Many people buy games outside of Steam. Sure, relatively speaking it's a minority and if a game is available on Steam and elsewhere, most will pick it up on Steam. But part of the reason why Steam is so good is because these other platforms exist and there's nothing actually stopping anyone from buying their games from other stores. Cloud saves, game streaming/remote play, online play, family sharing and many more features are all free/included with the game purchase on Steam and they also pioneered many of these features. Steam Workshop adds great value as well, there isn't anything remotely comparable on any proprietary console. Steam is good because it has to be in order for people to choose to use it. And "deep discounts" are the same as ever, I see some games 90% off on sales events. Sure, successful AAA titles usually don't get a big discount 2 weeks after release, but in the end the publisher sets the pricing anyway. Generally, even when comparing full price, games are just cheaper on Steam compared to PSN (10 to sometimes 20 $/€ for big titles).

No, people don’t buy games outside of Steam, I was just speaking about the numbers - that’s why Alan Wake 2 didn’t break even for a year. It’s just a monopoly that you like because it’s still convenient and don’t mind downsides. Most digital storefronts work like this. At least console players still have an option that allows them to trade/resell their games, which PC players lost ages ago, thanks to Valve.

Yes, it’s even less transparent and accountable.

You don’t have to believe me, just look at the price for PC games which are already digital-only.

> Why would Sony care about GameStop's share price? They don’t. They care about their games being on the shelves because that’s where grandma is going to pick up a game for Billy’s birthday. > PC is cheaper because nobody has a monopoly on digital games so stores need to run sales to attract customers. PSN has sales just like the stores for PC games, there’s no difference there. The difference is that the non-sale price on PC is lower. You also seem to be under the impression that digital stores work like physical ones, where the store buys their wares from a distributer and then decides at what price to sell it to the consumer, maybe even at a loss when they want to clear inventory. This is not how digital sales work. Digital stores operate according to what’s known as the ‘agency model’. They don’t set the price of the products, they just take a cut of the sale. The prices are set by the publishers. Even sales work that way, the stores don’t determine the sales price, instead they go to the publishers and say “we’re going to do a sales event, want to join in?”. For each individual game, the publisher of that game has a monopoly. There is absolutely zero competition between stores on individual games because they do not have any control over the pricing of games in the first place. The publisher set the price for each store.

> Exactly. That's why I personally don't mind buying digital games on PC, because the PC is an open platform. If Valve decides to drop the ball and sell every game for double the price or something, I can still get and copy games via other means on my Steam Deck That’s not how it works at all. Valve doesn’t set the prices in their store, the publishers do. Valve just takes a cut of whatever the publisher decides to charge. If a publisher for a game decides to double the price for a game, why would they do so only on Steam and not on every other store that game is sold?

It was just an example. If they only allow publishers to publish racing games from now on or whatever, you have a choice to run other software on your hardware. A console is locked down, it's a brick if the manufacturer want it to be.

I bought resident evil code in the box PC because it was cheaper that directly on steam.

In what world do you think publicly traded companies are more accountable? If anything it's the opposite.

Private company is not a subject to many regulations and duties that a public company has to adhere to, mostly on external reporting. How much do you know about Valve? What’s their profit for 2023?

That's because Steam offers a better user experience than EGS. Here are some nice things about Steam that EGS lacks: - Steam input - awesome controller mapping - Linux support - esp Steam Deck - huge back catalog - user reviews - maybe this exists now for EGS? - lots of features I don't use, but others might While EGS has: - free games - timed exclusives Why should I use EGS? Steam is better.

Valve has an arguably better platform but is more expensive and doesn’t have some exclusives. That would be a great opportunity for a competitor yet nobody broke through despite pouring billions in. Weird, huh?

