re: this article.
The title is a joke. “Free, but you have to make an EGS account” is a bit too rich for me.
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.
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?
Why aren’t people angry that you can’t put diesel in a gasoline engine? Why aren’t you mad that a DVD can’t be played in a VHS? Why aren’t you mad that you can’t plug a computer hard drive into a switch and play Civilization?
Do you understand that there is a difference between “This is only compatible with certain hardware” and “You can only purchase this at one specific business”? Because you are once again arguing as if they are the same thing and I’ve already pointed this out to you, which means you are either completely disingenuous or an idiot. Either way this is a waste of time.
If there’s a third option I’m missing please let me know.
