re: this article.
The title is a joke. “Free, but you have to make an EGS account” is a bit too rich for me.
it’s one service having a dominant position in the market. Not the same thing.
You’re the one wildly misrepresenting what a monopoly is:
1
exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
2
exclusive possession or control
3 a commodity controlled by one party
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly
By definition Steam is not a monopoly because it does have exclusive control.
Notice how the word “exclusive” keeps showing up in the definition. An “exclusivity deal” is literally a monopoly on that specific product. Seeing as we agree that monopolies are bad why are you supporting Epics monopoly on all sales of [game]?
That’s why Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have first party studios
I have no issue with Epic having the games they created exclusive to their platform. Fortnight doesn’t have to be on Steam. The developer can decide “I only want to sell in this/these stores” and I have no problem with that. My issue is with things like what happened with darq where Epic waited until the game was finished and announced on Steam, then approached them for an exclusivity deal. When the dev wanted to maintain their promise to fans and backers to have the game available on Steam suddenly EGS went from “would love to have your game” to “no interest”.
The dev would have been fully willing to release on both, and if EGS cared about their users they could have easily had the game as well, (more games available to users of your service is a good thing). But Epic did not care about having more options available to their users, or having actual competition in the market place, they were only interested if they had a monopoly on all sales of the game and if customers did not have a choice and had to purchase from EGS if they wanted the game.
The idea is that multiple (two is also bad) players are in the market, all competing to give you a better deal and attract you to their option. Steam gives you a better deal because the competitors exist. If they are the only game in town they don’t have a reason to give you a better deal.
I agree. EGS makes itself “the only game in town” for every title they purchase an exclusivity deal with, and that is why I refuse to use it.
And even if you assumed Gaben is a saint (he isn’t, he’d just rather squeeze the devs than the users, which makes him smart, not nice), he’s not going to be around forever and you don’t want a world where Steam is the next Microsoft. Does that register to you at all?
Of course, but I’m not going to use a service that is shit now over one that might be shit later. If Steam becomes shitty I will stop using it, I can always pirate my collection if I need to. I fully agree with you that competition is important, which is why I refuse to support Epic’s anti-competitive and anti-consumer behaviour.
You are wrong about what a monpolistic position is, at least in a world in which people don’t get pedantic and call it a “position of market dominance” because that’s not how real people talk unless they are dicks.
So yeah, Steam does have a position of market dominance that they are using to force conditions and prices on providers and customers. Whether that is done to a degree that it infringes on US antitrust regulation is currently in the process of being determined in court, but for the purposes of our conversation it is bad and getting worse.
And I can’t stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. I’m old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isn’t, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.
This is not a reason to get mad in any sane reading of a marketplace, period. Didn’t stop schoolchildren in the 90s from fighting over Sonic versus Mario, but I’m not a schoolchild now and I find it extremely tiresome.
And as for your last point… so don’t frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or don’t play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I can’t describe the subatomic size of the violin I’m playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend.
Nobody should care about this. Epic has decided to compete by giving away freebies and signing up exclusives, which is frankly, a lot more freebies than every other first party in the past thirty years. Mediocre as their software is I have very little to no patience for anybody genuinely complaining about this state of affairs.
And I can’t stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. I’m old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isn’t, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.
Do you not see how you’re talking about something completely different here? You’re talking about “Mario is only available on Nintendo systems” not “If you have a Nintendo you can only buy Mario at Walmart”.
The first is not a monopoly: “You can purchase this product anywhere you want, it is only compatible on this system”.
The second is a monopoly: “you can only purchase this product from US!”
For someone so much against monopolies and arguing for the need for competition and consumer choice, you are spending a lot of effort arguing FOR a behaviour that restricts competition and consumer choice.
And as for your last point… so don’t frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or don’t play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I can’t describe the subatomic size of the violin I’m playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend. Nobody should care about this.
So we both agree that your argument that “Steam might be bad one day” is pointless and a non-issue. Good. You can stop bringing it up then.
That’s not even a little bit what a monopoly is.
Which is obvious. Nobody is out there arguing that signing an exclusivity deal between a first party and a developer is somehow a monopolistic situation. Nobody has argued that in forty years of gaming exclusives and nobody has argued it in a century of television or music recording labels.
So the question becomes why argue it now, right? Why weren’t you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES? What overzealous, cult-like situation leads to a whole host of people going to bat for this ass-backwards concept on behalf of Steam? Who, I should add, have not argued this themselves or asked for this at all, although thanks to the power of lawsuits we do have a decent indication that they do approve of it.
One has to assume the cart is being put before the horse, given the timeline. People were bashing Ubisoft and EA’s previous competitors for less defined, more ambiguous reasons, and often no reason at all beyond brand loyalty. The whole “exclusives are bad now” argument happens to be the narrative that stuck with Epic specifically because it’s the one thing they’re doing that the previous ones weren’t.
So all of this has been a ton of typing to come back to the only statement this conversation ever needed:
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
