Is Valve's Steam Anti-Competitive? 286
Absolut187 writes "Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford says Steam's domination of digital distribution is 'dangerous,' and exploits small developers. 'Steam helps us as customers, but it's also a money grab, and Valve is exploiting a lot of people in a way that's not totally fair. ... Valve is taking a larger share than it should for the service it's providing. ... There's so much conflict of interest there that it's horrid.' Pitchford's comments came as part of an interview with Maximum PC, and he thinks Valve should spin off Steam to its own company. Is he right? Is there a better answer?"
Update: 10/10 at 02:00 GMT by SS: Randy has clarified his remarks in a comment here at Slashdot. He makes it clear that he likes Steam a lot, and for several reasons, but thinks stronger competition would benefit the industry as a whole.
...should we be outraged? (Score:5, Insightful)
And there are alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)
He might have a point if Valve really had a monopoly. If they because the only way to do digital distribution, ok maybe a problem. However, that's not the case. My personal favourite for digital games is Stardock's Impulse (impulsedriven.com). Same idea basic as Steam. What I like about it is it is better on DRM. They don't apply their own DRM to all games, so some have none at all. Others use Impulse GOO, which is kinda like Steamworks but you don't have to be logged in or run the client, others use 3rd party DRM like on Steam.
Yet another option is Direct2Drive. I'm not such a fan of this one, but it works. I've bought a couple of titles from it.
So if a publisher/developer doesn't like Steam, well then don't use them, use one of the others. Nobody is making you use Steam. Or, for that matter, you could always use Steam but offer a better deal to the others if you like them better. Have your game for $50 on Steam and $40 on Impulse. That way you still get sales from Steam, but you can point customers to the platform you like better.
The other funny thing about the whining is that though the digital distributors take a cut, it is way less than retail. Retail is about a 50% markup. So if you buy a game at Target for $50 the publisher sees $25. Digital distributors don't take nearly that large a cut (it is more like 20%).
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This does give me an interesting idea: image a program that is the digital distribution clone of Trillian or Pidgin. Instead of having to download tons of different distribution programs, visit 50 bajillion websites to download stuff, it would be nice to have them all merged in
Re:And there are alternatives (Score:4, Insightful)
The only AD banner Valve has ever added to a game in Steam are the ADS in Counterstrike (the original) which was released near a decade ago now. I don't see ANYTHING nefarious in that given Valve STILL supports the game and I seriously doubt it's sales numbers in the past five years would have been enough to justify that to anyone in Accounting.
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It did kind of get annoying though for a while when it was all ads for L4D, and its like "I bought the game a month ago, stop showing me ads for it."
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retail on games is more like 20% than 50, source http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2006/12/8479.ars (and that's markup, not profit, profit is probably about half of that, the last EB manager I was friends with said they averaged about 7% profit on the price of games over a particular period, which I think was summer but not sure). There's a lot less overhead when you don't have to manufacture a box, manual or DVDs, after all you have to pay for all the stuff even if it doesn't sell.
Either way, I'm partia
Re:And there are alternatives (Score:5, Informative)
I agree, Steam isn't a monopoly, and there are are better (in my opinion) alternatives that have some of the exact same games.
I've bought from Steam, Impulse and Direct2Drive specifically as well as a few other self distributors. So far, Impulse is my favorite, especially for items that they will sell you a box/cd and the download for a few bucks more. Direct2Drive is fine, but you have to pay extra to make sure you can redownload it later. I understand to some extent, you have to pay to get replacement cd's from pretty much anyone, if you can find someone to help you do so. Steam is okay except its constant requirement to talk to servers and that I can't transfer a game to another account, which aren't problems with Impulse.
Clearly there is competition here, Steam has some shitty policies, feel free to bitch about them and shop elsewhere, Steam will either fix it, or have some other reason they own the marketplace or they simply won't own the marketplace, like now.
Steam, Impulse and Direct2Drive are just examples of the Targets, Walmarts and Kmarts of the Internet, just retail stores, although they haven't worked out the details as well as the brick and mortor counterparts.
You can bitch about them about the same way as you can bitch about BestBuy and Walmarts practices, but calling them a monopoly is just silly.
