Steam Is Under Fire
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- Опубліковано 18 тра 2024
- Valve have a big legal fight in their future. Learn Back-end Programming: boot.dev/ Use code BELLULARNEWS for 25% off. Sponsored by Boot.dev.
Sources:
www.gamedeveloper.com/busines...
x.com/FalconeerDev/status/179...
x.com/superjoebob/status/1788...
www.polygon.com/24153665/warn...
x.com/FalconeerDev/status/178...
www.pcgamer.com/games/city-bu...
/ 1788570770232300021
vietnamnet.vn/en/steam-game-d....
/ 1790042824043348161
gameworldobserver.com/2024/05...
ec.europa.eu/commission/press... - Ігри
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Microsoft Copilot also can help walk you through programming problems, though I do wonder if Boot.dev’s bot is more tailored to the task.
7:07 Choosing to use a iPhone,..is like choosing to sit on a island no connection to all the mainlands arround.
Who uses iPhone anyway? ^^
*As of early 2024, Android has a 70.69% market share worldwide.* In the US, iPhones hold a market share of 60.77%.
More than 1 billion iPhones and over 3 billion Android devices are currently active.
*Android smartphones accounted for 66% of all smartphone sales worldwide in Q4 2023.*
_13.03.2024_
There we have it
> Dun use iPhones lol
The swastika is not a Hindu symbol, it is based on a Nordic rune. If you look at the swastika and the Hindu symbol (or an almost identical symbol from Japan) you'll notice that it is actually kind of a mirror image.
Showing Nazi symbols is still illegal in Germany btw. Exemption are only made for educational purposes as well as certain movies. Video games however are different and the ban is still in effect.
@@HH-hd7nd Holy Frigga, man of culture spits the truth
@@HH-hd7nd The oldest known one is 15,000 years old found carved into a mammoth tusk in Ukraine. The Navajo of North America used to use the symbol until the smallhat run government forced them through bribery to stop using it during WW2. That distribution across the globe should tell you WHO was in the Americas first. That symbol traveled around the entire northern hemisphere during that last Iceage.
Valve isn't anti-competitive, it's competitors are just anti-consumer...
Most of them, anyway.
Exactly.
Yea... just like EA and Ubisoft
GOG is the most pro-consumer distributor by far. Way more than Steam could even claim to be. And it's still minuscule...
GoG is anti-consumer?! But yeah, Steam does well because it brings a lot of value to the platform. It makes you want to buy there. GoG does well because it has it's own niche of reviving old games, anti-drm, and an installer being 100% optional.
The only reason Steam can be considered a monopoly is because their competitors keep shooting themselves in the feet with anti consumer bullshit. Steam is the peoples monopoly, it wouldn't exist as it is unless most people agreed that it's the superior platform.
Valve main power comes from gamers.
Pretty much, Valve doesn't even do anything about their competition, literally.
EGS and such just keep fumbling the bag royally hard.
Steam penalises Devs who list on drm free sites like gog. Ask the rim world dev what he thinks of steam
Sorry but this is a terrible take. "The Peoples Monopoly"? That sounds like something out of a cyberpunk corpo-dystopia. Monopolies are bad for consumers, and are only good for the corporation, full stop. Just because you like steam does not mean its at all healthy or good for gamers OR devs. Steam has a monopoly, so they effectively dictate how much of an arbitrary number that developers HAVE to pay them if devs want their game to be successful on PC.
All you need to do is think about this for 5 seconds and you quickly realize why this is ultimately a bad thing for gamers and developers, regardless of how great steam is.
@@Lucky_Drive Tell a lie a thousand times is still a lie. Steam doesn't have an monopoly which is how Epic store gets exclusives, Ubisoft refuse to bring their games to Steam ,etc. What makes Steam successful are the gamers. This is why Sony are bringing their exclusives which they have a monopoly over to PC because that's where the gamers are.
I remember when everyone forsake PC and claimed it was dead and Valve was the only company that cared to keep PC gaming alive. Now that Valve have been successful winning gamers over those who forsake PC wants to give us the middle finger.
Viet guy here.
Our local devs either pump out cash grabbing mobile games registered to Singapore or import trash P2W MMOs and expect people to whale for their profits. We stopped doing that since like 2010s.
so gatcha/gambling games huh. are they trying to use the government to remove competition? (steam)
@@invincible98 big dev companies would do that
And fucking killed off Vietnamese indie devs publishing genuinely good games (which they wouldn't bat an eye) on Steam
Vietnam is slowly following Japan gaming model actually . While Poland has issues with distributions
I guess people in Vietnam have to pirate
It's sad when having better consumer interactions compared to other storefronts results in being accused of being anti-competitive.
Its petty jealousy. The storefronts in Vietnam do not provide the same customer experience that Steam does, so they are acting like a bunch of 5 year olds who are throwing a tantrum cause they are not getting their way.
Same can be said for many other storefronts, they don't provide the same user experience that Steam does and they throw out Anti-Competitive practice crap because they refuse to provide a better user experience to their customers.
However they got their Monopoly status, monopolies are bad for consumers and great for the holder of the Monopoly. In this case the consumer also includes game devs as they are also customers of steam’s services. Steam might be less bad than they could be. But one company having a stranglehold over the vast majority of PC game distribution is still worse than the alternative
Monopolies are not bad per se, they are if they engage in anticompetitive practices.
Put simply, no one seems to be able to do things better than Steam.
What should you do if your product is so good no one can compete?
I hope more competition steps up, fails, and proves why good customer practices is always best. Steam is the example of vote with your wallet and winning.
They are anti-competitive only in the sense that they do not allow discounts or lower prices on games if the lower price is available for another platform only. Think if a game had a discount on Epic games store while still being full price on Steam. That is illegal based on Steam's terms of service, with the exception if the game is sold at a "comparable" price within a certain time period. So what I'm trying to say is, they do not allow other platforms to try to get a step up in price. This is honestly good though, because this does not just throw the developers under the bus because storefronts are trying to get customers with as low costs as possible, giving developers less money in the process. What remains is trying to make exclusive deals and the best possible customer experience. However, Steam already has the best customer experience with the most refined store, library and community functions after years of development (not saying it is all actually good, they still have some issues, but it is miles above anything comparable) so why should we switch?
Only "option" I see is for Steam to handicap themselves in some way, even though it is only and truly the other storefronts that does not even put up the effort to even match what Steam has to offer.
Steam only looks like a monopoly because all their competitors keep slamming their cod piece in car doors and expecting us to clap.
true
Kinda true, but GOG is pretty good, and does wonders for game preservation because there is no DRM which contributes to future digital decay. It could also mean that Witcher 4 could be cheaper for everyone on GOG, if something is done about it.
@@Harsh-mg2em gog is meh in my opinion. If gog started selling garrys mod first, I'd give more of a shit but they didn't.
@@user-uo8ny1kj4c As a shop, it's just a shop, better than the Uplays of the world because it's less intrusive, and actually it can connect all shops into one. Still, the main reason for GOG is that games are DRM-free, helping to preserve them forever, so even if you don't shop there everyone benefits.
@@user-uo8ny1kj4cbut even if they did, remember all the amounts of the steam workshop they have to get
Domestic games distribution in Vietnam is getting licenses from Chinese devs to distribute Chinese games. mostly gacha games. It sucks. As a Vietnamese, once u tried Steam u cant go back to these "blood sucking" games
You should switch to piracy. Better then playing money traps.
Sounds like hell man. Sounds like hell
@@mod-etc3666 I heard that FitGirl Repack is good source to get games for free
Sail the high sea like the rest of us
If you have games on Steam, you can use a VPN to access them.
Main reason GOG is still a thing is because they are legit competition to Steam. They offer a feature that valve doesn't and for some is VERY valuable. That is of course DRM free games.
On the other hand EGS didn't bring anything new to the table other then pissing people off with exclusives.
I mean, Steam do sell DRM free games, just not all of them. Some games even have DRM removed through an update. GOG is just actually serious about the DRM free policy and that's a nice niche to have (legit planning a purchase there soon). But a niche is a niche, it can guaranteed an existence, not dominance.
The thing about Steam is it is huge and it don't care about DRM. And big game publishers knew this and will keep selling games on Steam. And because of that gamers will always go to Steam, there are nowhere else to turn to. Unless more and more publishers set up their own stores, Steam stay dominant.
@@F_Around_and_find_outYou don't understand, Steam itself is DRM, a game without 3rd party DRM like denuvo still has DRM in Steam
And GOG does the one thing the other platforms are too lazy to do. Make sure retro games work on modern hardware. Meanwhile Epic just brute forces their own monopoly.
Yes, but here's the thing. This story is in Poland. Where is GOG? Poland. Read the whole story and this is like a checklist of Steam vs GOG. I don't think this is tin foil hat territory where GOG is using the judicial system against Steam. I do think this is a situation of CD Projekt Red, the owners of GOG, doing it. CD Project Red is in and out of the news in Poland for shady stuff with the government and government intervention depending on the day. They have a market cap 6 times larger than the entire GDP of Poland. They've also made absolutely no secret of the fact they want to own their own distribution platform as the main seller of their games. Which they cannot do so long as Steam exists in it's current incarnation in Europe. Which is to say getting this through the courts in Poland is significantly easier than getting this through the courts in the EU. Poland is looking at possibly billions of dollars of downstream tax revenue over time if it can pry Steam's deathgrip off the digital games marketplace. The only valid competitor most consumers see is headquartered in their country.
