You are wrong about what a monpolistic position is, at least in a world in which people don’t get pedantic and call it a “position of market dominance” because that’s not how real people talk unless they are dicks.
So yeah, Steam does have a position of market dominance that they are using to force conditions and prices on providers and customers. Whether that is done to a degree that it infringes on US antitrust regulation is currently in the process of being determined in court, but for the purposes of our conversation it is bad and getting worse.
And I can’t stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. I’m old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isn’t, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.
This is not a reason to get mad in any sane reading of a marketplace, period. Didn’t stop schoolchildren in the 90s from fighting over Sonic versus Mario, but I’m not a schoolchild now and I find it extremely tiresome.
And as for your last point… so don’t frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or don’t play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I can’t describe the subatomic size of the violin I’m playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend.
Nobody should care about this. Epic has decided to compete by giving away freebies and signing up exclusives, which is frankly, a lot more freebies than every other first party in the past thirty years. Mediocre as their software is I have very little to no patience for anybody genuinely complaining about this state of affairs.
And I can’t stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. I’m old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isn’t, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.
Do you not see how you’re talking about something completely different here? You’re talking about “Mario is only available on Nintendo systems” not “If you have a Nintendo you can only buy Mario at Walmart”.
The first is not a monopoly: “You can purchase this product anywhere you want, it is only compatible on this system”.
The second is a monopoly: “you can only purchase this product from US!”
For someone so much against monopolies and arguing for the need for competition and consumer choice, you are spending a lot of effort arguing FOR a behaviour that restricts competition and consumer choice.
And as for your last point… so don’t frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or don’t play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I can’t describe the subatomic size of the violin I’m playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend. Nobody should care about this.
So we both agree that your argument that “Steam might be bad one day” is pointless and a non-issue. Good. You can stop bringing it up then.
Which is obvious. Nobody is out there arguing that signing an exclusivity deal between a first party and a developer is somehow a monopolistic situation. Nobody has argued that in forty years of gaming exclusives and nobody has argued it in a century of television or music recording labels.
So the question becomes why argue it now, right? Why weren’t you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES? What overzealous, cult-like situation leads to a whole host of people going to bat for this ass-backwards concept on behalf of Steam? Who, I should add, have not argued this themselves or asked for this at all, although thanks to the power of lawsuits we do have a decent indication that they do approve of it.
One has to assume the cart is being put before the horse, given the timeline. People were bashing Ubisoft and EA’s previous competitors for less defined, more ambiguous reasons, and often no reason at all beyond brand loyalty. The whole “exclusives are bad now” argument happens to be the narrative that stuck with Epic specifically because it’s the one thing they’re doing that the previous ones weren’t.
So all of this has been a ton of typing to come back to the only statement this conversation ever needed:
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
Why weren’t you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES?
Why aren’t people angry that you can’t put diesel in a gasoline engine? Why aren’t you mad that a DVD can’t be played in a VHS? Why aren’t you mad that you can’t plug a computer hard drive into a switch and play Civilization?
Do you understand that there is a difference between “This is only compatible with certain hardware” and “You can only purchase this at one specific business”? Because you are once again arguing as if they are the same thing and I’ve already pointed this out to you, which means you are either completely disingenuous or an idiot. Either way this is a waste of time.
If there’s a third option I’m missing please let me know.
They are the same thing on the business side, absolutely. I mean, games are developed on PC anyway, so those are the same thing today for sure. I promise you there is a PC version of Bloodborne in a FromSoft computer somewhere, even though it’s stuck as a PS4 exclusive. Not because there is some mystery technical reason, but because somebody signed a deal to make it that way.
There has never been a technical reason a port of Ratchet & Clank or Uncharted couldn’t work on a PC (or a GameCube, previously), even when there was more porting work to be done, the game would have sold more than enough to make it worth the porting costs. Those games were stuck on their platforms because Insomniac and Naughty Dog had a business relationship with Sony. And then Sony said it was fine for them to be on Epic, Steam and GoG. And then they decided they wanted to have online authentication DRM, so they were only on Epic and Steam after that point.
Hell, if you go backwards, there was an uproar among Nintendo fanboys when Resident Evil 4 stopped being a Gamecube exclusive and showed up on PS2 (and then on everything else). And that, again, was not a technical issue, but a deal that was in place until it wasn’t. Because this conversation has been dumb both ways for a very long time.