Being silly is a valid slashdot headline/summary however.
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I'm curious if steam's distribution agreement would even allow you to put it on other digital platforms for less.
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GOG [gog.com] want you to own your games and play whenever you want. Steam want you to rent your games, and play when you're connected to their servers and it's economically convenient.
What you do with your dollar is up to you.
Re:...should we be outraged? (Score:5, Informative)
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What are the options should steam go away ? I've personally only had very minor interaction with the service when it first came out, HL era. Can you expound a bit on the steam backup ? physical media involved ? What happens if/when my drive fails ?
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I recently reinstalled Steam on a new machine after losing my account details from the old machine and having not used my account in 2 years. I had lost access to my old email account I signed up with so I had to provide them with the credit card details I signed up with. Now I have access to all the games I have ever bought using Steam. This is better than most game I bought a physical copy of as I am great at losing or damaging the discs or manuals.
The people here complaining about "renting" games are jus
Re:...should we be outraged? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's a terrible service that provides little merit outside of a unified friends list.
.. and the ability to log into the client anywhere and have it download all your licensed games and updates to them automatically. Although I do remember some prior /. story about license problems across territories.
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I bought a new computer and was able to get all my games back in one easy interface. Not bad. I haven't bought a game in the store for a long time.
If Steam is getting "too much marketshare", can't someone else come up with their own interface for downloading games? Are you telling me that Steam is "too good" and has to be destroyed?
At least they give you something for your money, unlike some others. Health insurance companies come to mine. I still haven't figured out what value they add to the equation
Re:...should we be outraged? (Score:4, Insightful)
Steam began as a way to distribute Valve software. It worked, other people wanted in. End of story. No antitrust. There actually ARE several companies with a front end similar to Steam, but they all came later, and haven't had as many or as big of titles as Valve has had to wedge their foot in the door.
More competition would be great, obviously. Lack of competition (which isn't precisely true, anyway) is not antitrust, it's that nobody came up with something like Steam before Valve (at least not in a way that was successful). Not a matter of monopoly, just a matter of being the biggest kid on the block. A bit like iTunes, except at its head is a big ol' fat guy rather than the hipster deity.
Re:...should we be outraged? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a pretty weak argument for someone with a modern connection. It took me about 30 min to install the orange box (about 4.8gb) on my home connection. If you account for time spent looking for the original disk, it's about neck and neck for the physical install vs. the online download these days. If you're buying a new game (if you're me, that's about 90% of all games played) then it's usually preloaded onto your computer until release date. That means it's faster, in that you don't have to drive to gamestop, or swing by there on your way home from work, and run through a messy installer. You just click on it, and it runs, first time and ready to go.
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That's a pretty weak argument for someone with a modern connection. It took me about 30 min to install the orange box (about 4.8gb) on my home connection.
As someone who moves around a lot, it would've taken me two months. I have a 3 Gb/month data cap.
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I seem to remember having to spend a good long while waiting for every single file within Half-Life 2 to validate within the Steam network. That's not "less DRM". Just wait until Valve goes bankrupt, shuts down their servers, and all of your home-made backups are worthless because they're tied to Steam.
Re:...should we be outraged? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually it does, it provides an easier way to meet the mass market than the alternative, which is the main games distribution companies like EA. You want a conflict of interest, try doing business with them and releasing a game at Christmas when their flagship titles are coming out.
I know Steam has its detractors as they do not allow resale of titles, but it also has its benefits.
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and, oh look, all your games were unified on one account. $100s down the swanny for you.
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Re:...should we be outraged? (Score:5, Informative)
Your argument fails for the fact that it was the developers choice to use Steam to activate the game. There are tons of games that are on steam and are also available for retail and do not require steam in any way shape or form to run.
Re:...should we be outraged? (Score:4, Insightful)
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so do something about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Valve is exploiting a lot of people in a way that's not totally fair
So start a competitor with policies you consider to be fair.
And stop whining, btw.
Re:so do something about it (Score:4, Informative)
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Dude, I responded the same way and went so far as to write gearbox. Randy wrote me back, personally, and cleared it up. This article is sensationalist exaggeration and bullshit, thats what it is. I knew my critic-o-meter was off today! I should have known a journalist will say crazy junk just to seem cool.