GOG, with their limited budget compare to the Valve and Epic, focused on two aspects, supporting DRM-Free gaming and re-packaging old games for modern systems. And they do those without using anti-consumer and anti-competition practices like Epic. That's why I would consider them the biggest competition to Steam and it's clear both stores are peaceful with each other. Sadly, using GOG is kinda hard for me due to two reasons:
1- They do not have localized pricing for most regions, so that makes games on GOG kinda expensive on where I live.
2- They don't have an official Linux client. Yes I can use their website and/or 3th party clients (Lutris, Heroic, etc.) that they provide apis for but it's not at the same convenience with official client
As a Vietnamese, I LOL'ed real hard when I heard that statement. Most of the "local" game here are just rebranded Chinese crap, with horrible gameplay and gacha stuff. They can't even make a good game, and they dare to said that Steam is "anti-competitive" while Steam is providing a better experience. All gamer in Vietnam are absolutely pissed because of this.
Another example is miHoYo games (Honkai Impact 3rd, Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail). They can't publish these game by themselves because of various reason (mostly tax and censorship imo), so they are distributing them via a Vietnamese distributor and all those games got rated 18+ while it's 12+ in Europe. That's just ridiculous. That's why a bunch of talented Vietnamese dev preferred going overseas or working for a foreign company. Making a company in Vietnam is hell.
bruh muh steam blatantly distributing games in thai ming doe
Also another thing with Poland and Steam, Polish prices are highest in Europe, but Poles earn 4 time less that Germany, and there is petition to Valve to adjust the prices because prices calculation were before covid and don't take inflation in consideration.
Should have stuck being a German conquest then, huh?
I thought the pricing was up to the developer/publisher? I don't think valve sets prices for games outside of their own.
@@bluebroham Steam changes the base price of everything depending on where you are. So if I publisher says this game in USA is $60 Steam will attempt to adjust the price for another market so it's not insanely expensive. Idk how it works under the hood but I would assume a publisher could opt out if they wanted. It's a service both ways. The customer can pay more local prices on an international market and the publisher doesn't have to handle looking into that themselves.
@@bluebroham I think there is a auto suggestion from valve and many devs just go with
@@bluebroham It might be a case of automation rather then dev/publisher setting the price. I say this because of what pirate software has said (though I can be wrong I would suggest looking yourself) that most companies don't do regional pricing which leads them to using US standard or letting steam do it.
My God, I HATE how much garbage people throw into "Strategy" tag
[Strategy]
It means "This is confusing game"
seriously. That tag is effectively useless nowadays.
My favorite example of something like that is how Cars 2 is labeled NSFW and Psychological Horror.
@@Owl90 Like "ARPG".
"...restrictions on the sale of games and ancillary content on competing platforms..." Isn't that what Epic was doing when it brought those exclusive game titles?
Yup, they were trynna force themselves into the spot of a monopoly with their deals.
Yup
Will the people bootlicker for valve you would be surprise to learn that in fact no buying a license to distribute a product is not anti competitive. Now using your sudo monopoly to fix pricing is anti competitive.
@@SpottedHares i keep hearing all this BS about price fixing. but never proof of it
@@SpottedHares Could say the same about bootlicking Epic, there's loads of them hanging around, and they 100% always show up in videos/threads mentioning Valve...
Steam may have a stranglehold on digital games, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t had earnest competition. They were just the least shit out of several publishers trying to corner the market with their AAA games.
Breaking up Steam will almost certainly be worse for the industry.
I would think that's the point though. Break it up so several more shit stains can take over within each country coming out as "the savior of gaming" respectively. This is just a ploy.
moment they break up steam im pretty sure the gaming market will most likely collapse cause then nobody is keeping these AAA morons in check...
What would you even break it up into?
@@connorschultz380 Forcefully selling parts of the privately owned company most likely.
Poland and Vietnam aren't going to have steam broken up LOL they're the most irrelevant places ever
An important note because people misinterpet what having a monopoly means: Steam is not a monopoly. Valve is not like facebook. They don't buy out competitors and force them to fail, Steam is just a good platform. No other company provides what Valve does. The only reason why Epic dragged customers over was by buying out games and making them exclusive instead of providing a good service. I bet the only reason 99% of people who have u-play or EA's thing is because their games "require" it, not because they're actually any good.
Provide something better than Steam and competitiom will happen. But thats expensive and risky. It's easier to throw a tantrum and try to get them taken down by convincing people who don't know what they're talking about that they're anti-competetive than it is to just make a good and consimer friendly service.
Exactly.
Epic had to play dirty by paying games to be 'exclusives' to them (and losing tons of money) in order to artificially compete with Steam. That's not sustainable.
Piracy is much better.
The problem is - what Valve is doing, is literally anti-competetive behaviour, that UOKiK has handed big fines (like 600 million PLN, which is ~150 million dollars kind of big) in last few years in other branches of the economy, from grocery supermarkets, to ISPs and GSM providers.
And it's not a lawsuit, where Valve can bring their full team of lawyers - it's a government agency slapping you with administrative fine, and ordering you to remove that practice and mend the damage to affected customers/competition.
And you can appeal ONLY through a very particular court that is heavily linked with said agency - in fact, the agency chief who just handed you the fine is the one you appeal to, and he is the one to forward your appeal to the court.
UOKiK has been ridiculously heavy-handed in regards to any form of price fixing - they have just finally stumbled onto the clustermess that is digital games market, and with how one-sidedly those agreements are usually written out, they smelled blood in water.
@@wojciechkowalski7305 Valve isn't doing shit that's anti-competitive. Epic is.
Steam provides steam keys to competitors such as Humble Bundle, Greenman Gaming and even creators such as Cohhcarnage with his own game shop. They literally host the game of another company's sales to provide a fair market. They would have a stronger case against Apple, Nintendo and Sony. They all have had extremely shady consumer practices in the past. The U.S. government had to intervene with Sony to make them stop bullying indie developers and try to get them to give money despite not being sold on their platform.
Got a reference on that last sentence as I would to read about that one.
I saw an expose that those keys were usually extorted from the developers as promises to review, to be sold instead
@@bouncedayHow i understood the review&curator scam is that it happens more often on g2a and kinguin. I believe humblebundle gets keys straight from devs. (Not sure where those other sites RPG mentioned above get the keys from)
steam-dev here 90% of those keys are stolen fyi......... when devs make keys for beta testing what will happen is we give them to IGN/others and they will resell them to someone and then they will sell them for nothing
@@magicpenuts6934 they aren't talking about the reseller websites they are talking about third party websites that Devs/publishers sell on, that provide steam keys upon purchase. Like Humble Bundle that doesn't involve any beta keys or anything, they work directly with Devs and publishers to make the game available and have the steam keys
The banning in Vietnam is almost pure corruption. Steam had for years an official partnership with VTC (a major local game publisher, the one you mentioned) and other Vietnamese payment methods (think Visa and mastercard like) in order for locals to purchase games. About 5 days before the ban, Steam did not want to renew the contracts with them thus they pushed the Govt to ban the platform (because they're all govt own/controlled entities). Another excuse from VN was taxes, Steam doesn't apply VAT (10% by law) which is a fair enough point itself BUT like I mentioned they had official partnerships with local banks and publishers etc. this means that they too were complicit in selling games without VAT...but it's fine if the local companies do it, but not the foreign one. No one here is chasing the fact that VTC et Al were selling games without the proper taxes.
Actually the government of VN has raised the tax for foreign businesses. It is now added 8% for selling tax and 5% tariffs. Thus yes, corruption.
And this is why as soon as possible, I'm moving out because in a country where even fucking gaming can be affected by corruption, like hell do I want to live here.
Polish gamer here, would be nice to actually pay the same amount yall out there are paying. It absolutely isn't fun having to pay more than my friends from USA for example even though we get the same product.
Taxes etc is my guess
@@Mutation666 Nah, taxes have nothing to do with it. Steam just have not updated their currency conversion.
@@igorwoek502 Actually, taxes do have SOMETHING to do with it. In a lot of countries you have to pay VAT on top of your purchases. But that isnt the issue here. The main issue is that publishers often set their own regional pricing and steam has to abide by what the publisher asks them to do.
If you lived in a poorer country. Asking $80 for a AAA game is pretty insane when your income is already pretty low. Nobody in that country is going to buy an $80 game so they have to price it low at a more affordable level for them which means that prices are higher for the richer countries that can afford to pay for it. Its just how it works.
Some countries pay more so that less well off gamers can also have some games to play. You dont need to like the way that it is but you could always not buy the game or wait till its on sale.
Same in Czechia
Why do we have to have pay 60 Euro
@@igorwoek502 Not even currency conversion
I am Czech, but I still have to pay equivalent of 60 Euro. I assume that all Euro countries have the same price
In summary :
1) Being the only competent service ≠ Monopoly
2) China disturbing the water again
3) Poland earns least and pays most
You guys are missing some big context here in Vietnam.
Short story is that Vietnamese government is trying to invest big money again into the newly sprouting game industry. A substantial number of universities and private college-level schools here are implementing game design / game developing trainings to kick off the scene.
