Steam is a functional monopoly, but… I’d argue it didn’t get there by being underhanded, ratfucking competitors secretly or brazenly.
It just is better. It offers far more things, to both consumers and developers/sellers.
Think from an indie dev perspective. If your game is actually good? Finds a niche? You don’t need marketing, basically. You don’t need to budget that, Steam will do it for you. AAA gaming is basically like fucking movies at this point, sometjing like 1/3 the budget goes toward building the hype train, not the product.
Attempts to outdo or directly compete with Steam have just actually been comically incompetent, from at least my own business analyst perspective.
Yeah, it has contract terms it enforces on sellers, but imo, they’re far less restrictive than say, platform/marketfront exclusivity, as had long been the norm in the video game industry.
Room for improvement? Absolutely. Functionally gambling on in game items, children doing this, is a legitimate problem. Afaik the court case with NY is still ongoing, will be interested to see how that pans out.
Yep.
Steam is a functional monopoly, but… I’d argue it didn’t get there by being underhanded, ratfucking competitors secretly or brazenly.
It just is better. It offers far more things, to both consumers and developers/sellers.
Think from an indie dev perspective. If your game is actually good? Finds a niche? You don’t need marketing, basically. You don’t need to budget that, Steam will do it for you. AAA gaming is basically like fucking movies at this point, sometjing like 1/3 the budget goes toward building the hype train, not the product.
Attempts to outdo or directly compete with Steam have just actually been comically incompetent, from at least my own business analyst perspective.
Yeah, it has contract terms it enforces on sellers, but imo, they’re far less restrictive than say, platform/marketfront exclusivity, as had long been the norm in the video game industry.
Room for improvement? Absolutely. Functionally gambling on in game items, children doing this, is a legitimate problem. Afaik the court case with NY is still ongoing, will be interested to see how that pans out.