Here is the link to my post (right here in slashdot comments) where I quote him from his e-mail to me.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1399359&cid=29700749 [slashdot.org]
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Re:so do something about it (Score:5, Informative)
There's nothing wrong with complaining about monopolies.
No, and I'm usually the one up on a soapbox railing against 'em. But Steam isn't a monopoly. There needs to be a special barrier to entry for a company or industry to be one, and I just don't see it. There's no legal bar, like with government-granted monopolies or Google books. There's no incredible infrastructure needed, just reasonable bandwidth and servers. There's not a "desktop" barrier in which users only benefit from one similar product. There's not even an "I wanted to be the car" barrier that caused so much consternation in my youth. Nobody's accusing 'em of coercion. Popularity alone doesn't a monopoly make.
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Monopoly is a specific word that has a certain meaning, and it's more than just market dominance.
Part of what gives a company a monopoly is that they have exclusive control over access to a resource, or near enough that it doesn't matter. This control alows a company with a monopoly to prevent competitors to be able to compete by restricting the resource outright or by charging fees that are so high the competitor cannot possibly provide a competitive service at a competitive price.
The obvious example is M
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That analogy doesn't make any sense. If all cars were made by one company, they would be a monopoly, for the reasons you cite.
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There's nothing wrong with complaining about monopolies
No, you just sometimes waste your breath doing so. Monopolies are only bad when they engage in coercive activities to keep out new competitors. Natural monopolies on the other hand, are not really bad compared to the benefits. Imagine what the landscape would look like if there were 20 companies all stringing power lines to every neighborhood to compete for home electrical power.
This game software "monopoly" being complained about is
are our brains leaking out of our heads? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:are our brains leaking out of our heads? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's one other thing that's revived PC gaming for me, and digital distribution does it by default. Apart from games I bought on Steam or from GOG, only one of them doesn't force me to insert the %^&*ing CD in order to play. This is despite the fact that games load just about nothing from CD these days because it's too slow!
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Typically they literally load nothing from the cd. They just check to make sure it is there (and legit) and after that you can just eject the disk with no issue.
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No, I think ad revenue is down across the board and all the journalists went to a "making sensationalist headlines work for YOU" seminar, and some of the slashdot editors went along to it. Even the relatively even-keeled slashdot has become rather fox-news-like in terms of sensationalist stories about nothing. It's one thing to break news about the Patriot act, NSA monitoring US citizens without warrants, etc but putting sensationalist bullshit about a very well liked company and their digital distribution
Well.. (Score:2, Insightful)
As much as I like Steam, they'll always be anti-competitive as long as you cannot unlink and resale games to other people. It ensures that Steam NEVER has to compete with itself for a sale, that is, no one can get a Steam-exclusive game and then resell it to another person, without selling their entire account off.
I have no issues with letting them dominate the market if they'd allow games to be resold or transferred between accounts. They haven't, to my knowledge, been anti-competitive towards other comp
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's worth noting that for Valve's exclusive games, when you buy bundle packs containing copies you already have, you get more copies which can be given to friends.
Unfortunately, the same doesn't apply for third-party games.
I can understand the publisher's desire to lock a game to every customer. It ensures every sale gives you profit. I also understand that in the case of Steam, that's giving us much lower prices. Unlike most other platforms, Steam is flooded with quality games that go on sale for between $5 to $15.
When's the last time you got an XBox360 game brand new for $10? You can take your rights of sale and shove them... somewhere. I'll lose at least that much money trying to sell a game I picked up new, so resale doesn't really concern me much. Plus, after I sell it and lose $10+, I don't have it anymore.
One thing I would like to see is Valve not allowing non-Steam DRM in games. I hate it when games have double-protection(like Universe At War), and then it doesn't work because of the non-Steam DRM.
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You mean like Turtles in Time Re-Shelled [xbox.com], which costs 800 MS Points ($10) on the Xbox Live Marketplace?
Or did you mean other than the Xbox Live Marketplace? Of course, that would make the comparison unfair, since XBLM is the 360's Digital Distribution system.
