The wolfire games lawsuit is so damn cringe. No company is your friend, but there's a reason Steam is number 1. The reinvestment in the platform and breadth of features steam has is unrivaled. Epic has been trying for nearly a decade now and their store doesn't even have 1/4 the features of steam. I love GoG though. For me they offer something steam can't, installers for my games.

The reason Steam is #1 is because everyone’s so invested into it.

Steam has so many more features than any other platform. First to market or not, that's why steam is number one. None of its competitors offer the community, market, discussion boards, rating system, friend system functionality and overall reliability that steam does. It has competition, just not on PC. Epic is atrociously bad. From hampering system performance to a total lack of any of the above features, using epic sucks. The Xbox app is somehow seemongly always broken despite literally being developed by the platform holders and with a shit load of cash behind it. I don't love the idea of a steam monopoly but you gotta also give them their flowers, it's a fantastic storefront, arguably the best when considering all gaming platforms that exist even outside of PC.

Nah mate, Steam is just the best game platform on PC. A game has access to so many features like cloud saves, community, workshop, matchmaking when it comes out on Steam, while the users have access to user reviews, curators, guides, sales, bundles etc etc. Epic doesn't have most of those features. And yes, a game dev can go out of their way to create those features for their game, on Steam they don't have to. Epic had all the time in the world to implement even half of them, but they still haven't. GOG is an alternative because it offers something Steam won't, and it's been going great for them. Epic is just a bootleg version of Steam. Their only claim to fame is their free game giveaways, but even then you're stuck playing the game without the features Steam users have.

My view is if you don't like a distribution platform taking 20-30% of the sale then don't use that distribution platform. It's a free market and a free internet. Use Epic, GOG, or host it yourself If I don't like what Comcast charges I don't do a class action lawsuit.

It’s easy to do that when you employ couple of hundred people while taking 30% cut of 90% of PC game sales.

It is where it is because it was the first. If tomorrow someone made a better Steam you’d still buy everything there because that’s where all your games are. Be honest with yourself.

Oh come on, comparing Steam to telecoms is a bit of a leap. Nobody *needs* access to video games on a day-to-day basis. Video games are a luxury item at the end of the day. Their breaking up also assumes that hosting video games for downloads is a thing only Steam can do. Steam hosting the game files and Steam as a service for the customer have little to no relation to each other. Steam, or anyone else for that matter, could just as easily use AWS. Breaking up Steam into many, smaller Steams might lead to lower prices, or devs will choose one, that one will become the dominant one, and we're back to square one. The best way to drive prices down is competition. It's economics 101. Do not blame Steam for being successful, blame their competition (Epic in this case) for being inept. Epic was the VC baby everybody was banking on going toe-to-toe with Steam, but they couldn't even get basic shit like a cart or a wishlist working for far too long. Steam's 30% cut is a different problem altogether. Yeah, it's probably excessive, and would ideally be tiered by sales. However, all the games (that I have seen) that released on Epic first, with their paid exclusivity, eventually came out on Steam. So what does that tell us about how impactful that 30% cut is. Steam's pre-existing userbase is a factor. Userbase they have, and maintain, due to their wide array of features. And, all those features Steam provides aren't free to maintain. They host the game on their own servers, they host all the user generated content on their servers, Steamworks matchmaking is ran by Steam. Game devs aren't just getting their game sold through Steam, Steam does much much more than that.

And this is how people will explain why upcoming technofeudalism is a good thing. Our new masters have earned it

Maybe it's just a bad take. Just a hurdurr big tech bad sticker on an argument doesn't win it for you if your argument is crap.

Sorry, they didn't gobble up existing infrastructure. Comparing them to telcos is just a bad argument.

If you lose access to a vast majority of the market if you don‘t use a service, it’s a monopoly. Don’t defend monopolists.

I dunno about those lame features, I use Steam because AAA mostly gets exclusively released there on PC. It kinda sucks.

A monopoly isn‘t good if the product is good. It‘s still bad.

Why? What are the negative aspects of breaking up Steam that way? I can’t think of any. I provided plenty of benefits both to consumers and developers.

Now we're just making things up to justify a bad take?

What‘s made up?

> if you don't like a distribution platform taking 20-30% of the sale then don't use that distribution platform Excuse my frank speech but that's *absolute bollocks* and lacks any understanding at all of how a monopoly works.

Calling it a monopoly. They didn't lobby to have the market share. They have competitors who can't make a product as good. Just calling it a monopoly because you think it's an easy win in an argument doesn't just make it a monopoly.

This is not how a monopoly is defined in any civilised country.