It was, and probably still, speculated that this "censorship" move is actually Vietnamese government trying to weed off competing platforms like Steam from the market.
Personally I think it's more complex than that, and the notion above is generally debunked by some leaked news that a major publisher in Vietnam - VNG - is going to partner with Epic Games to establish their platform here.
The narrative is still being played out. This is really something you guys should keep an eye on, and I would be very glad if you do.
That sucks, they're basically gravitating to another Chinese backed company
Don't except anything less from a communist country
@@n9ne There's nothing communist about supporting businesses, albeit domestic ones. That's economic nationalism, not communism. The US, the poster child of capitalism, is itself increasingly doing that wrt China.
@@JohnDoe-ds8um They're not gravitating to the Chinese, they're trying to promote their own companies.
yeah im going to move to germany, sick of all these government bs now
A bit of background on PL situation. The main reason why Steam is being investigated here are the prices. Prices for PL are one of the highest on Steam (the conversion Valve is using for USD ---> PLN seams to be the issue here). There was a bit of public backlash about the price of Hades 2. I mean, it was roughly more expensive than everywhere else by around of 8 USD. In context of EU common market it's ridiculous. Though Super Giant Games (not Steam!) did a right thing and reimbursed that 8 USD difference to everyone who bought their game on Steam in PL.
that's not too much valve's fault tho, the prices conversion is a suggestion by valve to devs, devs can always set whatever prices they want for whatever regions
@@Sinaeb It kind of is though. There's the same issue in Brazil and Turkey and a few other countries. People can't afford the games anymore because the prices are out of sync with the actual income of the region.
The reason? Valve found out that some people were buying the games through a VPN at that regional price instead of their price.
Again, it is the dev and publisher who set the price. So why blame steam@@ferinzz
Dude, I blacklist super giant game for their antics. And in this case it is risky their fault as it is them, the publisher, that set the price, not steam. So they paying customer back is just what is right. Doesn't make them saint.
How much hades cost ? It should be 130 zloty
I'm not sure how the EU would navigate this technicality; Valve doesn't tell developers they can't sell their games on other platforms, or for lower prices. They just tell them that if they do, they will lose access to Steam as a marketplace. Steam has become the default platform for PC gaming because it's a *damned good service*. Like Gaben said so long ago, piracy is a service issue. If you give people a service they want to use, they will. Nobody else has been able to compete with Valve, because nobody else seems to be able to make anything even close to as good as Steam. And why would, why should Valve host and advertise people's games just to potentially lose the sale somewhere else because it's listed cheaper there? They already have to deal with places like GreenManGaming, Humble and Fanatical offering pre-order discounts of 12-20% for games activated and played on Steam. Why would they encourage that, especially when the cheaper priced game will likely end up on EGS? I'm sure the last thing Gaben wants to do is validate and enable that petulant child, Tim Sweeney.
And as a consumer, I already have to deal with EA, Ubisoft and Activision games being on different launchers I don't want to use. The last thing I want as a gamer is to have the same situation we all have with streaming TV now. It used to be that Netflix was the one stop shop for everything, now we have like a dozen different streaming services and it costs us a hundred or more a month to watch what we want, when it used to be $12. I don't want that. I don't want to have a dozen different apps to play every different publisher's games. I love Steam, because it's useful above and beyond managing my games and it's convenient to have them all in one place. I do *not* want that to change.
"Can't do business with us based on what you do with others (and we're too big to ignore)" is pretty much the exact point of laws governing monopolies. It's about people abusing their size to enforce conditions about your interactions with the competition that would be refused if they were smaller, and this is a textbook case of that. It's about companies using the opportunity cost of their power of refusal as a club because you have no practical alternatives to turn to.
@@Ylyrra The trouble with that is that the definition of a mono is "one". Steam isn't the only option to buy or sell games and it never has been. It's just the best option, and by a lot. Publishers have no practical alternatives to turn to because nobody else has successfully developed a practical alternative. Even EGS, for all Tim Sweeney's preening, is a pale shadow compared to Steam, being run by a petulant child, partly owned by Tencent and it's basically malware to add. Galaxy is pretty great, unobtrusive and lightweight but it doesn't have the community features of Steam. We all use Steam, and by extension all publishers have to use Steam, because Valve solved the piracy problem by being a better service than a pirate can provide and has maintained that fact for 21 years. I mean they practically single handedly killed physical games on PC. I hardly ever see a physical edition of PC games anymore (western hemisphere), because Steam is just *that* good.
Like even visual novel and hentai RPG Maker... makers... have realized this. There's a reason that places like Kagura and DLSite have put their libraries onto Steam, and now have simultaneous releases on Steam with their own storefronts. I would guess that that reason is that they had a *huge* piracy problem, and while I'd guess they still have to deal with pirates, it's financially beneficial to them to put their games out on a platform people actually want to pay to use, and then make available a free and easy to install restoration patch if you want the H content. Why? Because Steam is awesome. It gives them visibility to people who the algorithm has worked out would be interested in their games, while giving those people a convenient way to buy them. Nobody does it better, because everyone that tries to make their own version of Steam does so while tunnelvisioning on trying to steal a piece of Valve's pie, and paying no mind to *WHY* Steam has become the de facto digital PC DRM.
Okay imma choose not to read the rest of this however I did read to " they will loose acsses to steam as a marketplace. So they have threatened to. I use steam I like steam. However I also like competition for big companies. And you should to. Competitors breed innovation and lower prices. If a game listed on gog is cheaper than on steam. Steam would now either have to take the cut or lower the prices too. Fight for the consumers attention and money. Its also important to understand that while Poland Is part of the EU. It does not me that any legislation or legal decision against steam in Poland does not mean the rest of the eu will follow. Polish government and EU government are separate entities
@@blackseat2265 But there is competition though. It's just the aside from GoG everything else sucks. Steam literally outcompeted piracy. No other company even Epic that's backed by Tencent can't compete even after doing exclusivity deals and giving out free games on their platform.
@@blackseat2265 Competition for big companies isn't innately good, and doesn't automatically lead to better products at better prices for us. The gaming industry is *THE* prime example of this. There are many big studios, publishers and hardware manufacturers in direct competition with each other. It hasn't been good for us. Sure, the occasional gem comes out. But in general publishers have been devising ways to extract more money from us while giving us steadily worse products. Some games are so bad it would be fair to say that we paid to beta test the game for them. Meanwhile Steam is out here doing its best all on its own, because Valve (Gabe Newel specifically) knows that all it has to do to make more money than God is continue to offer a good service. That's why when Tim Sweeney launched EGS and did all his flailing on X and in interviews about how unfair it was that Valve took a 30% commission on sales Valve was like "lol ok kid" and just kept doing its thing. Steam has hardly noticed EGS's existence.
Not every industry benefits from competition, and competition doesn't directly lead to better results for us. And I'm sick of this continued argument that Valve needs competition. *WHY?* In fact in the case of Steam, I imagine competition being forced on them leading to a Netflix situation. Where it costs us ten times as much to get worse products and services from a dozen different stores, when we used to get the best of everything from one.
7:42 worst problem for me and other gamers in Poland with Steam is that it doesnt provide us with local prices. Instead it converts EU prices in Euro into our PLN currency. And often when PLN gets stronger, Steam forgets to re-convert it and keeps less favourable exchange rates for longer. Polish people also tend to earn less than people in the west of EU, often twice less but thats fine cuz we have regional prices for most goods that are lower but Steam not only doesnt have that but also games on Steam because of bad exchange rates cost more in PLN compared to other EU countries that pay in Euro.^ Thats why I never buy directly from Steam but rather Steam Keys from 3rd party online stores.
not Steam, the prices are setup by publishers.
@@Commandant_Aeon yes, price can be set country-to-country by the developer but also regionally: developer sets a price for a given region and steam by itself converts it to different currencies within that region and my country Poland is poor compared to other countries in the EU region- add old unfavourable currency exchange rates and what you get is a "bad deal" ^
@@Commandant_Aeon good example is Russia, despite being, just like Poland, in Europe^^ because it's a big region, Steam somehow recognises it as a separate region and calculates games much lower price, sometimes 2x lower that those for Poland.
@@Commandant_Aeon But steam gives them recommendations and 90% of the time devs just go with the prices steam recommends.
@@Mr_Topek and the dev's lazyness is steam's fault... how ?
wolfenstein and co are now "uncensored" in germany, at least the newer games, but all smaller game dev games that are adult only are locked away in Germany too. it would need a propper age check on steam to get those back.
Which sounds idiotic as hell. Germany uses PEGI rating, not ESRB. There is no direct equivalent of AO games in PEGI (+18 really only matches the M+17)
@@jacplac97 Germany does not use PEGI, we have our own rating system USK which does feature AO (18+).
@@ubrot7995 Huh. Ok, I have been corrected.
The discovery features of Steam is a big part of why they don't want people to be selling at lower prices on other stores. Developers wanted to use Steam to market their game, sell the keys on their own website to avoid paying Valve, but then use Steam's distribution network to get the game to the customer. Which isn't a viable business model for Valve.
This seems very easy to understand, but for some reason nobody gets it lol
@@FriedEgg101 Except it is only true some of the time.
- Sale by devs might still be selling Steam keys but it can also be something completely independent
- GoG? They are probably not selling Steam keys and using Steam's network
- EGS is definitely not going to be selling Steam keys or using Steam's network
Steam also has conditions in place to limit how many keys a dev can ask for.
