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Remedy and Annapurna announce a strategic cooperation agreement on Control 2
(www.remedygames.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
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That's like saying that Walmart doesn't have a monopoly in your little town because there's this one other store that stays open even though most clients don't go anymore.
Hell, the first sign that a monopoly exist is that independents that said they wouldn't deal with the company with the monopoly start to do it because they realise that their sales aren't up to par because customers won't buy from them unless their product is available in the bigger store.
https://www.polygon.com/23799285/blizzard-pc-games-steam-overwatch-2-release-date
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/21/23471589/ubisoft-return-steam-2022-assassins-creed-valhalla
It's not that people didn't want to play their games (otherwise they wouldn't sell on Steam either), it's that people didn't want to play them unless they were available on a specific launcher and that means Steam is in a monopolistic position.
Lol, your two examples are from companies that have their own shitty launchers that customers hated using because they aren't very good. That's a service issue entirely on them, steams MoNoPoLy is a lazy excuse to paper over that glaring fact.
Again, store do good isn't a monopoly. Steam isn't a monopoly just because every other competitor doesn't know what customers want or don't care because it's expensive. And you're kinda proving my point. There are tons of competing stores out there to use, but people don't use them nearly as much because they suck or they're not feature complete. Both Blizzard and Ubisoft have their own competing stores, but neither can get market share because they refuse to offer features that customers want. Epic has the same problem.
Steam's MoNoPolY is 100% a lack of services and features from the competition, and that's what keeps people coming back to the environment. This isn't Walmart undercutting sales to drive competitors out of the market, this is smaller hobby stores mad they can't slap their customers and be entitled to the business the big player has.
What features? I have seen a lot of complaining about performance of the storefront here, which leads me to believe a lot of the complainers have not actually used EGS in actual years. I haven't seen anyone mention an actual specific feature of Steam that EGS is missing. Multiple running versions for beta testing, DLC linking with the main game page, sale frequency, everything except the social features of steam (which are notorious for being garbage communities) are on par in EGS these days, so this thread is confusing for me since you guys haven't actually explained a single missing feature.
I would give them remote play otherwise most other things are better off on Independent platforms or are just bloat (who the fuck cares about cards???)
The fact that the launcher isn't as good isn't the point.
If you grow tomatoes and sell them in a small grocery but barely manage to sell any because they don't have that many clients because there's a Walmart across the street and you decide to start selling your tomatoes at Walmart as well, is it because the grocery sucks or because Walmart is in a monopolistic position?
Once a distributor gets big enough that they become the default solution for clients and selling through an alternative distributor means forgoing profit simply because clients won't bother buying from the alternative no matter how good it is, you're in a monopolistic system.
Let's be clear here, no matter how good EGS gets or no matter how good a new alternative made their launcher, the vast majority of people won't do the switch for the simple reason that their library is centralized in a single place and that place is Steam.
What's funny is that I'm sure most people who don't care about how big Steam gets must be pissed whenever there's centralization in other markets. Hell, what platform are we on and why did it suddenly become popular? Because the giant that had cornered the market decided to turn to shit. Well, why wait until that happens with Valve instead of taking preventive measures and helping the competition? "Competition is good, it forces innovation!" Well that doesn't happen if even the customers are automatically turning against the competitors and never giving them a chance to improve.
It absolutely is the point, because the store and launcher being shit is why they have no market share. You're basically saying that it's not their fault that customers don't want to use their product.
The whole rest of your argument about physical distribution is a non-sequitor which doesn't map to digital distribution. And again, you keep alleging monopolistic tactics that don't exist in the real world. Epic being shit and not even remotely close to the same usable product does not make steam a monopoly.
You have no evidence of this, because no one has tried to offer a competitive service. And in fact, there is evidence against you with people choosing other stores like GoG and itch.io for games they want from those platforms even with the lower feature set. I use both platforms frequently for indie games or stuff I want DRM free, even though my main library is steam.
But again, those platforms aren't nearly as popular because they don't offer the same feature set. It's not steam forcing out competition, it's no one being willing to make a product to actually compete. Again, this is a service issue, not a tactics issue.
Also, L.O.L. at comparing a free service chasing cash to something you have to pay for.
But I'm done with this argument, have a good day.