the company becomes the same as the industry it serves.
- Price maker: The company that operates the monopoly decides the price of the product that it will sell.
- Price discrimination: The firm can change the price or quantity of the product at any time.
If the storefronts come together to make a Movies Anywhere style experience for PC games I'll happily link all the stores to it and use the platform of my choice.
Otherwise, having my games spread across a dozen different storefronts because every motherfucker wants to sell cheap PC games is nothing more than an annoyance to me. I'd rather pay more for Steam games.
Otherwise, having my games spread across a dozen different storefronts because every motherfucker wants to sell cheap PC games is nothing more than an annoyance to me. I'd rather pay more for Steam games.
Even worse: games on Epic's Store aren't cheaper. They are more expensive because they don't support competing 3rd party keystores.
Yes.
Also, shame on us for not supporting devs who support anti consumer moves.
Maybe you should lay out that definition for us then, because it's not lining up with literally every interpretation of the word.
Steam does not control the market. It is one of the largest pieces of it, but it does not restrict any game released on it's platform to be only sold via it's platform, it cannot arbitrarily define prices as it sees fit (and lets developers choose their own even to their own detriment), and does not sell every available game on the market due to exclusives developed for other, competing platforms.
Also, there are already competing platforms.
Steam has a monopoly on Valve developed titles. That's about it.
I have a degree in economics and accounting so what do I know. But it's nice that crazy people can just Google something and copy/paste the result without any context.
The characteristics you quoted are typical characteristics of a monopoly, not requirements. Also, Steam does have barriers to entry, being high infrastructure costs, brand recognition, technical expertise, publisher relations, brand loyalty, etc.
We never really left that point
Well yeah... if you compare Steam to Steam (for some reason), then yeah Steam is having a monopoly on beeing Steam and beeing Steam-like. We're talking about the general PC gaming tho and not a single of your points has anything to do with a monopoly or the topic.
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So it doesn't look like a duck, and it doesn't quack like a duck, but I have a degree (and am making the presumption that the people I'm responding to don't or are uneducated) thus I declare it's a duck.
Yes clearly. It's not a matter of principle but more that it's a practice I don't like, so I don't have to support it.
Taking all of that into consideration, it is Epic the one who is the monopoly. Technically, EGS is a monopoly since you can only buy those games from their store, with the only exceptions being The Division 2 and Metro.
Steam offers the ability to resell game keys for free on other store fronts.
The barrier is to be accepted by steam to be hosted on their store, which they've been trying to make easier.
Epic has offered deals to successful and high profile indie devs and AAA devs. I would argue the barrier is far higher for a small 5 person team to get their game on epic than it would be for them to get their game on steam.
a Degree doesn't mean shit if you are still wrong.
Your still haven't listed your concrete definition of monopoly. You haven been running around making the claim and then making nonsensical arguments.
Your admit Steam doesn't even have majority control of the market.
As far as I'm aware, you only need $100 to publish your game on Steam. Or did you mistype Steam for EGS?
Barrier to entry refers to competitors of other storefront, not developers or publishers putting their games on one of the stores.
Ok, steam has storefront competitors. Humble, GOG, Origin, Amazon, Newegg, GMG, key resellers. And yes, I have a large number of games purchased on other storefronts in my collection.
Whether or not an entity has a monopoly depends on the size and nature of the market, so it's somewhat variable.
In one instance an entity can have a 30% market share, but another firm in the industry may also have 30%. This would make it an oligopoly.
In another instance an entity can have a 25% market share, but no other entity in the market has above 5%. This would make it a monopoly.
None of those are as big as Steam in terms of selling digital games, and many of those had already entered the market before Steam was as big as it is. Therefore you're referring to a barrier to exit, not entry.
I guess explaining the word "mono" in "monopoly" wasn't a topic when you got your degree in economics and accounting. You are describing a polypol btw.
And if all of that was enough to be a monopoly.
A whole host of companies should already being sued for anti-trust. *cough Amazon*
GOG, Origin, Humble, GMG all came after steam.
As to barrier to entry into the market, none of those services have failed due to steam presenting too high of a barrier to enter the PC gaming market. The new twitch service and discord, not to mention Bethesda store and hell epic game store itself were unable to enter the market due to Steam.
That's the definition of a monopoly in market terms. Words can have variations on their meanings. Monopoly can mean 1, but in this situation, it doesn't.
I'm not sure what you're trying to insinuate. Just because there are barriers to entry, doesn't mean new business can't be successful, it just makes things more difficult. And as I said, none of those are even remotely as large as Steam.
User warned: drive-by post, antagonising other members.
why do people still get so mad at the idea of steam being a monopoly? literally climate change denier behaviour in this thread
Because it isn't one, despite the various definitions presented to twist it into being one.
Lovely that you compare posters to "climate change deniers".
You tout your economic/accounting degree and then say you weren't talking about the market term? You made fun of people for using the dictionary definition and now you run away from the market term?
What?
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To add to your post.
Something could be said about people who believe a massive corporation is acting anti-consumer in the here and now to be good for all of us in the long run. That sounds like another group supporting really questionable policies now in the unfounded belief good things will come.
But that would be an unfair comparison.
Amazon is a mega giant, it dominates ALL retail, not just PC gaming software.
How easy does it need to be to enter the market? What would be a fair level where you would no longer consider steam to be a monopoly?
Hey! Also the idea that if we support Epic buying exclusivity for already well known and successful developers, their success will trickle down to the real unknown and suffering developers!
That sounds so familiar.
Mono: a single entity with 100% market share
Oligo: few entities with a sum of 100% market share
poly: many entities with any given amount of the market share
You can set up a webserver right now, get a domain and sell PC games within the next 10 minutes. How is that a monopol? I'm using the common definition of "monopol" and not the Alex840-monopol-definition btw.
I'll take this sentiment one step further. Even if EGS, Origin and Uplay achieved full feature parity with Steam, I would STILL prefer to buy my games on Steam for the sake of platform and ecosystem consistency and functionality. If Microsoft had done a better job over the past decade of building Windows itself as the gaming platform of choice by offering the community and infrastructure that Steam does (and the alternative launchers currently fail to do), and the proprietary storefronts all played nicely with it then this would be a much different conversation that really could be about the economics of retail availability. It's the conflation of storefront availability with ongoing game functionality that sits at the root of my disdain for launcher exclusivity.
Video games are the commodity. Hades is a single type of video game, it being locked to a store does not make that store a monopoly. Good try though.
Steam is not a monopoly either, anyone saying either is a monopoly is wrong and extremely questionable in their motivations
soooo..why not close this thread and let people post in the epic megathread if they really want to. this thread was started on an article that amounted to nothing new
It's not just idealism. A game purchased on EGS is an inferior product than the same game purchased on Steam, due to all the extra features and services around it. Even if it was just idealism, there's absolutely nothing wrong with idealism playing a part in purchasing decisions. I have limited time and money to spend on games and I'd rather spend it on games and developers that deserve it. Not on developers that don't care about audience preference or on games that don't have the features that I want.
To me it is. I wont give money to support business practices i dont like.