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Microsoft launched Games On Demand [xbox.com] (Downloadable versions of full Xbox/Xbox 360 games you could buy in stores) a few months ago, so I don't expect that they'd put any games on sale through it quite yet.
Having said that, the Xbox 360 titles on it are usually $19.99-$29.99, cheaper than you find them in stores. They also have the old Xbox original titles on it for $15 or so.
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I'm actually pretty surprised by the prices on Steam though. Despite a strong second-hand market for PC games, the prices on Steam (and PC games in general) still seem to have some strong pressure from somewhere (piracy?). New game prices sometimes start below their console ports, and the price gap just widens from there. On top of that they offer sometimes crazy good sales and some amazing value bundles. Of course, they're not the only digital distributor with good deals. The recent D2D $5 sale has had me
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Well with digital distribution you cut out the publisher/distributor, and you can either turn that cost into profit or cut ti out of the cost of the game.
And of course since it costs mere pennies to distribute, once you make up the cost of producing a game you can set the price point wherever you want and it's pure profit.
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If you've signed an exclusive contract, then obviously you would be in breach of contract if you sold somewhere else. Duh.
That's actually you (the developer) creating an incentive for Valve to promote your software more than they would promote non-exclusive software. It's a business decision, and the company that has to live with it is the one that made the decision.
Re-selling is an entirely different beast. If you want to own a physical copy of a game you can sell to someone else, you should buy a physi
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As much as I like Steam, they'll always be anti-competitive as long as you cannot unlink and resale games to other people.
Sorry, but you will have to explain why that is anti-competitive. It might not be the most consumer friendly policy, but it certainly does not stifle competition. I also note that most games are cheaper on Steam which is why I always thought you were not allowed to transfer ownership. Thhey are in fact completely open about this, when you buy a game you know it is limited to you, so you have choice: buy it anyway, or do not buy it and go and pay more to get a hardcopy that still probably prohibits resale, b
Prices compared to retail? (Score:2)
Technically the service valve provides takes the role of packager, distributor, and store so if you add up the amounts those companies normally get (on an equally priced game) and it is a similar amount then it shouldn't be any big deal (for the developer). Especially since valve may have to distribute the game a hundred times.
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If ordering online, you also save shipping and handling from the eStore to you.
In my case - I'm Canadian - Steam saves me 12% tax. (more depending on province)
And I usually wait for things to go 50-75% off before purchasing, which puts my Steam cost at about 20% of retail cost.
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I was referring to the % of the price that goes to steam vs the developer compared to stores/distributors/manufacturers in retail. Sorry that I wasn't clear.
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Generally speaking, they aren't. In Europe they may be, but everywhere else Steam costs the same or less than retail, specially here in South America where it's common for the same game on Steam cost a third of what it sells for in retail.
I've heard that Play.com has lower than average prices thanks to abusing some loopholes to avoid paying taxes, too, but I don't know how valid those claims may be.
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I think it's because retail products take up physical space, so there's an incentive to clear inventory. With digital distribution, they can sell as many or as few copies as they want in order to maximize revenue.
Voluntary = exploitative? (Score:4, Insightful)
How on earth is a voluntary service exploitative?
In the same way I guess that a story exploits people who voluntarily buy from them.
Is there something I'm missing here?
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I'm not saying Steam is an example, but why can't a voluntary service be exploitative? People volunteer to do business with a high speed ISP, for example, but that ISP may be the only provider in the area, and lobby for laws to keep municipalities from establishing a competing service, so as to keep the price up, while also getting subsidies from the federal government. You volunteer to do buisiness directly with the company, but you also have financial involvement with them you didn't volunteer for - surel
valve has done something right the rest havn't (Score:4, Insightful)
That depends (Score:2)
Steam is less anti-competitive than say, The Pirate Bay?
What's stopping game developers from hosting their own pay-per-download site, instead of whining about Steam? Then they can keep ALL of the profit (less bandwidth and marketing costs).
Unfair competition? (Score:4, Insightful)
Has Valve somehow managed to erect barriers to entry into the market, or in any way block competitors from starting a competing service? Is there in fact anything unethical or unfair going on?
Valve pioneered this area. Now they are reaping the rewards. Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to start up their own, competing service.
