Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2024]

[Seanspeed]

I'm not escalating anything... I'm countering your anecdotal arguments that the industry isn't changing and evolving when the evidence is right in front of our eyes.

Now this is just a complete strawman. I've not said anything of the sort.

My 'escalation' argument was specifically about your claims about young people being normalized to open platforms, which just isn't true. Again, the iPhone is by far the most popular phone among young people, and it doesn't get more 'walled garden' than that. Beyond that, very few games allow you to play across platforms with the same account. Dont be confused by 'crossplay', which simply allows people of different platforms to play with/against each other. Crossplay does not necessarily mean you can play a game on one console and then switch to a different brand console and keep playing on the same account/files.

Look how many fanboys are swearing that Sony releasing their games on PC is causing irreparable harm to the Playstation brand

Fanboys are, by definition, irrational and ridiculous. I can scour the Youtube comment section and provide hundreds of comments with all kinds of ridiculous takes of all kinds. Your assumption that all of these people are 'middle aged' is completely baseless though, and you're providing no evidence to support it(I saw your comment before you edited it by the way, claiming this was 'fact' and 'inarguable' lol).

Remember, Sony was absolutely against it... and yet now they've succumbed to the realities of the market. These things ONLY hurt Sony

It really didn't hurt Sony though, and that was why people were frustrated over it. People weren't gonna choose Xbox over Playstation because of this, when Playstation would have double the users that Xbox had, not to mention lots of console players actually dont want to play against PC players for obvious reasons. Sony caved because they didn't stand to lose anything, and their current dominant position is more proof of this.

There's a million mile stretch from crossplay to Sony completely opening up their ecosystem and putting all their games on all platforms while allow anybody to put their own stores on their hardware. It's just so ridiculous for so many reasons.

I'll say it again, you're falling for a slippery slope fallacy. That because things have leant in one direction recently, it will keep going in that direction indefinitely. It wont happen.

 

[Cyan]

Again, if we're talking phones, Apple is by far the most popular/most desirable brand for younger people.

do you mean in the USA?

Apple works fine as a closed wall, one because there are only two competing OSes in the mobile world and they create the entire ecosystem cloud and so on based on that, and because people see it as a status symbol -that's the very same reason why other people don't like Apple and prefer an Android-.

Also the EU isn't a big fan of those business methods...

Watching streamers is not at all the same as what people are actually themselves playing games on. It might surprise you to learn that 6 year olds dont have jobs and rely on their parents to buy them games and gaming hardware. And that's more often than not gonna mean a console, not a pricey gaming PC. Not that people really care what hardware streamers are using in general, they aren't watching for that, especially not young kids.

that's true. I'd just add a tablet which is what my nephews have, and what most parents get for their kids. My best friend from childhood got a Switch for his kid -although he purchased a PC for him a year ago, for his 9th birthday-. when his son was like 5. My friend is one of those guys who grew up with consoles, first he had a Megadrive, then PS1, PS2, then X360 and XB1, until recently when he got a gaming laptop. So he did that out of nostalgia, the typical thing parents gave to their children in my era.

And well, my nephews watch those streamers and talk about games with their friends, but yeah, they don't know about hardware. When they play on my PC, and they have many hours playing on it, they sometimes touch the monitor screen to tell me something 'cos they think the screen is going to respond to their presses.

Last time I saw my 6 y.o. watching one of those streamers on youtube, the streamer was playing a game with tracks like in the sky and he was driving a truck and there were odd physics involved in the gameplay, my nephew was fascinated. In fact their parents decided to limit his time with the tablet 'cos he was so focused watching gaming videos on the tablet for hours.

When playing games on my PC though, save for a couple of Windows antics like throwing you to the desktop 'cos of Onedrive, and adding more gamepads -this can be troublesome in Windows, at least with non xbox native gamepads-, they spent quite a few hours playing on my PC without issues.