The third option is you don’t understand how games are made or exclusivity deals signed and you’re only latching onto them as a backwards justification for your foregone conclusion because you want to root for Steam as a platform.
The third option is you don’t understand how games are made
Right, the devs just need to change the code from “If_On_PC_Do_Not_Run” from TRUE to FALSE and it will work just fine. And I’m the one that doesn’t understand how games are made.
Dude, no, you really don’t. You’re Dunning-Krugering the crap out of this one.
Look, you don’t need to take my word for it, but I also don’t need to give you my bona fides or give you a TED talk about how platform targets are chosen in most modern games. You can go look it up.
It’s… really not how you’re picturing it. And you’re picturing it that way to justify your chosen platform as a home team. You should really stop doing that and just enjoy the games you want to enjoy wherever you want to enjoy them.
How do you think I am picturing it? I’m responding to your absurd claims that not being able to use gasoline in a diesel engine is the same thing as Esso being the only business allowed to sell gasoline.
No, you’re imagining that games are like fuel. Games are not, in fact, like fuel. It’s not like you’re picturing it.
I’m tempted to give you a different simile, but it’s clearly pointless. Games are like games. You put them on platforms if it makes more money to sell them there than it costs to port them, and modern hardware is very similar across the board, so that’s most of the time, unless you have something more profitable for your programmers to be doing OR somebody pays you to change that math.
There I am, giving you the TED talk. And you know what? You don’t deserve it. You’re confidently wrong on the Internet, it’s kind of on you at this point. You can figure it out or not, but under no circumstanes will exclusivity deals, co-marketing or co-development deals be anticompetitive just because you want to shill for a random company online. It just doesn’t track at all and it’s weird that people keep parroting it.
You are wrong about what a monpolistic position is, at least in a world in which people don’t get pedantic and call it a “position of market dominance” because that’s not how real people talk unless they are dicks.
So yeah, Steam does have a position of market dominance that they are using to force conditions and prices on providers and customers. Whether that is done to a degree that it infringes on US antitrust regulation is currently in the process of being determined in court, but for the purposes of our conversation it is bad and getting worse.
And I can’t stress enough how exclusivity deals are signed with both first and third parties all the time. I’m old enough to remember when gamers were rioting at the concept that Metal Gear or Final Fantasy would show up on Xbox. Insomniac only got purchased by Sony in 2020, they had made Playstation exclusives for twenty years by that point. From the end user perspective there isn’t, and has never been, any difference between a game being made by a first party or being signed as an exclusive from a third party.
This is not a reason to get mad in any sane reading of a marketplace, period. Didn’t stop schoolchildren in the 90s from fighting over Sonic versus Mario, but I’m not a schoolchild now and I find it extremely tiresome.
And as for your last point… so don’t frickin use Epic, who gives a crap. You have so many ways around this entire non-issue. Go play Fortnite on the Switch, or Alan Wake on a PlayStation. Or don’t play them. Or play them on Epic and quit the launcher after. I can’t describe the subatomic size of the violin I’m playing on behalf of your ordeal, my friend.
Nobody should care about this. Epic has decided to compete by giving away freebies and signing up exclusives, which is frankly, a lot more freebies than every other first party in the past thirty years. Mediocre as their software is I have very little to no patience for anybody genuinely complaining about this state of affairs.
Do you not see how you’re talking about something completely different here? You’re talking about “Mario is only available on Nintendo systems” not “If you have a Nintendo you can only buy Mario at Walmart”.
The first is not a monopoly: “You can purchase this product anywhere you want, it is only compatible on this system”.
The second is a monopoly: “you can only purchase this product from US!”
For someone so much against monopolies and arguing for the need for competition and consumer choice, you are spending a lot of effort arguing FOR a behaviour that restricts competition and consumer choice.
So we both agree that your argument that “Steam might be bad one day” is pointless and a non-issue. Good. You can stop bringing it up then.
That’s not even a little bit what a monopoly is.
Which is obvious. Nobody is out there arguing that signing an exclusivity deal between a first party and a developer is somehow a monopolistic situation. Nobody has argued that in forty years of gaming exclusives and nobody has argued it in a century of television or music recording labels.
