this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Except Valve allows people to sell their own keys without Valve taking a cut. That system is why at least half the vendors here can exist at all. The dev/publisher cuts a bunch of their own Steam keys and dumps them off with these shops who take less than the 30% cut that Valve takes from sales within Steam and the dev/publisher gets to keep the difference or pass that on to the customer as a discount. Steam just isn't a monopoly. They allow sellers to use everything that their platform offers for nothing more than a percentage of what is made exclusively from sales within the platform. A seller can sell their game through their own website and take home 100% (less whatever their payment processor charges, usually a single digit percent) of the sale, while still using everything that Steamworks and Steam in general is bringing to the table and all without any lock-in or requirements that they stick with Steam. All of that is a HUGE strike against considering Steam a monopoly, but that's not even everything.
So far as "the competition does not matter" that's largely because the competition (Primarily talking EGS here, but it's apropos UPlay and Origin too) hasn't done anything to make for a better value proposition other than paying for store exclusives and giving developers a rightfully higher cut of sales for a shot at a much smaller portion of the PC market. If Epic offered answers to Proton, Steam Link, communities, workshop, meta-games in the store, quick UI, marketplace, etc... It might make for a real challenge to Steam, but as it stands now there's nothing in EGS that puts up anything approaching half of what you get for the same games in Steam. I've never bought anything in EGS, but trying to use their app with any of the free games that they've given me has immediately turned me right around and sent me back to Steam while it takes literal minutes for the app to get me signed back in and going (and often has to spend time updating a game once it does) while Steam was good to go 2 seconds after boot, never needs me to reauth once I've signed into a system, and keeps my games updated silently without my having to notice or worry.
Now GOG on the other hand, where I have spent a decent amount of money and own a good number of games has managed to make a proposition of giving me a barebones store that gives me barebones downloads of games that don't need updates, or a launcher, without any DRM so I can just download an EXE and get my games. They matter, they're bringing something to the table that nobody else does and I love them for that. I go out of my way to buy games on GOG when they're the sort of things that don't need any of the stuff that Steam is providing.
If any of the other publisher owned storefronts tried to do anything half as ambitious as GOG or Steam, they'd probably matter, but the fact is that they won't because they don't think like Valve or GOG, they think like MBA shitlords who's single trick is extracting rents for properties made by smarter people, often back in the days before those MBAs knew their multiplication tables. The same school of idiots who saw how Netflix had a really good thing going and thought that they could have the good thing themselves so now we have a worse situation than we had before Netflix destroyed the cable industry and we get all of these platforms that don't work as well as Netflix did/does where you have to go to 30 different shitty places to get what you used to find in one really good place. A whole lot of idiots who paid a lot of money to learn in fancy schools that you can personally get rich by convincing a company to kill the golden goose, so long as you immediately proceed to get out of town so it's the next guy's problem to solve before anyone notices that the golden eggs aren't rolling in anymore. It's incomprehensible to me that people are going to bat for those muppets when all they ever do is make things worse so they can line their 401k with another million.
What makes Steam a monopoly is market dominance. Nothing else counts.
The keys thing underlines how little their competition matters. They can effectively give away copies, to other platforms, and those other platforms remain irrelevant.
Shitting on Epic - however fun and well-deserved - does not change how we are talking about Steam.
Netflix is a great comparison, because Netflix was also plainly a monopoly. The streaming video market was Netflix. Their behavior as a monopoly was better for everyone, compared to this shit-show of vicious little fiefdoms.... but defending a monopoly doesn't make them stop being one.
Except, legally in the US where Valve is based, you've got 0 legs to stand on.
Valve does dominate the market they're in, but they do so without creating an unreasonable restraint of competition in that market. They are dominant by providing the best product, not because they have unfair business practices which burden the competition. Like I said, Valve will literally allow game makers to go and take 100% of every sale they make (assuming they can process payments for free) while still allowing them to use the platform Valve have built and pay to maintain so long as they'll pay Valve a cut for the copies that are sold directly through the Steam store. Valve allows their competition to sell games that package said competition's stores inside of those games. Every EA or Ubisoft game comes with the competitor's store bundled in. They create tools that allow their competitors games to run on platforms that the competition doesn't want to bother with and they give them away. HOW IS ANY OF THAT AN UNREASONABLE RESTRAINT ON COMPETITION?
Steam is the antithesis of anticompetitive, they're not the single seller of any good beyond "Valve Games" of which there are now 22(?) among millions of PC games, and they don't generally dictate prices in the market; which is the succinct way of saying that they don't live up to any portion of the legal standard for what constitutes a monopoly. Give me something factual that implicates Valve as a monopoly or get out of here with this nonsense.
Restraint of competition:
I'm not thrilled how every reply pretends I follow up "Steam has overwhelming market share" with "and they're EEEVIL!!!"
I haven't said shit about Valve, ethically. I outright said Netflix's short-lived monopoly was better for consumers. I certainly haven't defended Epic, whatever the hell that other guy wants to rail against.