I will preface this with : I have many games that are not in steam that I play regularly, I understand this isn't the norm, I have **zero** paid games in EGS and outside of checking the platform I never use it. Alan wake on EGS is a terrible example to support your claim. It's like being upset that a fancy new car hasn't recouped costs when it's only available in 4 custom made dealers that are only open half the time and the manufacturer refuses to allow it to be sold in all the places people normally buy cars. Sure, that is certainly a choice but it's a choice that would have been part of the risk assessment before the money was sunk. Steam does have a monopoly, because it works and there isn't anything better. There is a bit of resistance to switching, most game libraries are in steam because **it's been the best option for a very long time.** If EGS worked well and epic (outside of unreal engine) wasn't such a shitshow the platform would be fine. It's doesn't and they aren't so it's not. It can't compete on features, support or stability so it tried exclusivity, that hasn't worked out for them. Steam has its own shit, sure, that percentage is some apple level monopolist bullshit. Name a comparable, viable alternative?

How many people actually trade/resell games? And what's the actual value of that in terms of dollars? How does that compare with the generally lower price of digital games? Digital games are often $5-20 if you wait a year or two after release, whereas console games are often $40+ even for older games. According to my Steam Replay, 37% of playtime is on old games (8+ years old) vs 15% for new releases (released in 2024). I don't have sales numbers, but I imagine a lot of people are buying digital games on steep discounts. You can't really do that on a console. For me, not being able to resell a game is worth the massive discount I get from digital. Many of the games I buy are $1-2 (Fanatical, Humble Bundle, etc), and I rarely pay >$20. I also have a Switch, and I'm lucky if I can find a used game for <$40, and when I used to have a recent console, the floor was about $20. If you prefer console, that's cool. I prefer choice. I can: - customize my PC, and I think the HW is actually cheaper long term - I upgrade CPU and GPU separately at about 3-5 year intervals to something mid range - I have controllers from different brands (XBox, PS4, Steam), as well as a nice KB and mouse - I use my PC for nongaming uses (software dev, messaging, photo/video editing, etc) - further reduces the gaming-specific costs - buy from a variety of stores - Fanatical and Humble Bundle for cheap bundles of Steam games, GOG, EGS (I just claim the free games and play a/ Heroic, because EGS refuses to support my platform: Linux) - create family account so we can all share games - possible with console, but only one person can play a given game at a time, whereas on Steam it's one per library (we have three, me, wife, kids) All of that more than makes up for a lack of physical games.

I sell games, sir, because I’m not made out of money. I buy digital too but it’s impossible with most AAA titles these days. I mean, I’d say it was your money to spend how you like, but Steam monopoly means games are more expensive than they need to be and you’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

Alan Wake 2 is a great example because it’s a game with both critical and popular acclaim that will be remembered years from now. Despite this, people decided to ignore it - they couldn’t be bothered with alternatives. Most of you claim those games on EGS so you don’t even have to make an account. This means that the platform now has such a high impact on what you consume that you’re going to skip on one of the best games of the year even though all that stops you is that it’s not in Steam. That’s a terrifying amount of power that people aren’t bothered by even though we’re talking about company that’s smug about selling gambling to children.

Sorta. The legislation that applies to physical copies of copyrighted materials is different and comes from the time when the only physical copies of copyrighted materials were paper books. Whilst strictly speaking you are buying a license for both, for physical media it's quite a different format of license with quite different conditions than for digital media. The physical media license is implicit, standardized (the same no matter where you buy the media, the publisher or even the game) and associated with the media (i.e. ownership of the media means having the license) which means that it's transferable without requiring a 3rd party intermidiary (literally giving or selling the media means giving or selling the license that is associated with it). Digital games licenses, on the other hand, are not standardized and vary from store to store, publisher to publisher and/or even game to game. They're all very explicitly personal (associated with the buyer) and them having or not of any of the buyer rights from in the implicit license of the physical media is all over the place. Most notably, it's very rare for them to be transmissible (it hugelly depends on the store) and even then it requires a 3rd party to approve it (generally the store). As far as I know, there is not consumer license for digital media which has the same or more rights for the consumer than the implicity license for physical media and only commercial licenses (which cost thousands of dollars) will give you more rights than that. Things like EULAs are pseudo-legal attempts at circunventing the implicit license of physical media, which is why they're not valid in most countries (they're deemed a one-sided attempts at forcing a change of the implicit contract terms of the sale, after the sale has been concluded, and hence have explicitly been deemed as having no contractual force whenever those things got to court in most of the World).