 

[Cyan]

Yea no thanks. The only way Microsoft innovates is to find ways to continually pull money out of your pocket. Their way of business has added nothing of value to gaming and is not one that is to be emulated.

what differentiates MS in the console business from other platforms? Just curious... I don't see any difference. I don't like things like automatic billing getting enabled if you start paying pc gamepass for instance, but also many people actually got a lot of ms rewards points with bots and so on to abuse the system and have pc gamepass for free.

 

[Remij]

Now this is just a complete strawman. I've not said anything of the sort.

My 'escalation' argument was specifically about your claims about young people being normalized to open platforms, which just isn't true. Again, the iPhone is by far the most popular phone among young people, and it doesn't get more 'walled garden' than that. Beyond that, very few games allow you to play across platforms with the same account. Dont be confused by 'crossplay', which simply allows people of different platforms to play with/against each other. Crossplay does not necessarily mean you can play a game on one console and then switch to a different brand console and keep playing on the same account/files.

Look how many fanboys are swearing that Sony releasing their games on PC is causing irreparable harm to the Playstation brand

Fanboys are, by definition, irrational and ridiculous. I can scour the Youtube comment section and provide hundreds of comments with all kinds of ridiculous takes of all kinds. Your assumption that all of these people are 'middle aged' is completely baseless though, and you're providing no evidence to support it(I saw your comment before you edited it by the way, claiming this was 'fact' and 'inarguable' lol).

Remember, Sony was absolutely against it... and yet now they've succumbed to the realities of the market. These things ONLY hurt Sony

It really didn't hurt Sony though, and that was why people were frustrated over it. People weren't gonna choose Xbox over Playstation because of this, when Playstation would have double the users that Xbox had, not to mention lots of console players actually dont want to play against PC players for obvious reasons. Sony caved because they didn't stand to lose anything, and their current dominant position is more proof of this.

There's a million mile stretch from crossplay to Sony completely opening up their ecosystem and putting all their games on all platforms while allow anybody to put their own stores on their hardware. It's just so ridiculous for so many reasons.

I'll say it again, you're falling for a slippery slope fallacy. That because things have leant in one direction recently, it will keep going in that direction indefinitely. It wont happen.

I never said young people were normalized to open platforms... I said they want their games to follow them. The next step for publishers is to do their own thing and the platform holder to get out of the way.

All the big games DO allow you to play across platforms... Fortnite, Call of Duty, Minecraft... I mean..

What do you notice about most of those games? They have cross-play and cross-progression. These people playing these games will 100% expect that their progress... that they've worked so hard over the years to build up.. will continue with them, regardless of whether they buy and Xbox or Playstation or PC, or Switch next time...

You have a very narrow view of how consoles will evolve in the future.. Nobody said it's happening tomorrow.. but the walls will continue to fall. Like I said, just one generation ago, there was simply NO WAY that Sony would put their games on PC period.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

I only participate in two forums, discord channels aside, one of them being this, and the other is like a Phoenix reborn from the ashes of one of the most popular forums that existed -which died 3 years ago-.

In that very forum, after 3 years not only we are the same old guard, but there aren't new people registering

That's less "reborn like a Phoenix" and more "we have a faint pulse after performing CPR". Gotta work on your metaphors.

To sum it up, there is literally just a handful of people actively writing posts there, and of those that are, you always end up bickering and discussing about the same arguments

I'd say it's a safe bet to at least generalize that forum usage has declined since even just a decade ago, likely largely due to social media's ascendance and the primary method of interaction with the internet for most being through mobile devices. So on that level at least, sure. The average young person today is probably far less likely to be a forums poster than they were in 2010.

The fact you only use forums populated largely by geriatrics (like me) though, means that's just where you choose to hang out - but you can't really use that personal choice as anything indicative of an actual survey of the forums landscape. For example, I get you may not like their userbase/moderation, but you're ignoring the most popular gaming forum by far - ResetEra.