But Valve obviously has power.
Valve has the ability to do these things.
Their competitors don't.
Steam's market share is so high, they could do whatever they want, whether or not they ever do.
We are talking about a long-awaited critical darling of a game, and we are talking about how its sales blow, specifically because it's not on Steam. Yes, it has sales, but it doesn't have enough sales, unless it goes through this one store. Defending the store's practices will not change that. Defending the conditions that led here will not change that. It is a dead simple fact that Steam's market share is real fuckin' high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.
I was going to get to this but my last comment ran over the 5000 character limit and had to be trimmed back. I was just going to drop it, but on reflection it is important to drive the distinction home, so here it is:
Yeah. We do. That word is dominance. It is not monopoly because monopoly has qualifiers beyond dominance.
First things first, you cherry picked the one thing from my link that supports your position intentionally ignoring that it is a single prong in a standard that has several. Second, I'm glad you brought the FTC link, because they also do not agree with your stance if you bring the whole context from your own link into the conversation:
Your definition only meets one portion of the FTC standard, which is why my comment addressed how Valve fails to meet any of the points of the standard beyond the dominant market position. YES STEAM IS MARKET DOMINANT, BUT NO THEY ARE NOT A MONOPOLY BECAUSE THEY DON'T MEET ANY OTHER PORTION OF THE STANDARD.
To do what? PC is an open platform that they don't control.
To make people raise prices or exclude competitors? Again, how or where?
Epic is LITERALLY excluding competitors right now for a bunch of titles, other competitors have done likewise until they recognized that customers didn't like it and decided that it wasn't in their best interest to do so.
Not to beat a dead horse, but how? They literally have no control over PC users beyond that which they've earned from being the best of MANY options, so how could they possibly parlay that into a power they could use to exert force over consumers or developers? Unless they did something that made them into not the best option, they have competition from every angle including from their direct competitors at Microsoft whose platform (as of March 2024) houses 96.67% of their customers with Windows being the dominant OS for Steam users by an absurd amount. There's incredible danger for Steam to try and pull anything anti-competitive because they literally live in the house that their competition built.
You seem to imply that Steam being a monopoly has caused Remedy to suffer poor sales. However, we have the following problems there:
A) Steam fails to meet the legal definition of a monopoly. Just full stop. You attempt to take singular statements from a legal concept that by design has multiple prongs (specifically because we do not choose to harm companies who do no competitive wrong and come to their dominant position through the art of their craft being superior), but that's just willfully misunderstanding the concept of a monopoly.
and
B) A developer choosing to launch their game on the Evercade Vs and failing to see the sorts of sales numbers they might expect on Sony Playstation/Microsoft Xbox/Nintendo Switch is hardly a justification to claim that the game did poorly because Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are a oligopoly. The dev CHOSE to launch on a shittier platform, one that doesn't offer all the things that the current market expects. The devs are going to see lesser sales as a result, that's just how it works, they weren't harmed by a monopoly effect, they were harmed by their poor market choices.
See, I think your problem may be that you think market share aside, all other things are equal, which is simply not the case. By your logic I should be able to offer you a nice shiny and new Evercade Vs in exchange for your Playstation 5 because it's only the market share that makes it so that the Evercade has less games to play? It's only natural where Steam is bringing more to the table, it has more customers as a result. EGS offers a pale shadow of what a consumer gets from Steam, so why should they count as much? Who owes them that? They need to get on that level if they want that credit due. They currently matter about as much as the effort they're putting into competing, which I'll agree isn't much, but is hardly relevant here.
Pointing out which meaning applies is how definitions work. One is enough.
Cherry-picking is highlighting part of a paragraph, and ignoring that it begins: As a first step, courts ask if the firm has “monopoly power” in any market. The documents you picked are telling you, being a monopoly and doing harm are separate questions. The ability comes first, and that ability comes directly from market dominance.
... a monopoly is not about who carries one specific game. It's about the market. The market you know Steam dominates.
When Steam excludes a game, for any reason, that game usually sells a lot less. Orders of magnitude, sometimes. That is the power they wield over all games, as a game market. The fact they don't abuse it is a defense against legal action - but we're discussing legal actions that can only apply to monopolies. Determining whether they have that power comes first.
Those sales figures do not respond to price changes, either. Epic can offer whatever sale they like - for most sales, the price on Steam is the price. Y'know. Like in the definition I pointed out. The one that is the way that things are.
'Poor sales are your own fault for not selling through the one store that matters,' says monopoly understander.
Nothing sensible ever follows these words.
This is not at all what those documents say, they state unequivocally that a monopoly has to create unfair conditions for competition AND they have to be dominant in their market. A company that creates unfair conditions for competition in their market is not a monopoly, a company that is dominant in their market is not a monopoly, it is both conditions combined that make a monopoly.
Yeah, you're right, it was unfair of Steam to exclude Alan Wake 2 and cause them to lose all those sales. ಠ_ಠ
The entirety of the isthereanydeal.com website and their history for almost every game in the database proves that this is false, are we not going to require facts in this discussion any longer?