> Valve has an arguably better platform but is more expensive Yes, I think everyone would agree that Steam is the best PC games platform > doesn’t have some exclusives Well yeah, that's the definition of exclusive. Sony, Epic, and Microsoft pay to have games not available on other platforms. First parties don't release their games on other platforms to increase the attractiveness of their platform. Valve does this with their first party titles as well (CS:GO, Half Life, etc), but they release very few games. Exclusives are the definition of anti-competitive behavior. Valve only does this for their first party titles, and other than that is *very* competition friendly, since they allow devs to release on any other store, as well as make free keys to sell elsewhere. As a platform, they behave much better than pretty much everyone else, with maybe only GOG beating them due to license transfers and DRM-free commitment. Steam arguably has the best customer service in the industry (or if not best, very close to it), so it's less of a concern. > Valve didn’t figure out how to port Steam to ARM Why would they? Windows on ARM is pretty much nonexistent, emulating x86 on ARM on Linux has severe performance issues, and the best platform support for ARM is from Apple, where there's even less game selection. Most games don't work on ARM, so there's little point in supporting it. But Steam does work on macOS on ARM (I think it uses Rosetta still?), where devs are actually going to port their games to ARM. Windows and Linux on ARM are incredibly niche and games just aren't ported for those platforms. I guess they could do a compat layer like Rosetta, but it'll be a terrible experience running a game through a compat layer. AFAIK, EGS and GOG don't support ARM on anything other than macOS (and phones for EGS), and why would they? > dragged their feet on x86-64 Why does that matter? The only reason to port to x86_64 is to access more memory. Even while Steam was x86, games could still absolutely be x86_64. During the transition, they still needed to support 32-bit, so why do extra work when the benefits don't really apply? I've helped update to 64-bit, and it can be a lot of work. Why prioritize that? > I'm not sure where that money goes - Steam features like Steam Input (i.e. all that stuff that makes them stand out) - Linux support - tons of investment into WINE/Proton, drivers, etc; this is huge for Steam Deck - hardware development - Steam Deck, Valve Index, etc - marketing - both their products and other devs' games - employee salaries - Valve employees are paid very well - legal fights - e.g. patent lawsuits - Gabe's yachts - similar to how Unreal Engine profits are used by Tim Sweeney They're not public, but it's not hard to estimate since they publish a lot of data about the platform.

I started buying games after buying myself an OG play station. Even back then, I remember $40 and even $50 MSRP game prices. Their greatest hits line was discounted to $20. Final Fantasy 7, which remains an all time favorite of mine, [was $50 at launch](https://www.gameslearningsociety.org/how-much-was-final-fantasy-7-when-it-came-out/). Their greatest hits line was generally priced at $20, which offered a way of discounting games after launch. IMO man games in Steam follow a similar pricing strategy these days - high launch prices with discounts later. Note that I'm not advocating for the digital only model. Not being able to sell your games again is super lame.

Steam doesn't have a monopoly, they have a massive market share that they don't abuse. Even on their own platform (Steam Deck), they went out of their way to allow competition by giving access to desktop mode, and you can add non-Steam games to the Steam app, which means I get all the nice platform features from Steam in my EGS and GOG games (Steam Input, Proton, etc). There's nothing stopping anyone from switching to a competitor, like EGS, GOG, or any of the publisher-specific platforms. EGS even takes a smaller cut, so they can afford to sell games for less, yet they largely don't. PlayStation and Xbox are completely separate platforms, yet prices are similar to Steam, and usually higher for older games. Valve doesn't set prices, publishers do. If you don't like prices, complain to the publishers, not Valve. You really need to qualify your argument here that Valve somehow caused higher prices. In fact, if you look at game prices *before* Steam and adjust for inflation, games are cheaper now.