@@MorbidEel The EGS poaching games with exclusivity deals when they were about to be released in mere days on Steam is literally the reason Steam updated their ToS and adopted that policy.
The problem is that there is no 'good' answer. The better they make things for the people just trying to do things as they're meant to, the easier it is for bad actors to screw everything over for everyone. The harder they come down on the bad actors, the worse everything is for the people who are just trying to use a service as designed. Anywhere they set the needle between the two extremes is going to be unthrilling for everyone involved, because nobody is going to like feeling punished because someone else can't behave.
"How dare you offer a service so good that others can't compete. You'd better make it worse or there will be consequences"
Gog exsist. Alos if you you have leukemia you not happy bcs all others have cancer. Better not good. And yet do you will pay more that evryone around you when they on top of that get more money ?
I have invested literal thousands of dollars in my library, so I am going to watch this with mounting dread.
Part of purchasing a game means being allowed to own a private backup in case of any issues. Figuring out how to crack Steam's DRM or pirating the material you lawfully purchased so that you can have that backup is perfectly legitimate. Though I would still advise a VPN just to prevent grief.
If you live in Vietnam, you can use a VPN.
I have over a thousand worth of games I have never opened... still don't really regret it lol. Figure the company or government would be required to refund the players if they disabled the company and we lost access to our games... a bill that I am sure most would not want.
@@Suzuki_Hiakura This is what happens when you have totalitarian governments like in Vietnam. I have a feeling the government doesn't really care that it just nuked all the gamer libraries across the country rather than just disabling the ability to purchase games on steam.
What are you doing? Buying games new and not waiting for 70+% off sales?
Who am I kidding. With an average under $5 /game I probably spent close to $1000 in the few years I've had my deck.
Well, if other launchers would allow me to import my ENTIRE steam library into their launcher without having to re-purchase every single videogame I own then sure I'll try another launcher, but other companies are being anti-competitive by trying to force you to repurchase games you already own just to use their launcher.
What you said doesn't make sense, it is like buying a game in PS and wanting to play it on Xbox. No store will ever do that.
GOG's launcher does this, with an extension. The store isn't better than Steam's, but I'll always buy DRM-free first.
The whole reason that I stopped playing Ubisoft games was because they wouldn't recognize my steam library of their products since my steam account was using a different email.
@@musguera GOG's launcher will trigger Steam to launch the game. If that's not enough for you, so be it.
GOG tried to make a system to allow you to redeem a copy of a Steam game you owned on GOG's store, but next to no publishers were willing to participate so they had to shut that program down.
GOG tried doing this years ago with GOG connect. There's a problem with this though. Once you've imported your library to another service, then you have two separate copies of the game unless your copy on steam disappears. If it doesn't you now have an old account you can sell on the grey market. This is where things like NFTs could be brought to bear. When you purchased a game on any storefront, you could then have an NFT for that game stored on your digital wallet. Said NFT could allow you to access your game on the original storefront and any participating storefront for a nominal fee. The game would have to remain in your wallet for continued access and would only be able to be used by a single service at any given time. This would solve many problems. You could then sell the NFT of your game and transfer it to someone else. You wouldn't necessarily be beholden to a single company since the record is on the blockchain. Because steam is great right now, but what happens when Gabe dies? Who's to say the next owner won't turn it into a shit show or make the company public and enshitify the service? GOG Galaxy is currently the best launcher on that front because it can aggregate what you own across many storefronts, but it still requires you install the other launchers and go through those launchers to play your other games, so it isn't ideal.
All the companies that tried to compete against Valve with their awful launcher, they never did what Valve does: (well at least at launch) Forums, social interactions, and all sorts of stuff. They launch in these bare-boned launchers that is a storefront and that's it. Nobody wants that. And as they added those features that folks love about Steam the damage and reputation has already been tarnished. Therefore, nobody will go to it.
Essentially any "new" company that wants to launch a browser/storefront and gamers' actually give a shit about it. It has to launch day-1 (not EA, day 1) will EVERYTHING. Essentially the level of polish and manpower it would take to create a new Operating System. That's an insane task to take on. But honestly, if anything were to actually compete against Valve's Steam, it would have to be something that huge. Hell, even Microsoft can't do that, and they have all the money in the world. Yet, that truly doesn't mean shit these days.
Every time I read about praise for Steam's social features I find it quite funny, because even though they were acceptable for their time many years ago, nearly all of them are now redundant and do not make the platform more appealing to new users today. Having a friends list and being able to use that to join a game is basically the only thing that is needed. Everything else is done on Discord now (or on the dev/pub's own website, especially if the game is multi-platform). That is a whole other can of worms because Discord has many problems of its own, but it is undeniable that they are as big, if not bigger, in the instant messenger space as Steam is in gaming. Valve even made a half-hearted attempt to copy Discord by remaking Steam chat and turning it into a separate app on mobile, but it was (and still is) so lacking in features that it simply isn't worth using; Valve recognised this themselves and pretty much abandoned all work on it except for adding some new stickers every sale.
And the Steam Workshop often isn't even the best place to get mods for Steam games, as there are websites that have better ranges and varieties of mods but aren't able to join the Steam download stream.
Everything else like screenshots and guides is only still alive on Steam out of convenience, since those things are easily done by other websites but it's simpler for the user to just post directly to Steam.
Steam: We're not anti-competitive, we're just a better service.
Yes because they are and becuase steam was the first of it's kind platform and if you take a closer look except GOG every other steam like Platform is trash because they don't give a shit about the consumer so why should Steam be punished for being the best in it's field?
@@BlogingLP Even gog isn't really as good as steam in most respects, it just offers other significantly desirable features that steam doesn't in order to make up for it. ... which is to say it actively competes. Of course, then it runs into the problem that the very things that let it compete with steam at all are things that customers like but publishers Hate.
@@BlogingLP thank you, It's like twitter users shitting on misskey. If you don't like it, you can just use a shittier version.
Steam has weathered this storm before, they will weather it again the same way they weather all storms: by being awesome and not giving a shit.
That's the best mantra for Valve. Look at EPIC when they lashout at Apple, because Valve ignored the hell out of them. It was glorious.
emphasis on being awesome, because steam would be horrible if they don't care about anything. valve already doesn't care about TF2 enough if you're an tf2 fan
You mean making sure to keep prices fixed
A lot of the things gamers complain about in the AAA space (digital-only, DRM, "play-to-earn", lootboxes, actual GAMBLING, etc.) was pioneered by Valve/Steam, oddly enough.
Steam had to be SUED by the Australian government to allow refunds.
This is also the same company that successfully appealed a ruling that would've allowed customers to resell digital games.
But I'm sure that boot tastes REAL good!!!
More mindless corporate fanboyism.🙄
About Poland, the case is that Poland pays sometime twice and even THRICE as much as THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD for literaly ANYTHING somewhat connected to gaming, consoles, PC parts, TVs, monitors, VR headsets, games, even damn phones can cost twice as much in stores compared to the rest of the world in USD, for example, a price of PS5 for the whole world was around 450$, less than two years ago PS5 in Poland was selling for EXACTLY 814$, NEARLY TWICE AS MUCH despite being one of the poorer countries in Europe, same thing for Meta Quest headsets, Quest 2 for example costs 250€ on their website, that around 1200-1300PLN, and in Poland it costs WHOOPING 2300PLN without discount and 1999PLN with discount, once again, TWICE. AS. MUCH.
I imagine no indie is going to individually persue vietnam so well done inept government with far too much control over the market
I prefer Steam having a strong position in the market than pretty much any other company in the games industry.
We already had developers try to replace Steam. Needless to say, all those games are on Steam now. And it’s not because Steam is “anti-competitive”, it’s just convenient to use.
That and it's competition keeps failing at providing a comparable service, at all.
EGS' whole shtick was exclusivity deals, trying to take over the monopoly spot, while other stores/launchers like Origins for example were simply made so the company behind those gets *all of the money* and *all of the data* from their games.
Only exception being GOG to be honest with lack of any DRM which, also goes against what most companies would want since it gives customer control, not them.
@@simplysmiley4670 I love GOG. I use it and Steam concurrently. Having DRM-free copies of games is very liberating.
While I agree that in MOST cases, Steam's best way of competing has just been to watch their competitors shoot themselves in the foot - that doesn't mean Steam is free from blame. Steam does take a high cut from every game sold and in conjunction with their practice of kicking out any game that's sold cheaper elsewhere, I feel that's absolutely within the parameters of being "anti-competitive".
@@PropaneWP part of the issue is the question of what is a fair and more importantly sustainable cut for the store front when customers want that store front to have all the bells and whistles that steam provides and probably even more. The cost of development of things valves added over the years like steam overlay, workshop, forums and proton need to come from somewhere.
The 30% basically all the games distributors take is a relic from physical games when you would buy from a place like gamestop, but we know epics 12% isn't sustainable Sweeney has admitted to it multiple times in many different ways. If you live in a nation with higher over head payment methods epic adds fees when you try and buy games and says epic has to to run a 12% store when those same fees on steam are simple taken from steams cut instead of another cost being pushed onto the customer. Once you add in those fees the cost not going to the publisher/dev on epic easily goes to 15% if not higher and that's from a company that has purposely bleeding money to gain a foothold that could afford to because it had the income of fornite.
