It matters if people are captive consumers of the product. It does not matter if they can simply stop using the product with no ill consequences.
The same goes for movies, TV, music. You can simply stop buying these commercially with no ill effect.
Wrong. There is an “ill consequences” effect added to this. For most consumer media (games, TV, music, etc) there are very few options. You either get most of what you want by surrendering to the bullshit scummy practices of the few huge ones, or choose to cut the options dramatically by moving over to some platform that’s all but doomed to fail or be purchased by the “huge ones”. There is one third option, do not consume anything. There’s you “ill consequence” right there.
Take electricity or communications, for example. I have yet to see one of those companies that does not work exclusively on predatory practices. If you know of any, please, enlighten us. Fine, go live in a cave without electricity and/or communication in this day and age. You won’t, you’re using a device that you paid for, which uses electricity that you paid for and a connection to be able to transfer these hits of data, that you also paid for. Guess what, like the rest of us, you’re a captive consumer as well. You’re welcome.
Again, valve is a corporation, their function, before anything else, is to be viable, and the only way to achieve this, at least that I’m aware, is making money.
Very few of the comments here actually defend the 30% cut, which is the main subject of the whole thread (fully deviated from the OP post, granted). But the fact remains that Valve is, and has been (nobody knows about the future, so no “will be”) the one consumer media distributor with the best rap across the board, because they do bring a lot of added value with their offering, to both sides of the gaming industry (devs and consumers).
Make no mistake, they are after our money like every other business out there is, they just have been wise enough to build trust among it’s stakeholders (not to be confused with “stockholders”, just in case).
I don’t like Valve. I don’t like the non-ownership model of game distribution.
Users aren’t captured at all, since none of them need to purchase video games. Game developers may be captured by Valve, but game developers aren’t producing anything of importance.
I’m for legal restrictions on industry practice that are predatory towards the users, but there’s no need to protect the industry itself from control by Valve, since nothing important is being controlled.
Valve also can’t control the gaming industry if they don’t control the OS gamers use. They may be trying to control the OS, but they haven’t done it yet. Until then, they can’t prevent users from installing games outside of Steam. If Developers are locked in to Steam, it’s because users buy games in Steam and refuse to buy games outside of Steam. The users behave this way because Steam provides lots of value to them.
If Steam starts to abuse users instead of serving them, there’s nothing stopping them from purchasing games some other way.