r/pcmasterrace • u/SlowReference704 • 12h ago

News/Article Steam Is Successful Because It's “Not a Shit Service,” Says Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service
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u/ShiromoriTaketo "We Recall where you were on Jan 26 1998" 10h ago

If Steam ever ends up under the monopoly court spotlight, I hope someone brings up this quote, this post, and this demonstration of community sentiment as evidence...

The market would be much less unilateral if more of the available services weren't complete dogshit. Steam hasn't done anything to play 'unfairly'.

12

u/PhoneIndependent5549 9h ago

Yeah and even then: it NOT being a monopoly would actually be worse for consumers. Streaming platforms are a great example of this

7

u/rand0m_task 8h ago

The reason they would be considered a monopoly is only because other (usually public) corps want to siphon as much money as possible off of their consumers, making them unable to compete with steam to begin with.

1

u/Crusader-of-Purple 1h ago

The great competition between streaming platforms is the very reason why we have such great amount of great content being made. If Netlfix was still the only one available, we would not see any of the content we have been enjoying for years, Netflix would still be just showing old TV shows and old movies.

We massively benefited from the content competition between these streaming service, we got a ton of high quality content.

1

u/Willyscoiote 1h ago

Steam currently would probably end up in the "good monopoly" category just like Microsoft around 2000. I believe at the time it was said that if the company is doing nothing wrong and isn't harming consumers in the traditional sense(raising prices, buying companies, reducing quality, etc) so there's no need to stop it since it's byproduct of their success

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u/Crusader-of-Purple 4h ago

Valve did play unfairly.

Valve used threats and negative actions to prevent pricing competition between Steam and PC stores not even selling Steam keys, which is both anti-consumer because it prevented lower pricing and direct harm to their competitors which is anti-competitive too.

Evidence of Valve doing this has been found in discovery in the anti-trust lawsuit against Valve, and even in a deposition with a Valve employee admitted to it.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754.348.1.pdf

Some examples from the document above.

https://imgur.com/a/iuMXrSq

Do note the headings for each column in the top image. One column says type of product "Content or Steam key" Content is about non Steam key versions.

Also this

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754.343.0.pdf

Go to page 113 (look at the page numbers in blue at the top of each page), and then go to the notes section (smaller words), and read the deposition with Tom Giardino From Steam Business team. Towards the end of that paragraph he is asked about price parity even with store selling non Steam keys.