Maybe a more reasonable and sustainable share would be 20/80 but no storefront/distributor has tried that we only have 30/70 and the 12/88 from stores we know are bleeding money to gain market share. So until a storefront is willing to try a 20/80 and manages to be long term profitable and has all the features of somewhere like steam we are going to be stuck with 30/70
@@PropaneWP You think Steam infrastructure is cheap to run? Even game sold cheaper elsewhere still will use Steam features, and those require money to maintain. So, no cheating with Steam - if you want your games to use it's features, pay what is asked.
Hi, Polish here :) the issue we have with Steam is that game prices (in local currency) are higher than in other EU countries, while our incomes are lower. Shucks :/
Take it up with the devs of those games, they are given to tools to adjust prices per Country.
Blame it on EU and people who using VPN to get cheaper prices. People with VPN make Valve do geo-blocking, but EU fines Valve for do geo-blocking and end up basically "EU Countries share prices with the country have the most expensive prices"
@@jgih32 Wrong.
Steam gives recommendations regarding pricing for regions/countries under a given currency. Problem is, current exchange rate Valve provides to publishers is about 15% lower than the current one, while the prices are always adjusted to be just under the 60 euro cap for the EU zone. Effectively, this makes the games for Poland around 8-12% more expensive than in places where games are sold in Euro, despite purchase power of an average gamer in Poland being significantly lower due to lower incomes when compared to the Euro zone in general.
Anyway, the issue is the conversion rate that Valve gives is about 2 years old when currency of Poland was very weak due to war in Ukraine breaking out, and has not been reviewed since. Now when our currency is back to its normal conversion rates to the Euro, we effectively pay more for games whenever a publisher decides to use Valves recommendations for regional pricing. And trust me, most publishers do use them.
@@sumirejr1you dont get it... We arledu accept we get the same price as rest of eu but bcs of out date steam price tool we pay literaly more like euro price is 24 eu what go to 104 pl but our price is 115 pl... And is still good i see things like +10 euro in our country. And it all valve calculator
@@jgih32yes steam have prices tool is most popular game calculator and is out date what make our prices worst.
Most dev can do own research but dont do that until players say something.
Why create a too when someone give you it for free, i can understend that.
Just to add some more much needed context - UOKiK has been very heavily fighting in other markets with big companies forcing that sort of exclusive clauses onto smaller entities for last few years. And the fines they can give can be... quite astronomical, especially, if the clauses in question are not immediately reversed.
Biggest supermarket chains in Poland are squealing under the weight of the fines already, and UOKiK is not stopping in slapping them with new fines.
Also, considering the recent EU law changes combatting VAT tax evasion - the fines probably can be based on Steam's global revenue, and where the issue has been found to really severe, the fines can go as high as 10% of yearly revenue on top of my head. And now imagine rest of the EU's anti-consumer regulators who are now seeing a potential golden goose, all of which can probably drop similar style administrative fines.
Yes - UOKiK does not sue - it hands you a fine, and your appeal process goes through them first, and very rarely gets to court.
Well it will get to court at EU level if necessary, then the EU resolutions would have to be managed by polish judges. Either way i think such a crazy approach to steam would just result in Steam pulling out of the country entirely.
@@blackknight4152 It doees not go to EU court yet - UOKIK hands a penalty and sanctions, and potential appeal goes through UOKiK to polish court of consumer and competition protection (meaning UOKiK has full access to company's appeal before the trial, since they are the ones submitting it to court - yes, that seems hella sus, but is real) and then the court decides the matter fully - from what I gathered, that is the end of appeal process, unless a company would be willing to convince Polish Supreme Court to pick up the case for nullification (good luck with that).
Also, any clauses found by court in the agreement in violation of fair competition and consumer standards - by end of the trial they are added to UOKiK's official registty of forbidden cases (UOKiK can also interject into someone else's lawsuits to have clauses argued by parties added to registry). You can check the registry of banned clauses on UOKiK's website - they have thousands of them already, all is in text there, so could probably auto-translate if you really want to see some examples.
As for pulling out of the market - highly doubt it - as I said before, Nintendo got scared of a Norway, which is much smaller country than Poland. And remember that pulling out of the country, because you have been found in violation of the local laws will cost Steam in refunds - the "we reserve right to cut the service with no refund for any reason" clause has been struck in its myriad forms so many times by UOKiK in the past, there is no doubt it would land Steam in even more hot water.
To be fair, the case for why Steam is on the hook seems pretty clear to me, but I still have no idea, what was exactly that caused UOKiK to raid Sony's office - I presume it might be even bigger mess than Valve's dilemma right now.
@@wojciechkowalski7305 But i dont believe for a second that Poland can just strong arm Steam using a flawed judicial proccess honestly. I think polish courts can go as hard as they want, you understimate the ability of a company to cease all activity in a country. Besides the case would go quickly international and i would expect some EU reaction.
EDIT: Also add that steam has already streamlined the proccess to grant refunds so the undertaking is nowhere near as crazy as you think it is. For starters steam store can just be blocked in Poland and consumers would still have access to all their purchases through a modified version of the Steam app. I think you over estimate what polish courts can really do to a multinational company.
@@blackknight4152 Am I? UOKiK has repeatedly forced giants like T-Mobile and Orange to comply with it's rulings - they know their pull, and as I said - price fixing and inequality in power in distribution contracts has been their pet peeve for few years now, so it is no surprise they came after Steam, if that clause it true, and it seems it is judging by it being mentioned in the court documents from all the Epic vs world suits.
Is Steam the only one getting the bonk? Nope, they have raided Sony Office as well, probably due to the fact that Steam and PS Store by volume are most likely the biggest digital game/media store fronts present in the country.
And if Steam decides to pull out of the country? Everyone will just VPN to German IPS - considering we are already paying rates only topped by Switzerland, it might actually be cheaper...
That however, will not prevent Steam from getting fined, and UOKiK chief usually goes for top fines lately, and then sometimes lower it on appeal if the company shows good compliance with the ruling (fines go into hundreds of millions for big companies) - if Valve pulls out of Poland, and tries to appeal the fine, it would probably be viewed as obstinance, and any hope of fine getting reduced gets tossed out of the window.
Digital apps/games market is one of the most anti-consumer sided ones out there - it finally started being noticed by authorities, so I expect only more scrutiny being placed.
Game is a digital good as any other - why should Steam be allowed to dictate prices in other stores?
And as I said - I expect this is only the beginning of more scrutiny towards the market as a whole - the perception that computer games are only "toys" with no value has finally died, so the Wild West market rules will have to quickly go, unless the publishers want to face severe repercussions.
As long as Gabe Newell is in charge of Steam, we can rest easy. If things change at Steam, we can start worrying because it will take years to get Gabe's level of trust.
i already started to back up all my steam games using the high seas, because its a matter of time before gabe leaves. and as of today steam doesnt let you back up games in the same way gog does.
@@thefool8224 Imagine if they allow you to backup, itll be the biggest victory of the year. Although Gabe not being in charge will be the most terrifying and critical loss for PC gaming. You know full well how envious and jealous other AAA companies are of Steam and they are hell bent on taking on Steam by all means necessary if new leadership is found and they're gonna try to offer the new person in charge an offer they cant refuse to get Valve to go public.
steam is already turning into trash.
He will pass on at some point. Given that you probably don't own most of your games on the platform, cross your finger that whoever takes over doesn't screw up.
All my games are drm-free and backed up as offline installers. What about you?
Gabe Newell has not been an active CEO of Valve for a very long time now. Steam will continue fine without him.
steam gives games a place to live not just be sold.. offers community forums, mod support built in, reach a larger customer base, other store fronts are not like this at all.. hell epic store can't even keep a consistent UI between their store and cart.
Don't forget the workshops, a place to find mods for your title, where u can even interact with the mod maker and others using it.
These are features that only provide a worthwhile benefit if your game is only on PC or only on Steam to begin with. Any multi-platform game would just find its community getting splintered if they put any real effort into engaging with Steam's miscellaneous side. Even though Discord is far from perfect, it's way better and way more common for that to be the central hub of discussion around a game, and if necessary the developer or publisher uses their own website to host a forum or official announcements if Discord's way of doing that isn't suitable for them. Or they create, may God have mercy on their souls, a subreddit.
I don't know much about the technical side of how Workshop mod support functions, but the convenience is really the only selling point it has over using a mod website like GameBanana or Nexus which are usually better in every other way.
I suppose the only ace in the hole that Steam's unholy amalgamation of all these features has is that they're able to be pushed to the player as a blend with the game experience rather than being a separate app or website. That's basically it. They don't do anything better, they just do it more overbearingly. I wish they did do it better, and I especially wish they would make Steam chat and discussion boards worth using, but it's just not like that these days.
Sheesh - remember when PC gaming was dead? Personally as a die hard PC gamer I thank Valve. Edited to add /s, sheesh people.
What? When did PC gaming ever die?
PC gaming was never dead. You clearly have a very limited PC gaming history.
@@zerobytey It wasn't. but there was a period where the market wasn't growing much while the console market was booming, mostly due to the price of the hardware needed to run new games on either platform, and so of course all the publishers that are overly fixated on maximum short term profit did what they usually do... Then the market changed again, as it does.
