The issues related to the fact that without backing from Valve releasing a game on the PC was often economically unviable, most of them had to get onto Steam or fail. GoG wasn't that popular and only released old games back then, Ubisoft and EA obviously didn't want to know and trying to promote your game from your own website or other hardly known portal was almost impossible.BigTuk said:How is Steam a Monopoly? Being the best or at least most preferred and most popular doesn't make you a monopoly good sir/madam. IT simply means you are very good at what you do. Good enough that you have adequately balanced the needs of both your customer groups to the point where both feel comfortable doing business with you.J Tyran said:For years Steam was the gatekeeper of what game would be successful or not, for hundreds of them no Steam launch = no success.
This doesn't really matter though, Steam is/was a monopoly but regardless death threats are not the way to deal with frustration.
But the process of getting onto Steam was lengthy, difficult and obscure. Indies would hear nothing for months and get no feedback before a curt refusal, getting in touch with someone and trying to discuss it was out of the question a lot of the time. There was no transparency and no feedback, no policies or standards indies could follow to stand a greater chance of acceptance.
It was almost like making a prayer and hoping in a few months it would be answered, Green light did little to fix it and it became more about selling your game to the community and hope to avoid getting buried rather than producing a good product. Getting "celebrity" endorsements from YouTubers to encourage vote bombing was a higher priority than communicating with Valve about what they would allow on their store, then they allowed publishers to add almost anything they wanted with little oversight and many of these small indies are getting seriously shafted because the only viable way to sell their games is via Steam and the only way to get on Steam is to sign away their soul to scalping publishers.
Meanwhile any old garbage is getting thrown onto the store on an hourly basis, maybe Monopoly isn't the right word because Valve don't appear to be acting in an anti trust manner or anything but the environment around them has grown so that they are the Gatekeepers that stand between devs and financial viability and Valve are not doing enough to alleviate the problems this causes. They have bungled it again and again, they are not responsible for the way that the market has evolved but they are responsible for their own conduct.
If they where the responsible custodians of PC gaming people claim they are they would recognise the harm their policies and inaction are causing, instead they let irresponsible and anti consumer publishers list whatever broken and objectively (I do not use that lightly either) awful games they want on their storefront.