this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
750 points (90.3% liked)
Games
16961 readers
278 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But they haven't crushed any other competitor through any mechanism but having a dramatically better product.
They don't force you to be exclusive to be on steam. They don't force you to implement any of their Steam stuff. They are very permissive unless you do shit that potentially exposes them to liability down the road, like the NFT nonsense.
And they let you generate keys for literally free to sell on other stores.
All their stuff companies use is because it's things customers value.
When they started, they did used to force you to use products edit: aside from their own games(fair cop), some 3rd party games like Lost Planet also required it.
Certain games, and not just valve games, you'd buy in a store and the disc would force you to install and create a steam account to play the single player offline game.
They're a distribution mechanism. If you buy a Steam game you need Steam. Allowing developers to require Steam to play their game is not anticompetitive or in any way unethical.
They didn't force any developer who wanted to sell games on Steam to only sell games on Steam. That's what would be anticompetitive and abusing their market position. Games choosing to only distribute through Steam because there's no other storefront that wouldn't be a worse value if it was free isn't Steam doing something wrong.
My point is that they did initially to force usage. I'll edit the post with the game name when I get home.
Edit: Lost Planet. It had a disc but required you to sign up for and use steam to play it.
A publisher only distributing through Steam when it does things others don't isn't forcing usage.
Forcing usage is requiring developers to only distribute through Steam.
There is no scenario where the first is wrong, and there is no scenario where the second is OK.
Looks like it was a console exclusive before it released on Steam, if you're talking about Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (which is the only one I can find by that name).
Do you have more information about the release? Or perhaps it's a different game?
They didn't force any game to use Steamworks, developers and publishers chose to use it because it offered a lot of good middleware. And of course it requires Steam to use Steamworks.
This is a very soft idea of "force".