I get the argument of noncompetitive about stream...but it's not Valve's fault that every other alternative besides gog SUCKS. It's not just "oh I don't want more than one launcher to play my games from" because if you REALLY wanted to you could just set it up so that you launch those games from steam anyway, it's also because these stores are just objectively worse stores than steam. Whether it's a lack of features steam has had for a decade now, bad ui, or something else, steam is basically unchallenged because everyone else is seemingly unable to make a better moustrap. Now, I actually do think gog is better, but gog doesn't actually require you to use gog Galaxy (for most games anyway). You can just download and use standalone installers for games.
People honestly don't actually know what a 'free market' is. They cry for interference when they think it'll suit them, and get mat at interference when they don't like it. Hypocritical.
@@Rietto yeah it's basically projection for them at this point
@@Riettofree market still have rules and steam break them when fix problem is probady 1 day of 1 perspn work.
What games gog won't allow you to play wothout gog galaxy? I didn't knew that.
I only knew games like WormsWMD where you can play without gog galaxy but you can't play online multiplayer. Not only that, but they actually hide option to play online multipayer if you don't have gog galaxy, so you can install the game and and not even know that you can play online (In my opinin game should have lan multiplayer but that is another rant).
@@Daniel_VolumeDown Pretty much, galaxy is needed for some online stuff and I think MAYBE an Asscreed game and that's about it.
Anti-competativ? I don't think so, I would say that Steam is the only not shit game store
Steam is DRM. GOG is DRM-free.
@@BloodwyrmWildheart First, idk what GOG is. Secondly, I don't want 8 diffrent stores for my games. Third, I would rather pay than have to use any of the alternatives that I know of.
@@joakim8579 The sentiment you're expressing is precisely the problem. Having achieved that userbase critical mass, it is impossible to compete with Steam except on value, which Steam will not allow even though other storefronts charge developers lower fees to list their games. The claim everyone makes that this is all because Steam has a better store is a load of crap. Most people would not pay $10 extra on every single game to keep it on Steam, yet the developer makes the same amount of money selling a $50 game on Epic that it makes selling a $60 game on Steam. They're just not allowed to sell it for $50 on Epic or they'll get banned from Steam, all so Steam can take your $10 while contributing nothing to the quality of the game.
@@maninredhelm They will not het banned lol, there is no rule in the Steam guidelines for devs not to be able to sell their game else where. Also, if you honestly think the fucking Epic store of all things is in any way not a shit show... I pity you. Also ironic you are mentioning Epic since they have bought the exclusive right to multible games for large sums of money, in exchange for having the game only on their platgorm for the first couple of years, who is anti.competative now? Also the games most of the time sold better on steam since noone want to use that godforsaken shitshow of a store
@@BloodwyrmWildheart Steam offers the game dev/publisher the choice whether to be DRM or DRM-Free!
So your sentence is an absolute lie!
Steam should forbid people to add the Tag "Souls-Like" because too many people think hard game = souls-like.
Playing and buying games from Vietnam. The crux of the Vietnam issue is that local gaming " mobile scams" from the gatcha duopolies want steam to bend a knee and it won't so the rich assholes over here are trying to pull it down. The other problem is steam isn't paying taxes. Sony also officially supports Vietnam and Playstation is huge here, but both companies have a peculiar business arrangement that will have massive growing pains. Vietnam used to be a massive piracy problem but steam properly converts regional pricing and has made gaming accessible to the new middle upper classes. It just sucks either way, Steam should pay taxes and NOTHING should change.
Makes one wonder why Steam isn't already paying applicable taxes, because they seem perfectly fine with paying taxes in other countries that decided their sales-tax-equivalent applied to digital retailers selling to people in that country.
@@laurencefraser Probably because they can get away with it in the past, just like Facebook
They worry about steam but don't bat an eye at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.
or samsung, which has been price fixing or you cant sell our product for decades. or miele and other vendors that bully small sellers.
because it isn't about being right or lawful, it's about who gives them their cut.
Pleas read where problem is, you talk abaut total difrent thing that we in Poland, is not like the other one dont exsist. But one problem at time and well amazon and microsoft are not that popular stores
People in Poland earn on average about 4000 zł/month. Now 1$ = about 4zł and 1Euro=4,5zł. Now... Steam has set game prices in Poland to be highest on the planet. So when you pay - lets say 60$ for a game - we in Poland pay about 80$. Is that fair? No - prices should be the same as in the rest of EU or even a little bit lower.
Just so you know the whole story.
Yeah it gets even worse when they charge not $60 but $80 and up for the new ps5 ports (like ff7 remake which is around $86,46 after conversion).
Image paying close to a 100 bucks for the base version of a game :/
my country is the same, the average earing per months are close to 1k dollars per month (or around 38k pesos).
most big publishers completely dropped the regional pricings for their games years ago, konami had them higher here than in the US for a long time. but most indie devs are just chill with it and offer lower prices. GoG is the same in that regard, but not many devs want to have their games DRM free
@@thefool8224 GoG is the best. Not only they have more discounts and free games - but the prices are MUCH lower than on Steam - for the same game. And you don't have to worry with DRM...AND the game is yours.
that has nothing to do with Steam, the devs are the ones who put the prices, no Steam, this happens all the time in Latam
@@rodrigobogado8756 It has everything to do with Steam - because valve is converting the value of currency. They set PLN way below its value - so the prices are highest on the planet.
Isn't what Poland investigating fits more what Epic is doing with their literal exclusivity bullshit?
Exclusivity is a legitimate business model,
The problem that really exists in steam is devs can't go OK so on this store we would get more money so we are passing thar on to you as a pri e reduction
Pole here, I think this is some corruption. As I think Epic should be investigated first, not Steam.
Epic isn't a service provider with market dominance. Steam is. Simple as.
@@asdfadssf Steam doesn't have exclusive distribution agreements. Epic has.
Steam wasn't caught spying on a competitor's installation folder. Epic was.
Steam wasn't trying to undercut the competitors by giving away freshly released products for free. Epic was.
@@azradun3903 none of this are breakings of Polish law. You can give stuff for free in Poland, you can have exclusive distribution agreements.
Abusing dominant market position is.
Unexplained selling product for higher prices in one EU country than in another is.
Polish guy here. Valve selling games for higher price is a fact. Let's for example say that that one dollar is worth 4 polish zloty so logic dictates that 30 dollar game should cost 120 polish zloty but Valve bumps the price and you have to pay 150 zloty and that is happening for years and the fact that our goverment is finally looking into it is not them messing with Valve for personal benefits but the simple fact that those slops in power in Poland are finaly doing something for polish people. You people are angry that 60 dollar games became 70 dollars imagine for a second that Valve just decide that game is worth 60$ but in US we will sell it for 70. Arbitrary pricing has to end
had to pay 92zł for a 20$ game, despite the 1$/4zł ratio, the game is really good, but it's annoying when that happens (esp since Omori is like 71zł rn and goes for the same price in $)
@@mistyisacat8012 exactly my point :( I'm sorry for you :(
another thing in Poland about steam is the pricing, people are angry at how much the games are overpriced, due to steams wrong currency conversion, which of course means more money for valve, there's even a petition to solve this problem
9:30 Why would you let someone advertise their product on your marketplace, the biggest in the world, but then let another marketplace develop the reputation for selling games for 10-20% less? It makes sense for Valve to say that publishers can't undercut the steam price on other stores.
Valve should have a say on what games they want on their store just like publishers like Ubisoft can decide their game can only be bought through their store.
It gets even better. Apparently the restriction isn't even on selling the game cheaper elsewhere... it's on selling Steam Keys for the Steam Version Of The Game cheaper elsewhere.
@@laurencefraser yep. it's only for keys.
If Steam can display overall and recent user reviews separately, then it shoupd be able to also display developer and user submitted tags separately.
[EDIT/Addendum]: I think Steam should also have a Review that does not count as positive or negative, and is something like "I just want to give important Information"
Agreed, sometimes I just want to post info. Some would say there's discussion boards for it, but that's not really a replacement, also neutral reviews are a thing.
You see, Steam and Valve are incredibly static. Most of the time they change anything (especially for the better) is when external forces make them change something.
What pissed me off the most about Steam being banned in Vietnam is that they didn't announce jack. It was the worst possible move that the VTC (which is probably a monopoly in itself) and Vietnamese ISPs could have done that there is no way corruption wasn't involved. I only found out through third party gaming news channel on UA-cam because like I said, there were no announcement. They made it seemed like they were threwing a hissy fits over not getting their cut, which is in no way the PR move you are supposed to do, even if the reason is justified or not.
I just hate being a gamer in Vietnam so much. There has been many game that I had to access through other means other than the Google Play or App store because they banned most of the games I play or want to play (most likely due to no one wanting to pay the absurd tax rate) so even if I am able to play those games, I'm unable to support the developers. And now with Steam gone, it's the last straw.
The main reason Steam is in such a powerful position is nobody TRIED to properly compete with them for years. Now, the people who try are doing a godawful job of it.
EGS is losing money hand over fist. It only continues to exist because Epic has the infinite money printer known as the Unreal Engine to fuel it. EA/Origin? Completely laughable setup, basically limited almost entirely to EA games, and lacks basic functionality Steam's had for years. Ubisoft? They could POSSIBLY be a credible threat if they ever actually got some good new games on their platform...
