Games

Valve has a reputation for being the good guy

Because they earned it.

"Big tech monopoly is bad", but somehow "Valve monopoly is good for the customer".

I had this discussion with some friends of mine lately. Valve is definitely not perfect, but the steps they've taken to be better than their competition, often in the consumer's favor, is so far and away better than the likes of the other entrenched market leaders: Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. I'm not a fan of them tying Steam Input and Steam VR, among other things, to...Steam, naturally...when they should be independent libraries, but would Sony and Microsoft have started to abandon their walled garden ecosystem strategy of exclusives without Valve leading the way? Not a chance.

Predatory pricing? Not a problem. It's the industry standard.

But like...it is the industry standard, and it's definitely not the definition of the word, "predatory". If they offer the best deal in town, it's still a good deal. Epic is offering better than that, but if it was so easy to match, you'd see the other platforms doing so as well, including those also trying to compete with Steam, meaning maybe the dollars don't really make sense in Epic's world.

Steam is dismantling the entire concept of digital ownership

The hell they are. For one, not every Steam game has DRM. For another, when I buy a game on Steam, any game, I certainly "own" more than when I buy a "digital copy" of a movie or a TV show, of which there is no avenue to actually legally obtain the file that contains the movie. It's only streaming.

[Before Steam] it was possible to buy a game and just play it without internet access

Perhaps the video author is too young to remember, but online authentication on PC games definitely came before a single third party sold their games on Steam. MMORPGs predate Steam for that matter.

Honestly, this whole video seems to come from someone who's too young to have lived through this and only read about it. We became happy Steam customers because it was better than what came before. Valve is not responsible for standardizing any of this nonsense and did in fact get to where they are by being better than everyone claiming to be their competition.

For many games sold on Steam, Valve takes a flat 30% cut. Why 30%? I don't know.

Exactly my point. They picked 30% because they were confident it would scale to cover their costs and because it was a better rate than what the developer could stand to make in brick-and-mortar.

The cost of running an online store is essentially zero.

No, it's very much not.

Now all of the other tech companies are getting sued for...[these monopolistic practices]...

Because they're exhibiting monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior. It's a much harder case to say that Steam has engaged in monopolistic practices compared to Apple requiring that all software on their devices comes from their store. Which is why the Wolfire case is not a slam dunk.

A lot of the other bad faith arguments here are derived from the incorrect idea that running a digital store costs nothing.

I do shop on GOG for lots of the reasons that the video raises, but it's often still a worse experience than buying on Steam. For instance, I'm on Linux, so while GOG's refund policy is exceptional, I have to do a lot of legwork to get a game like The Thaumaturge to run in Wine, a game that's Steam Deck verified and just works on Steam. And the only way I was able to deduce the steps to get it working was by taking a peak at SteamDB to see what the game's dependencies are.