But hey, he's entitled to complain about it if it makes him feel better. That's less work that trying to compete with Valve.
steveha
Re:Unfair competition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure and LOL, they were the first carrying titles like Counter-Strike and Half-life, pretty much forcing people to install Steam in order to play these highly desired games. NOBODY would install Steam without some good game already in. You can try to start a competing company with no such games, good luck.
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Sure and LOL, they were the first carrying titles like Counter-Strike and Half-life, pretty much forcing people to install Steam in order to play these highly desired games. NOBODY would install Steam without some good game already in. You can try to start a competing company with no such games, good luck.
So what game did Direct2Drive use to achieve popularity, then?
Also, even if your premise holds true, game market itself is quite competitive. It ain't cheap, but it's certainly feasible for a new entity to come up with a new good game, and then tie that to its new electronic distribution service, just like Valve did.
So, again, what's the problem here?
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Use Impulse Instead (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure nobody has ever released a buggy game on Steam, right? Or in retail for that matter?
What a silly argument.
Waah waah waah. (Score:2)
I've definitely purchased more games due to Steam. I do wish that more of the games supported online backups of saved games, and that it had a default configuration/hinting system for settings such as key and mouse binds. Movement, invert mouse, zoom, jump, crouch, prone, etc: most games of a similar type have mostly similar controls.
Steam is great. They've had the potential to
There's plenty of competition. (Score:2, Insightful)
But the only service from this list I like more then steam is gog.com. Steam offers a great service which offers very fast downloads, an easy to use steam app, weekend deals, plenty of community features, achievements... The only thing they seriously fuck up is their price ranges. Direct dollar to euro conversions make me feel ripped of. It also means that new games are always cheaper
Monopoly? (Score:2)
You can put it on Impulse, GameTap, or make it a direct download on your site. You can port it to console and put it on WiiWare, XBox Live, or PSN. Seriously, there's a lot of alternatives here, and its hard for me to think of Steam as a monopoly.
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Monopoly in the antitrust sense just requires a certain market share, I think steam probably have that market share, OFC now they need to abuse it to get this prize [archive.org]
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While I agree that Valve is hardly a monopoly, companies like Electronic Arts [steampowered.com], 2K Games [steampowered.com], UbiSoft [steampowered.com], Rockstar Games [steampowered.com], LucasArts [steampowered.com], and iD Software [steampowered.com] are hardly indies.
Steam flaws (Score:4, Informative)
I'm seeing a lot of comments discussing various flaws of Steam, but nothing which I recognize as anti-competitiveness. Now I'm not terribly well informed on what constitutes anti-competitive practices, so I did what any random Joe Slashdot on the street would do, which is look it up on WP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices [wikipedia.org]
Looking at the list of typical anti-competitive practices, I see none which I can imagine applying to Valve's Steam, so I'd imagine that their high popularity with publishers given their high cut of the price is simply due to a lack of good competition rather than Valve pushing all their competitors in online game distribution off the market.
If Steam wasn't ultimately providing a profitable service, I'm sure publishers would simply stick with the physical retail market.
Comment from the source (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Comment from the source (Score:4, Funny)
As a guy who reads, trusts and respects slashdot and the community here
You lost me.
Re:Comment from the source (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Comment from the source (Score:4, Insightful)
As a guy who reads, trusts and respects slashdot and the community here,
That is where you are going wrong, we are in fact 90% self righteous troll, fortunately I'm part of the 10% that responds to logic and completely agree that it would be better for everybody involved if steam/valve split. If they do not they will have to take great care to not end up running afoul of anti-trust laws as they are a major part of several markets distribution,PC FPS (particularly at a pro level),engine licensor.
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Would Stardock have to split too, then? What about Microsoft and their next XBox, or Apple?
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That Randy is such a rebel boat rocker.
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I can respect that you are coming from the perspective of a competitor, and commenting on how you would feel better about the distribution channel if it wasn't directly conjoined with one of your biggest competitors. I can really understand that concept.
As a customer, I hope Steam *never* separates from Valve. I trust them, as well as I can trust any corporation, as they have in the past demonstrated that they *really* want my cash, and are willing to prove it. They do it in a variety of ways,
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Impulse is really good, too. I buy from Impulse, Steam, and GOG.
