I feel like some journalist got high as fuck with a dev, wrote out a fucking fever dream of… drivel and then the editors were like fuck it, Tim Sweeney pays us to post some hit pieces against Valve and this is all we got this month so we’ll just run with this.
Call me when they show predatory behaviour to establish their monopoly. I don’t think steam has exclusive deals as epic has for example.
Until any competing store releases a Linux client, I can’t really argue against Steam. They are a gatekeeper and almost a monopoly, but they’re also the most benevolent and pro-consumer gatekeeper that we have in the PC gaming distribution space. As long as all the competition continue to be Windows-only and, in some cases, actively work against Linux users, I don’t want Valve’s digital fiefdom to fall.
How are they a gatekeeper? Near monopoly sure. But they don’t force companies to only publish on Steam. They don’t have restrictive rules. I’m not sure what gate they are keeping.
If you reeeeally want to stretch, they do have rules about pricing things lower on other platforms. Like, you can have a sale on your website that makes it cheaper than Steam, but can’t have the base price cheaper there than on Steam. That’s about it.
Disproven many times over.
You can’t sell the free generated Steam keys on other platforms lower than on Steam. You are perfectly free to sell the game on other platforms for less than Steam.
Steam obsessed people always cry about the lack of “features” in other stores, as if a game store + launcher needs features other than being able to buy and launch games.
Hell, I don’t even want to launch games. Just let me buy and download an exe (oh yeah, GoG does that, which is why I use GoG whenever I can…)
Sucks for devs that people just won’t buy their game if it isn’t on Steam though :/ Idk how to change peoples’ behaviour, unless Steam does something egregiously bad to users
Steam is fast. Epic is slow. Epic is always asking me to 2FA to access my library of free games. Epic takes minutes to load their store homepage.
I agree and hope that what comes after it is even better at supporting gaming on GNU/Linux and contributing to various libre and opensource projects like KDE and Proton and Mesa and such.
