Randy Pitchford predicted Epic Games Store would kill off Steam 5 years ago. Now, the internet is mocking him as Borderlands 4 comes crawling back to Steam.
Haha I refuse to download the epic store. I love the expanse and was heartbroken when the telltale game was a timed epic exclusive, and I still didn't download it.
Sure steam is a monopoly, but they haven't been too much of a dickhead, whereas I just don't like Tim Sweeney and have no desire to go out of my way to enrich him
Valve has allowed me to play almost every game I own on Linux without any setup or trouble. Epic has kept me from legally playing games this way through their exclusivity. I'll never open an account there.
Yep, I am a Linux user and a Linux gamer, Tim Sweeney being a huge dick about Linux gaming while Valve has done a ton to help definitely is the main reason.
I am embarrassed though, I got so tired of still fighting with Linux gaming that I built a hypervisor and I run windows as a vm to game 😞.
That's fair. I am probably parroting stuff I hear about the play store or the apple store. Before epic I don't know many big players steam had to compete with. How much revenue does Gog make compared to valve for instance?
How much revenue does Gog make compared to valve for instance?
I don't know. That's not relevant to the definition of a monopoly. To be a monopoly you need to be the only supplier of a product or service. If there's competition, but you have the majority of market share, then you're merely dominating the market, which is not illegal (or even necessarily a bad thing, as evidenced by Steam).
Google Play and Apple store are monopolies because they are not competitors to each other, if you own a phone you're stuck with one or the other with no choices. They also take steps to prevent competition, which is highly illegal.
Steam is pretty much a monopoly because I expect something like 90% of pc game sales go through them. The thing is that being a monopoly is not necessarily bad, or illegal. It is abusing your monopolistic power to exploit consumers that is. Steam doesn't generally seem to do that
Oh yes I see it now. You posted it right after my response. And I do agree with what you say there. I however do believe that the destinction between a true monopoly and a dominant market position such as steam has is essentially irrelevant in this context. In a market economy you would expect very few (or even no ? ) true monopolies except those run by the state. And not being a true monopoly doesn't stop dominant firms from being able exploit monopolistic powers.
However my point is that steam doesn't exploit it's market position while it could definitely choose to. On that we seem to agree I think
I'm very grateful to the epic store. They gave away A Plague Tale: Innocence a while back and it ended up being one of my favorite games of all time. I bought the sequel on steam, of course.