Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).
Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.
If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.
Thank you. I’m not against any of that, except maybe some definition needs to be applied to what is infra and what is store. For instance, a big part of what people like about steam is that they have reliable reviews. That would need to remain true with this split. I think there is a fine line to walk between enforcing interoperability and compromising or letting other companies leech on steam for no reason. You also seem to be implying that regardless of what store you purchase something on, you can access it from any other store because steam manages the licenses? Seems strange to me.
It’s not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Valve owners were rewarded handsomely for this already, there’s no reason for this to continue until heat death of the universe because there’s not that much value added that they provide now.
It’s cool that they pay salaries of like 3 Linux devs and piggyback on Wine work that Codeweavers funded for the past 30 years. You’d think there’s so much more they could do with 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales however which is why they need competition.
Details of such breakup can be ironed out but it’s important to keep in mind that this option exists and was used before successfuly.
not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time.
Just to be clear, the majority of the current competition is not only incompetent but actively malicious. The ones that don’t suck already have a toehold and I would like to see flourish because competition is good for everyone, but this picture you paint of steam is honestly ridiculous.
Consumers aren’t the only consideration. Even if Epic sucks in many ways they’re much more better for smaller devs because they don’t take anything until you make $1M. One would think that this would be enough for indies to publish there but they don’t want to split sales between platforms (they need all sales to happen on Steam so that they rank better there, it’s the only store that matters).
It’s a viscous cycle where smaller competition like GOG or Itch.io have no chance in hell to compete. I’m pretty sure anyone considering competing with Steam has done this math, hence you get only competition backed by big $$$, which usually is the worst people imaginable.
I’ve done so in this community it repeatedly over the course of ~2 years. If you don’t want to make an effort why would I.
If you already have an answer then copy paste it. If you already have an answer then why do this weasel dance? You clearly don’t have an answer.
Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).
Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.
If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.
Thank you. I’m not against any of that, except maybe some definition needs to be applied to what is infra and what is store. For instance, a big part of what people like about steam is that they have reliable reviews. That would need to remain true with this split. I think there is a fine line to walk between enforcing interoperability and compromising or letting other companies leech on steam for no reason. You also seem to be implying that regardless of what store you purchase something on, you can access it from any other store because steam manages the licenses? Seems strange to me.
It’s not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Valve owners were rewarded handsomely for this already, there’s no reason for this to continue until heat death of the universe because there’s not that much value added that they provide now.
It’s cool that they pay salaries of like 3 Linux devs and piggyback on Wine work that Codeweavers funded for the past 30 years. You’d think there’s so much more they could do with 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales however which is why they need competition.
Details of such breakup can be ironed out but it’s important to keep in mind that this option exists and was used before successfuly.
Just to be clear, the majority of the current competition is not only incompetent but actively malicious. The ones that don’t suck already have a toehold and I would like to see flourish because competition is good for everyone, but this picture you paint of steam is honestly ridiculous.
Consumers aren’t the only consideration. Even if Epic sucks in many ways they’re much more better for smaller devs because they don’t take anything until you make $1M. One would think that this would be enough for indies to publish there but they don’t want to split sales between platforms (they need all sales to happen on Steam so that they rank better there, it’s the only store that matters).
It’s a viscous cycle where smaller competition like GOG or Itch.io have no chance in hell to compete. I’m pretty sure anyone considering competing with Steam has done this math, hence you get only competition backed by big $$$, which usually is the worst people imaginable.