Steam had a good decade of being effectively uncontested to get things right. It's not perfect, but nobody else is even CLOSE.
The thing is they want every game to go through the approval process of the country, which they themselves have to go through. This is not about blocking any single game, but every other game has to go through gatekeeping like they have to.
The problem is, if any Vietnam devs want to go global, they can’t go through Steam anymore, which is even worse for the devs.
The only party that benefits, are the devs of existing gacha games. There is no games that is based on a single sale that can reach revenue scale as gacha games with just a very small market size.
And let’s face it, the size of the market does not justify creating any new live service games just for vietnam.
Steam isn't anti competitive, they're very competitive and win every competition!
the swastika isn't just a hindu symbol. many many nations snd cultures used it. The one germany used is an ancient germanic rune. So old, they didn't even know india existed back then.
5:38 Honestly Steam removing Turkish regional pricing was huge betrayal to us and i'm hope publisher are happy with the rise of piracy in Turkiye.
Petty jealousy, nothing more. All these other platforms are jealous of Valve's success. Perhaps if they actually catered to their customers more they wouldn't have these problems.
Steam not wanting to be undercut in sales and preventing it makes sense. In a brick and mortar it is under the stores jurisdiction to adjust their prices of products. On steam the devs/publishers set the price. Steam also has costs in hosting, advertising and distributing the game, they would be more negatively effected by being undercut and unable to compete on price because they can't lower the price of the product.
Except that is not even Steam's policy. Steam does not care if you charge less on other platforms, they care if you sell Steam Keys for less on other platforms.
You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.
For context, Polish players pulled some data and apparently the game prices were inconsistent with the price of polish Złoty to USD. A petition was created to look into the matter and got enough traction for the government to take a serious look at Steam. This was one of the reasons why Steam is being investigated.
I could be mistaken because I'm not a dev/publishers and therefore don't know the actual details, but I thought Steam's price restrictions was for *steam keys*, essentially saying you can't sell steam keys elsewhere for less than the price the game is charging on Steam itself... Which made perfect sense to me.
Again, I could be complete wrong there and it's a different story if it's not only steam keys.
They don't like it when a private company has too much power; it threatens the shareholders.
a thought that always bothered me is what will steam become after gabe, which hopefully is a long long time away
As a Polish person, the main problem I have with Steam is their regional pricing. Our per capita GDP is around 1/3 of regions like the UK/US/EU, we don't use the Euro, yet our regional prices are usually higher than 95% other regions, including the aformentioned US/UK/EU. For example, the Polish version of Starfield on Steam is the second most expensive version, with only the Swiss version being slightly more expensive.
Not that I want to buy Starfield, I just remember my jaw dropping when I saw it was the equivalent of $86, while it's $70 in the US.
A major reason why steam is so liked by consumers and a large chunk of devs is that they don't typically buy out IPs/dev teams only to dismantle them or run them into the ground. Other publishers take a far more control freak approach to all of this in comparison to Steam. There's issues with it yes, there always is issues with everything in the world, but in comparison to other publishers the damage is really not as impactful to both dev teams and consumers.
Not to mention Steams storefront is so damn massive in comparison to other publishers who, again, take the control approach and lock games to their platforms/sites whereas if you throw your game on Steam it reaches far across the world fast. It just works better for everyone. It's easier for everyone. No wonder the competitors can't even hold a candle.
I have a lot of beef with Steam's recommendation system lately. First, the user tags are generally a good thing, but some of it really annoys me both in that Steam themselves will remove "negative" tags that would be very useful, like they removed "asset flip" and "mobile port" in the first few weeks of the tag system. Plus the with the Bulwark story, when people add tags for something that isn't in the game. I've seen so many "roguelike/roguelite" tags for games that have a little bit of procedural generation or randomization, but aren't roguelikes/lites. Just because a game has randomized levels after death doesn't mean they are roguelikes.
Second is with the recommendations themselves. I remember years ago the "more games like this" section being very accurate. Now when I go to it, it seems to only recommend newer games or ones that are in a vaguely similar category. There are so many games that are a "clone" of something and basically the same game with slight changes in mechanics and graphics, and instead it recommends something insanely left field, and no matter how many times I refresh the page it will not recommend the game that inspired the game I'm looking at, but will recommend something almost completely unrelated. I get it when the game is very unique and way out of left field, but when I'm looking at a metroidvania I expect ti to recommend Metroidvanias like it used to, now I'm getting top down roguelikes and puzzle platformers. In a genre thats super oversaturated on Steam it should be recommending everything from that genre/subgenre. Same goes for the "because you played" section, it has the same issue.
Overall its better than any other storefront, I just have some criticism for something I love.
So steam is being anti-competitive for being consumer friendly.
Yes vietnam is turning into boomer era almost zoomer nowadays
@@Deezsirrer Vietnam politician are dino make law for UFO era
No, for being anti-competitive and somehow trying to intimidate publishers into not offering lower prices elsewhere which I can't believe is legal anywhere.
To a communist country like Vietnam that is anti-competitive behaviour.
@@theliberation9061 If they want to offer lower prices, they don't have to sell on steam, look at what ubisoft is doing!
As a Polish person, I have to say it's about time that UOKIK started investigating them.
The currency converter for PLN is outdated, causing us to pay for the same games more money, than we would pay in Euro. The sellers, generally ignoring this fact, make buying games in PL unprofitable.
Valve doesn't have an "unfair advantage". Everyone who has ever tried to compete is just bad.
Steam is so convenient and has the highest brand loyalty.
"Brand loyalty" is a bad thing.
@@BloodwyrmWildheart Maybe in the sense of being blindly loyal, but being a person or company that has earned it probably says something positive.
User-generated tags have always been rather shite. I remember when Cyberpunk 2077 had the "masterpiece" tag before launch... It was neither helpful nor accurate lol.
I said that the tags should be generated by the publisher but, and this is the key, *voted on by verified purchases when leaving a review* to ensure accuracy.
Thanks Michael for taking the time to make this video and educate us on what's going on
there deal where they can hit 80% to 90% for triple A games, is so unheard of. steam is one of these company's i would glad let take the wheel in leading
unheard of? Literally every other store does those, or better. EGS, GOG, Humble... Steam has the best selection and best client, but not the best sales, by any means.
Microsoft, Meta, Apple, EA, Ubisoft, Sweet Baby Inc, Disney, Blackrock, Vanguard, and literaly almost every other corpo destroying thousands of smaller companyes and doing literally the worst things possible to the customers > "Nothing to se here"
Valve treats it's custommers with dignity > "Now you've done it! 😡"
The bad guys won, didn't they?
A lot of the things gamers complain about in the AAA space (digital-only, DRM, "play-to-earn", lootboxes, actual GAMBLING, etc.) was pioneered by Valve/Steam, oddly enough.
Steam had to be SUED by the Australian government to allow refunds.
This is also the same company that successfully appealed a ruling that would've allowed customers to resell digital games.
Super consumer-friendly company though! /sarc
Nah they never won never had a chance, they gave into broke before they had a chance. They will implode financially before the ever got they chance to win. We are winning not because the industry is getter better, but its collapsing to build up better!
That other companies are trying to dictate the standard (and failing because they don't have the market dominance) to do worse doesn't make Steam right. It only makes them "not as bad". Or perhaps they're actually worse, because they've already successfully set the expectations so thoroughly that you don't even question them, they're just "that's the way it is".
Also, anti competitive and anti consumer are not the same thing. A company can be both pro consumer and anti competitive, which only indirectly leads to anti consumer results in a "but our hands are clean!" kind of way.
As a tf2 fan I can say that Valve doesn't treat their customers with dignity at all. Steam is cool but Valve is not and even the worst companies wouldn't allow for their own game to be in such bad state as tf2.
@@lycanwarrior2137 This is like the third time you copied this exact comment. On that grounds I'm going to completely disregard your argument.
Just a reminder to everyone: Steam isnt pro-consumer, infact they have a lot of anti-consumer issues, its just that every other competitor minus one or two are so irredeemably anti-consumer that it makes Steam win by virtue of doing nothing.
Never saw a picture used as much as the thumbnail one. Love it!
Steam definitely isnt anti-competitive, its just that all the competitors either suck or aren't trying to be competitive in the case of GoG. Epic Games tried to be a steam competitor. But their storefront absolutely sucks.
Yeah, you didn’t give a reason why steam is an anti-competitive.
I think one big thing that steam set apart from other stores is thier ecosystems which unlikely no one can do it better than them as other company is found as public company so lot of pressure like to make them do short term goal as always instead of steam which is private company can do thing in scope of long term.
In the end , literally no one can be compete as others focus on build the store with sort of quick grab profits tactics or massive cut the price for dominate market and take all money back after they're 1st in the market apart from that they didn't care anything else at all.
@@SpottedHares Give a reason why it is? Or do you not know one?
Would this not mean that "epic" games should be banned in Poland.
I would be for a an ban of their store in the EU.
I agree that this is a "double measure"
BUT I think Epic Games Launcher is good for the game market
It existing is a good thing but holy fuck if egs itself wasn't an absolute piece of shit software
With their exclusivity deals meant to brute force their way into being the monopoly themselves while providing a terrible service to customers? Fuck no.
Only store that has a comparable service to Steam's, by which I mean, it doesn't fuck over the customers, is GOG and only because of it's lack of DRM meaning games bought on GOG are yours for good.
