Right on. I enjoy steam and I find Valve are mostly responsible gatekeepers, but at the end of the day, they’re still a gatekeeper
I find it really interesting how Valve hired Yanis Varoufakis to analyze the markets that were spontaneously emerging from games on their platform, and how he went on to write a book about the feudalistic nature of internet platforms that is being referred to here. I wonder what Gaben thinks of that and what Yanis thinks about Steam.
Then there is the aspect of Valve being a flat company, no hierarchy, and how Gaben has talked about avoiding rent-seeking that other companies were taking part in, how he wants to make good products for gamers, doesn’t look at sales numbers.
Valve has some really great philosophy running behind it, and then there is the fiefdom of Steam extracting rents from publishers.
Are they gatekeepers though? It’s not like they own Windows or Linux and stop you from using any other store. Just having the biggest audience doesn’t make them gatekeepers to the market.
I never see people talking about what valve should change other than lowering the 30% cut, but arbitrarily forcing that would set a bad precedent.
Instead of virtue signalling here’s reasonable things Valve could do:
- allow developers to chose what features of steam they use for each game, allowing them to lower the cut by individually opting out of forums, workshop, cloud saves, achievements, inventory items etc
- offer a purchase = one time download with no drm (still legally one copy) for the closest thing to “owning” a digital game
- allow someone to inherit a steam account
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure proton is free to use and you can install stores and games not from steam on a Steam Deck, so again I really don’t know what they’re gatekeeping.
For specifics, I’d like to see consistent, transparent censorship standards, and Steam Workshop files made publicly available.
Steam’s censorship issues are only going to be more of a problem as the Japanese PC market continues its explosive growth. The platform’s inconsistency is surely frustrating Japanese developers, and the lack of transparency is giving fuel to a (not unearned) narrative that its content reviewers are arbitrary and xenophobic.
The Workshop matter is far smaller in comparison, but Steam is gatekeeping crowdsourced work product.
The workshop is an interesting topic and one if like to see a larger discussion around - theoretically people are free to upload their workshop content outside of Steam altogether, but arguably it’s on developers to support importing non-workshop content.
Censorship is definitely something that needs sorting out. I hadn’t heard of much censorship going on but I can definitely see it happening, giv n Japan’s standards can differentiate massively from America’s. Clear rules need to be laid, and I hope clear reasons are given when it occurs.
I see why steam doesn’t let people inherit a account and why they don’t let people chose what features they use.
The inheritance is likely a legal issue with the license, officially they don’t let you do it, but just logging in changing the account email and taking it will nither be noticed nor do they care.
And the features is likely because they have running costs, the small stuff like cloud save and community cost them almost nothing, what is costly is the games distribution itself and that’s what they get the money for (also the advertising on the Front page). You need to send all the data from a server as close as possible to the user downloading it, steam operates in almost any country in the world. Its a huge amount of data they need to store, backup, secure and transmit, they do cut their share after a certain amount of copys are sold because they are then in the plus with less money, but they also pay for all the free games, all the mods and all the other stuff.
publishing on steam costs nothing, they just take a share, and thats a fair share in my opinion, when you don’t sell, steam gets nothing and eats the costs, when you sell they gain from it as well and probability recommend people your game that are willing to buy it.
I’m with you on all of this. I’m familiar with this (am a game dev) and you’re 100% right that the biggest cost is game distribution. One thing though: it costs ~$100 to list a game on Steam, which is returned to you after it’s made a thousand or two.
Honestly there’s nothing much valve can do to appease people, but I believe the most likely thing they can do is release data on how much distribution costs and give companies the ability to disable the “extra stuff” to save even a few percent of their revenue.
Having the biggest audience to the degree that they do absolutely makes them a gatekeeper. If Steam became predatory tomorrow it would have a catastrophic effect on the consumer friendliness of the current PC market because you wouldn’t have anywhere else to turn for many games. GOG and Itch don’t have nearly as large of a selection of mainstream stuff.
That’s on developers for not putting their games on other platforms, Valve do not prevent you from doing so. If they went crazy tomorrow, people can just jump ship.
I swear the only games that could never be on another store would be Valve’s own. It’s really not their fault that other platforms are so bad or niche.
Like realistically what should they do to not be seen as gatekeepers? Become worse to scare developers and customers onto other platforms?
Gog, direct distribution, something else I haven’t thought of. I just fear monocultures. Things can go south fast