YES!!! FUCKING YES! If you choose to exclude the premier dominant platform that your product might appeal to, that is YOUR FAULT! Nobody owes you sales when you choose to do dumb things.
In your case you couldn't be more correct. Touché sir.
The document says in black and white that looking for monopoly power comes first.
Conditions and competition come after. Identifying a monopoly comes before any judgement of that situation.
Read your own goddamn sources.
Amount to a teensy fraction of what Steam sells all on their own.
The existence of one premier dominant platform is called a fucking monopoly.
Read the first sentence of the Cornell Law Legal Dictionary:
Restraint of Competition links to the FTC doc that defines what that is in a page titled "Monopolization defined" and it offers a two pronged test which is exactly what I've been saying all this time, they have to be the leader in their market which they have to have "gained or maintained through improper conduct."
Your lay interpretation informed by feelings that it's bad we have a market leader (and even there I'm giving you a huge gimmie because Google Play, GOG, EGS, Xbox, UPlay, and Amazon Games all exist and sell PC games in a digital storefront entirely absent Steam, and for stores that aren't absent Steam, as I noted before even games sold for use on Steam may not net Valve any revenue thanks to the ability of devs to sell their keys directly) is just not the correct interpretation for whether Steam is a monopoly. EA alone made almost as much revenue in 2023 as Valve did, which isn't an apples to apples comparison since EA does business a lot of places, but they're just one of a lot of big fish who don't always put money in Valve's pockets in the Digital PC Games Distribution market. Many devs sell their games as Steam keys on Amazon, GameStop, Newegg, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and all the others I linked before and Valve gets nothing (Excepting maybe a freeloading user) from those sales.
Out of curiosity I went to check out my account to see what I had bought "from Valve" vs "not from Valve" on Steam and it turns out that I own 1724 games on Steam. We can break that down in the transaction history, but I'm not going to go line by line to figure out which are DLC and which are games so this next part won't add up to 1724, but I'm providing the number to give some context for the remaining numbers so it doesn't just look like most of my transactions are MTX or something silly where Steam is actually getting something. I think it is illuminating to show that I have only made 718 purchases through Steam, I have been gifted 70 games, and I have 209 transactions which were indicated to be "Complimentary" where most seem to be DLC but there are a few games in that mix, so let's be charitable and give Valve the whole lot those as sales even though they were likely nothing of the sort. I have in my transaction history 1152 transactions that are listed as "Retail" which is Steam's way of showing that I didn't get the game or DLC from them. In 16 years of using Steam, Valve has charitably gotten a cut of 997 interactions, while I have given Steam 0% of a transaction 1152 times. That means that Valve has gotten a cut for only 47% of the content that they provide me at the absolutely most charitable interpretation of the data. So far as my account is concerned, if they're monopolizing the market, they're doing a terrible job of it by letting everyone else out there take the majority of the money while bearing none of the costs for Steam's infrastructure and development.
You can dismiss the fact that there is a historical record of Steam often not being the cheapest place to buy a game, or you can claim that just because there is a dominant player we defacto have a monopoly, or any of the other insane claims you've made but the fact is that there isn't a finding of law anywhere stating that Steam is a monopoly and it's unlikely there ever will be because they just don't meet the standard defined even if you cut down the market to the slimmest possible framing.
Unfortunately, we have clearly reached an impasse where you refuse to acknowledge statements of fact as written and will just "blah blah blah" away inconvenient facts, so I suppose this is where we part ways. Hopefully the next time we meet will bear better fruit.
Restraint of competition defines anticompetitive behavior by a monopoly... not whether a business is a monopoly. You keep saying "two prongs" when it's two separate things. Some monopolies are legal. Some monopolies commit restraint.
This is abuse sprinkled with lies. Like following up 'Steam can be beaten on price,' which is irrelevant or worse, with 'it's insane to claim monopoly is about market power!' when that's the definition on these pages you fucking chose. Earlier you were screaming that Steam has market dominance. Now that you've figured out that's all we're talking about, you're trying to haggle down how dominant they really are.
This wall of text is the only way you can disguise how you gave it away and can't accept being mistaken.
So which is it? Because the only one that might apply is the last and that one has a complicated legal meaning that is multiple parts of which you only seem to care about a single part: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly
It's the definition given by your own fucking source. The one you called "cherry-picking."
It's not "a single prong in a standard that has several," there's a list of meanings, and one of them applies.
That page even reminds you: not all monopolies are illegal. Maybe you should re-read it?
Here, it's easy:
Does not in fact say:
The standard has multiple prongs. You might have "monopoly power" without in fact being a monopoly because being a monopoly requires meeting a legal standard where being the in the leading position of a market is not the singular qualifier.
You're quoting a sentence that defines anticompetitive practices, not a sentence that defines a monopoly.
Here is a sentence from the same page that defines a monopoly:
Which you seem to take for a granted, but won't provide even a theoretical for how that might have happened here?
Ability means "they can," not "they did."