GOG is just a website - an impressive website. It has DRM free installers for all their games. ;)
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D2D is very simple, you give them money, they give you a link to download the app, no download manager or anything to install except the game itself. I have only purchased one game through them btu they seem fine, if I want I can download the game again, plus the game I bought had 0 DRM on it.
Other games may have DRM and or other issues.
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GOG only sells old titles, so it's out for recent onces. Metaboli doesn't appear to actually sell games. So that leaves Direct2Drive, GamersGate, and Impulse.
If all you want to do is buy games, those three are sufficient. But in terms of the end-user experience, they don't hold a candle to Steam, which is what's holding them back from being viable competitors.
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Counterpoints (Score:3, Informative)
Counterpoint from John Gibson [gamasutra.com]
Counterpoint from Derek Smart [shacknews.com]
Gimme a second here (Score:2, Insightful)
Anticompetitive (Score:2)
Does Steam prevent another company setting up a similar service?
Do they force their users into an unfair contract against their will?
Do they force the software authors into an unfair contract against their will?
Does Steam intefere with, or say that you can't use, other similar services?
No? Then it's probably not anticompetitive. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's anticompetitive. Just because they are the only decent online to-your-desktop electronic software distribution network that is p
Thoughts from a game dev (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who has an upcoming indie game [wolfire.com] appearing on Steam, here are my thoughts.
First of all, there is no shortage of competition [wolfire.com] for Steam. Steam is definitely the biggest, but they are not doing anything anti-competitve.
Unlike the console market, it is not uncommon to see a game sold on Steam, D2D, Impulse, and the 15+ other contendors simultaneously, from day one, in addition to being sold by the creator directly. In fact, even earlier than day one, due to the trend of preorders.
If Steam pressured developers into exclusive deals (which they could easily do, due to their size), then sure, I would be kind of pissed. The fact of the matter is that Valve isn't doing that -- they are simply acting like a big, friendly store where developers can put their game for sale. They have been great dudes so far.
They don't have a monopoly (Score:2, Interesting)
why so many "not a monopoly" posts? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow it looks like if a company is not MS or google then nobody should even question the conflict of interests they have here on slashdot!? The guy has some good points, agree/disagree but give me a break on all the "they have competitors"/"build your own nobody is stopping you!" posts, I mean most of those posts are just repeating previous ones, of 109 posts (most of them "they have competitors",etc) only 1 has any real analysis/content!
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I was bitching about the shear number of crap post, even giving you credit for a some sort of content in your post (as a reply completely OT though) out of 209 there are still less than a dozen posts with any content the rest are just going on about drm/not a monopoly/how much they love steam.
In reply to your points,
The issue is that monopolies are only bad when customers wind up with a sub-par product,
I do agree however I feel it would be better if steam/valve split before they did anything to make them bad. For example without any external regulation, most of the hedge funds in London volunt
Let Randy build his own damned product (Score:2)
If Mr. Randy thinks there should be more competition, then Randy should build one on his own dime -- not try to squash those who have already done so.
When I build successful services, and I choose to charge for them, I don't like it when other people try to make my life more difficult by forcing me to charge less because they feel entitled to pay less. What the hell?
Free markets are exactly that -- you don't like the price, you don't have to pay it. You can offer to pay the developers directly. And they c
Steam is the best thing since sliced bread (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, for customers of Steam (read : anyone who might has a game he wants to market) it might be. But for customers of those customers (read : those who buy those games) its far from that.
I recently bought a copy of Fear 2. Alas, when I tried to install it I got a "Fear.dll missing" error-message, maybe because my game-machine is simple not connected to the 'Net ?
And pardon me, but there is, for me, absolutily no way I'm going to put money down for a DVD contaning some software I can't even use, everytime I want to install it (and maybe even more often ?), without contacting some far-away server from whom I can beg to please give me the content I allready payed for. Especially not when I'm known to enjoy games of yester-decade as much (or maybe even more) as the current games -- It would (most likely) be impossible for me to re-install games of a few years old onto my machine (and not because of hardware incompatibilities). Either the game will not be supported by Steam anymore (licence-to-play expired ?), I would have to prove I'm the first buyer probably by sending the origional bill to them, or even Steam has ceased to exist, leaving me with a "bought" game that has become worthless without me even knowing when it happens/has happened (throw a standard dice, divide by 2 or even 3 and add 2 to 3 years. That is, if you're lucky, as it could happen next week).