I don't know how they existing is a good thing. How many studios and publishers have lost respect and sales because of the egs?
In the end it is just Chinease spyware with an CEO that thinks he is Jesus.
@@simplysmiley4670 I would not mind competition to Steam, GOG is great and I do use it, it might have lost a few sales recently from me as I am planning on a Steam Deck and I want easy access to those games.
That's why the gov is for. People in US are often against gov interfering in their "free" market while having absolute garbage consumer laws and drama after another regarding corpa's abusing their power and lack of restrictions to fuck people working and buying from them (recent Asus but there is plenty of other examples like apple, ms, amazon etc.)
Yep, it's pretty amazing to see the EU slowly do the basic common sense minimum for the last decade or so and then people, especially Americans, acting in massive shock as if they were blowing up companies.
That would only work if corpos in the US were not INVOLVED with the US government. However, they are, and politicians get some heavy "donations" from these corps to look the other way.
@@tancoat1346which is again, completely illegal in a lot of counties.
Except government tends to fuck things up royally... like... 90% of the time.
@@tancoat1346 You do realize that in the EU lobbing is just as bad. Across the street from the EU parliment is the lobbyist building where companies lobby to EU commision and poltitions. There is a German comdian who became an EU parliment member and documents all of this
I think this is the first time, the audio loudnes fluctuates in your advertisement? Im a regular listener to your news and love the channel! keep up!
7:34 - No, whatever is not threatening german bottomline is not an EU issue. If it does threaten german bottomline it is eu issue. and yes, as a Pole living in Poland: EU is germany. basically. To give you idea of the power dynamics.
I don't even look at user tags. It's always just a bunch of trolls. Elden Ring: "Grand Strategy". That being said, Strategy is like RPG. Everything is an RPG, and everything takes Strategy, so therefore, everything is a Strategy RPG.
Valve can absolutely cut deals with larger publishers. They already do. Other developers can't do that because they aren't larger publishers. The end.
I come from, Vietnam, I have been saving up money for over a year to finally buy games, then steam got banned, out of the blue
OMG I just found out you developed the Pale Beyond. I LOVED that game! I'm not a subscriber, but I've watched your channel on and off over the years, so I missed you announcing what the game was. I do remember a few years ago that you were working on a game, but assumed it would either be small in scope (most indie) or not my cup of tea. Boy was I wrong!
I love meeting or learning that people I respect and appreciate for one thing are also really talented at another thing.
Thank you for the joy you gave me this morning (and while playing the game)!
I saw people pointing out the Polish average wage and while it is cool to do so, there is a small problem with that.
Majority of people of Poland do not earn average wage and it is the wages of the rich social class which provides heavily into the Polish average wage.
People over here in Poland earn something around 700 to 800 USD (post VAT, post tax, post healthcare deduction etc.) a month, which is already pretty far from the supposed average monthly wage in Poland that is somewhere around 1900 USD.
But Steam doesn't really take that into consideration and on top of that we have higher prices than the rest of the EU due to us using the PLN but the very crux why we don't use Euro is what I said: majority of Poles BARELY earn 800-900 USD equivalence a month. Introduction of Euro would deepen the already massive wage gap as we do not have a middle class anymore.
Then take it up with the developers, Steam cant force them too change their prices by Country. The can only Provide Tools to do so. Currently the devs decide to Publish a game with a certain Price for their region (Mostly US) f, which gets converted onto the Regional currency. The Devs could change the Pricing per region as the tools from steam are there, but they dont.
@@jgih32 someone already contacted factorio dev and they said they won't change the price because they use steam conversion. If the steam conversion changes, the price for this game will change too. So tl;dr we've just been told: fu k you
On the other side, devs for hades 2 and some other games changed the prices to accurate ones already. If you're willing, then you can get things done, easy as that.
@@Rezlusiowa Of course, Steam got hit by EU regulators and basically told it wasn't allowed to charge different prices in different parts of the EU, or something to that effect, just to make things messier.
@@laurencefraserbest thing that poland government or regulator can do is setup talk about review on that agreement exchange with valve can geo blocking as they should be.
We may get to find out if Reddit's love for the EU's anti free market policies is stronger than their unconditional love for Steam and Valve, who can do no wrong.
Sometime regulator interpret or imply definition in the law too strict and somehow didn't realise effect that it will be happened afterward or they know since very start and act like no clue as they're got lobby by corporate or they can't speak thier own mind as doing job as regulator.
part of the reasons valve can be do pro-comsumer is that they are privately owned. There are no valve shareholders of stocks. the entire company is 100% owned by gaben.
One of the things to consider about steam restricting prices on other retailers is if steam isn't allowed to restrict pricing, than a company like epic can sell a game on both apps but overprice it on steam essentially using steams promotional acumen to promote a game for a different retailer.
Since when is offering a better service than everyone else illegal? Meanwhile Walmart has ruined communities for decades
Buying products on Steam being a Polish citizen is kind of fucked up. Because They upped prices in Poland when the USD exhange rate was at an literal all time high period, and they never adjusted it back, the prices of games are so abnormally high for us, that when you sort price of some game on SteamDB, 80% of times the highest will be Poland and Israel, always higher than USD and EUR users. And for Israeli? Okay it MAYBE have common sense because it's high earning country, but Poland? It's GDP per capita PPP is slightly below EU average. What have this country done to you Steam, that games here cost more than in all EU states, US, Norway, Switzeland, Kuwait and UAE even??? Why is polish wallet being treated unequally than other wallets?
This is respectable. A developer heard the game they sold was being retired, and convinced them to give the game back so he could make it free to download/play. It would be nice if they did this more often, or at least allow those who purchased the game to continue to play it.
Aren't the Valve's restrictions on pricing only about Steam keys, and not the games themselves?
The thing is anything pro consumer is anti competitive like there is a reason the majority of pc gamers only use steam its the best market place basically netflix but as store front for games because no store front is good compared to it and its been around longer
DRM isn't pro-consumer.
@@BloodwyrmWildheart Steams drm is optional and completely in control by the devs. Steam provides an option but factorio shows that a dev can do basically anything with a users key as long as they provide a worthwhile service.
Anyone who still uses steams drm either decided to stay opted in because they didnt care to make their own drm service, or didnt feel like loosening DRM restrictions in place of something like wubes login system. In other words, steam provides a tool but its not a requirement to market on their store.
@@BloodwyrmWildheart I have many steam games with 0 DRM. I can launch the apps/games without steam being open, but my played time isnt tracked then. This is not the case to most games, as obviously a slight amount of DRm is kind of necessary to protect the software, but you can always launch steam in offline mode and play the games, here is where the devs add aditional DRM, like total war needing an online ping every 48 hours esentially making the games forever online.
Sick of people parroting the same "Steam allows devs to turn off DRM" BS. Besides the fact only a fraction of games take advantage of it, great, you still don't own the game you purchased, you still can't install it without Steam everytime, you are still at the devs mercy if they decide to update the game and remove content or break it with a new update (anytime Bethesda updates their games).
Buy games on Itch, GOG and other platforms if you can help it. Since valve doesn't care about preservation or ownership.
the fact that people call steam, which is literally an open market plattform, anti competative is baffling considering by the very definition a marketplace isnt
Are you joking? Steam, an open marketplace? If I sell MY game on another platform for ONE CENT less, they will kick me off their "open marketplace".
@@zerobytey this is why i love listening to people that have never been on an open market before
or know how they work fundamentally
you know, the ones in your city? where you plop down a stand to sell your goods?
yeah, always a touch grass moment fo sure
@@zerobytey not to mention, you REALLY think combatting LITERAL fraud is a fair and useful argument when talking about "anti competative business practices"?
@@zerobytey and they are right? if i had a marketplace why would i let you have a stand in it that you use just to self promotion and sell the product in another place?
@@rodrigobogado8756 Like Valve couldn't figure a way to bury a game in the listings if views to sales ratio was too low. They already have mechanisms to block publishers for fraud and other activities too. If someone abuses the service they can handle it.
Or they could just change their terms to "you aren't allowed to set the wholesale price of your game lower to any other platform, or sell direct to the public at that wholesale price", and then the retail price is wholesale price plus steam fees. Same way most bricks and mortar local grocery shops work.
My favorite part of steam user tags is that TWW3's launch earned it a 100% justified early access tag.
$team being invested for anti-competitive practices by merely a single country is the biggest issue. That should be done by many, MANY more countries.
If other companies weren’t garbage, maybe they’d stand a chance. Guess it’s much easier to drag others down into the shite instead of elevating yourself.
As soon as I got a break at work this drops!
uokik usally dont ban things, they just make you pay more while breaking laws of consument.
There is differend opinions on it, I personally love how uokik forced influencers to tag corretly ads or sponos products, and made clear rules and examples.
I have to say that Steam's "you can't sell your game cheaper than on here" has long sat ill with me. Selling on your own website aside, it's leveraging Valve's market share to fix prices on competing platforms, like Epic and Itch. Which certainly sounds like an anti-competitive practice to me.
Anyway, bad user tags are indeed bad, BUT it was very funny when Nekopara 4 got the "Souls-like" tag.
It's specifically about steam keys. You cannot sell steam keys cheaper elsewhere. You can sell your game cheaper elsewhere, but you're gonna have to also distribute it yourself.