So the question becomes why argue it now, right? Why weren’t you mad when Ratchet & Clank could only be purchased an played on a PlayStation or Final Fantasy was only on a SNES? What overzealous, cult-like situation leads to a whole host of people going to bat for this ass-backwards concept on behalf of Steam? Who, I should add, have not argued this themselves or asked for this at all, although thanks to the power of lawsuits we do have a decent indication that they do approve of it.
One has to assume the cart is being put before the horse, given the timeline. People were bashing Ubisoft and EA’s previous competitors for less defined, more ambiguous reasons, and often no reason at all beyond brand loyalty. The whole “exclusives are bad now” argument happens to be the narrative that stuck with Epic specifically because it’s the one thing they’re doing that the previous ones weren’t.
So all of this has been a ton of typing to come back to the only statement this conversation ever needed:
Seeing the console wars play out on the basis of which DRM platform you want to put in your PC is wild.
Why aren’t people angry that you can’t put diesel in a gasoline engine? Why aren’t you mad that a DVD can’t be played in a VHS? Why aren’t you mad that you can’t plug a computer hard drive into a switch and play Civilization?
Do you understand that there is a difference between “This is only compatible with certain hardware” and “You can only purchase this at one specific business”? Because you are once again arguing as if they are the same thing and I’ve already pointed this out to you, which means you are either completely disingenuous or an idiot. Either way this is a waste of time.
If there’s a third option I’m missing please let me know.
They are the same thing on the business side, absolutely. I mean, games are developed on PC anyway, so those are the same thing today for sure. I promise you there is a PC version of Bloodborne in a FromSoft computer somewhere, even though it’s stuck as a PS4 exclusive. Not because there is some mystery technical reason, but because somebody signed a deal to make it that way.
There has never been a technical reason a port of Ratchet & Clank or Uncharted couldn’t work on a PC (or a GameCube, previously), even when there was more porting work to be done, the game would have sold more than enough to make it worth the porting costs. Those games were stuck on their platforms because Insomniac and Naughty Dog had a business relationship with Sony. And then Sony said it was fine for them to be on Epic, Steam and GoG. And then they decided they wanted to have online authentication DRM, so they were only on Epic and Steam after that point.
Hell, if you go backwards, there was an uproar among Nintendo fanboys when Resident Evil 4 stopped being a Gamecube exclusive and showed up on PS2 (and then on everything else). And that, again, was not a technical issue, but a deal that was in place until it wasn’t. Because this conversation has been dumb both ways for a very long time.
The third option is you don’t understand how games are made or exclusivity deals signed and you’re only latching onto them as a backwards justification for your foregone conclusion because you want to root for Steam as a platform.
Which is the wild part.
Right, the devs just need to change the code from “If_On_PC_Do_Not_Run” from TRUE to FALSE and it will work just fine. And I’m the one that doesn’t understand how games are made.
Looks like option #2 was the correct one.
Dude, no, you really don’t. You’re Dunning-Krugering the crap out of this one.
Look, you don’t need to take my word for it, but I also don’t need to give you my bona fides or give you a TED talk about how platform targets are chosen in most modern games. You can go look it up.
It’s… really not how you’re picturing it. And you’re picturing it that way to justify your chosen platform as a home team. You should really stop doing that and just enjoy the games you want to enjoy wherever you want to enjoy them.
How do you think I am picturing it? I’m responding to your absurd claims that not being able to use gasoline in a diesel engine is the same thing as Esso being the only business allowed to sell gasoline.
No, you’re imagining that games are like fuel. Games are not, in fact, like fuel. It’s not like you’re picturing it.
I’m tempted to give you a different simile, but it’s clearly pointless. Games are like games. You put them on platforms if it makes more money to sell them there than it costs to port them, and modern hardware is very similar across the board, so that’s most of the time, unless you have something more profitable for your programmers to be doing OR somebody pays you to change that math.
There I am, giving you the TED talk. And you know what? You don’t deserve it. You’re confidently wrong on the Internet, it’s kind of on you at this point. You can figure it out or not, but under no circumstanes will exclusivity deals, co-marketing or co-development deals be anticompetitive just because you want to shill for a random company online. It just doesn’t track at all and it’s weird that people keep parroting it.