Oh yeah, I recently (last week) bought Fear I (the origional, first version) too (I allready played part of it on a friends computer). Too bad that it suddenly cried that there "is an update available", a message which won't go away (pops up every time I want to continue playing).
The funny thing is that an update will invalidate any saved-games you allready have. To add to this monkey business the site where the update should be gotten from is non-existant anymore. If this company can't even support its own product a few years (or, in my case, a week after I bought it (from a store) ) I allready have bad feelings about an external party like Steam ....
a rebuttal (Score:4, Insightful)
First, saying that steam is a money grab is as asinine as saying that physical media publishing is a money grab. Of course it is. It no more exploits small developers than 2K Games, Ubisoft, EA, or any other software publisher does. Which is to say, yes they all do. Attacking Valve specifically because Gabe and Doug had the foresight and vision to get a foothold in the digital distribution market before it became popular is just plain whiny. Valve's domination over the digital distribution realm is not due to anti-competitive behavior. It's due to a superior service which adapted to the market long before traditional publishers' white haired executives realized they were losing sales to steam. By then, the best option was to publish under steam. Does steam take a larger share than they should? Probably not, given the service they provide. Using physical media presented problems for consumers. Publishers, already wary of online piracy saw digital distribution as counter-intuitive. Valve presented steam as both an answer to piracy and a solution to issues with physical media. But for Valve it was much more than that. By publishing their own games, they effectively avoided issues with traditional publishers. Consumers wanted to get their games online. Traditional publishers wouldn't provide them. Blaming Valve for steam's popularity is both a compliment and ludicrous. The consumers wanted the service.
Second, there is plenty of competition out there for digital distribution. None of it provides quite the same value as steam. Traditional publishers tried their own flavor of digital distribution. Some were very difficult to use and offered only one download of the game. None offered the community features that steam did at the time. Steam continues to improve the service at no additional cost to either consumers or developers. Only Stardock is coming close to Valve. Stardock was offering community services long before their Impulse DD store launched. Other DD game stores are web-based and don't even come close to the services and value that steam provides. So forgive me if I don't share your disdain for steam.
I thought the idea was stupid when I first heard about steam in 2002. I didn't see the potential.
That being said, the only dangerous part is the faith we place in the service after investing thousands of dollars on games on steam. If steam shuts down or becomes defunct, our games go poof. Granted, we have the option to backup our games, though they only work if connecting to the steam service. So the dangerous part is also the most valuable part.
Why go for digital distribution? (Score:3, Insightful)
I buy my games ate physical game stores for a very simple reason:
- If they don't work or they're not what's advertised I can bring them back and get a refund.
This is true for any game I buy: there's no need to investigate the Software License of a game before I buy it (like in Steam) to make sure I can get a refund
Try doing that with digital distribution or even online stores.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:A system designed by greed... (Score:4, Funny)
Wow... who would imagine.
WOW isn't on steam.
Re:Expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's not at all uncommon for newly-released (and thus not-on-sale) games to be available cheaper at traditional retailers, as you can usually find at least one that is running a sale on the brand new game.
The most notable recent example I can think of is Left 4 Dead (a Valve-made game, even!) which was available at some major retail chain (I forget which) for $40 at launch, vs. the Steam price of $50. Buy it at the store, put in your code et viola, legit Steam copy of the game for $40. Buy it from Steam (
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You must not be European, at the least, then.
Ever since the product pricing in Steam adopted the traditional "USD = EUR! bend over, lol" method of currency conversion, Steam games have been bloody expensive for Europeans.
No, it's not just taxes. Highest tax in Europe is some ridiculous 25% in Sweden, Denmark and Hungary (most are around the 19% mark). Now check the going rate for EUR/USD: 1.47501.
It really is very often much cheaper to just buy retail in Europe.