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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Steam has about 80% of the PC digital distribution market for new releases.

    So it is a bad thing now that Steam makes new releases more discoverable than the other storefronts that have a larger installed base than Steam?

    Microsoft’s store has a close to 100% penetration of home installation of Windows 10 and newer.

    Opening Microsoft Store: Boom, top spots for Microsofts properties (Activision Blizzard sale, Minecraft, Candy Crush).

    Switching to the Games tab: PC Game Pass, more Activision Blizzard sale, COD Black Ops 6 with a dedicated banner, more Minecraft, more Candy Crush.

    Visiting one of Microsoft’s other game stores, Battle.net: 100% Microsoft exclusive. Not just Blizzard games but Doom, Avowed, Sea of Thieves, PC GamePass. That’s unregulated Microsoft on full display. Not a single 3rd party game even available but the rest of the Microsoft catalogue integrated after the takeover of Activision Blizzard.

    Compare that to Steam: Huge banner advertising the sale promotion of EA.

    Scrolling a bit further down, Microsoft games advertised, some convention for narrative games.

    Nobody but Microsoft and Epic are to blame for their huge installed bases not converting to sales of 3rd party games. Mostly advertising their own properties and paid exclusives.

    All your emotional outbursts do not change facts.



  • 10 Bn for Steam revenue this year, by the way.

    So still far off anything resembling >50% market share on PC. Good to know they’re still not a monopoly.

    The money flows to Valve because Valve doesn’t need to make ANY games at all, pay for exclusives or do anything else.

    So Valve is not engaging in any anti-competitive behaviour as well as pumping resources into Linux support to break the Windows hegemony? Great!

    Especially since the fanboys paint any attempt at competing against a monopolistic actor as an anticompetitive act, somehow.

    Yeah, these people are very strange. I mean, it’s a fact that Microsoft is the convicted monopolist because of the grip Windows has on the industry, the same Microsoft that bought Minecraft, Bethesda, and Activision Blizzard King to become the world’s single biggest games publisher and their Windows-exclusive PC GamePass is also growing (surely at least partially thanks to Microsoft “continuing to misuse its Windows operating system monopoly” to promote their other services).

    And yet, there are people who put the sole Linux supporter in the same corner, as if that company had anything approaching Microsoft’s market power. Not even the EU thought Valve was important enough. Microsoft, Apple, Google, ByteDance, and Meta are Digital Market Gatekeepers, not Valve.