Hell, its popularity is one of the reasons it sucks to hold any type of conversation there, as any thread is pushed off the first page into the netherworld within minutes due to the volume. I can't find any stats for posts/day for it currently though, aside from when it opened in 2017 - for the first 24 hours, it had almost 75,000 posts. Whether it's declined significantly since then I have no idea, but the userbase now is the tens of thousands vs. ~8000 at that time. I'd say it's a safe bet there are probably over 100k+ posts per day across the entire site, conservatively.

So compared to TikTok/Discord? Who knows, maybe a drop in the bucket for twenty-somethings. But those aren't just 40 year olds making tens of thousands of posts per day.

 

[Boss]

what differentiates MS in the console business from other platforms? Just curious... I don't see any difference. I don't like things like automatic billing getting enabled if you start paying pc gamepass for instance, but also many people actually got a lot of ms rewards points with bots and so on to abuse the system and have pc gamepass for free.

MS history in the industry has been to drive services and I don't buy a game console for services. It's why they're in the kerfuffle of irrelevance that they're in at this point in time. Paying for online was their doing. Forcing developers to charge for DLCs that they wanted to release for free(XBLA), etc. Every time they "innovate", it just ends up costing consumers more and more money.

 

[Cyan]

That's less "reborn like a Phoenix" and more "we have a faint pulse after performing CPR". Gotta work on your metaphors.

I'd say it's a safe bet to at least generalize that forum usage has declined since even just a decade ago, likely largely due to social media's ascendance and the primary method of interaction with the internet for most being through mobile devices. So on that level at least, sure. The average young person today is probably far less likely to be a forums poster than they were in 2010.

it was by then, yes, in general. On the forum I was talking about there were like more than 100.000 iirc, but it might be wrong.

The fact you only use forums populated largely by geriatrics (like me) though, means that's just where you choose to hang out - but you can't really use that personal choice as anything indicative of an actual survey of the forums landscape. For example, I get you may not like their userbase/moderation, but you're ignoring the most popular gaming forum by far - ResetEra.

In its heyday the behaviour was similar in said forum, a thread could disappear in a few minutes.

ResetEra is a place I'd never want to be. The woke mentality and the "cancelling" philosophy isn't for me. I love women and that's it.

On most forums nowadays the users' opinion is more like this -the replies say it all-:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/imran-khan-bloodborne-pc-ps5-was-at-one-point-in-the-works.1666690/

So compared to TikTok/Discord? Who knows, maybe a drop in the bucket for twenty-somethings. But those aren't just 40 year olds making tens of thousands of posts per day.

as with everything, there are cases and cases, but people like us are slaves of nostalgia and we still think in terms of console wars. Nintendo isn't on the console wars from the Wii era onwards, the peak was the PS3 vs X360 era -with a bit of the Wii360 movement-. Now you can play anywhere, Xbox isn't a factor, the PS5 is unrivaled, and it will probably never be rivaled again, who knows.

There is no console wars nowadays imho, perhaps still the exclusive wars.

 

[arandomguy]

Wait, what? Not clear on the implication here - are you saying Steam's worth is largely based on the existent of its game forums? Christ I hope not, they have some worth yes to give feedback directly to the developers, but otherwise they're a cesspool.

When I see people who are 'fans' of Steam, what I see touted as its advantages that are more commonly cited are things like Family Sharing, Steam Workshop, Remote Play, Steam Input, Broadcast, Achievements, the (relatively) speedy client, stuff like that. Don't think I've ever seen someone actually tout the forums as an advantage.

I mean cripes, the Epic client still can't move game installs or even detect already installed games. I don't think every publishers launcher requires Steam's extensive list of features, but most can't even get the basics right.

I was being somewhat facetitous with that line. In all seriousness though if we want to discuss Steam specifically (as opposed to platforms in general) I don't want to give the impression that I think Steam is a bad service with neglible intrinsic value (although I will be honest I really just use Steam, or anything else as a game delivery service primarily, so a lot of that extra stuff such as things like Broadcast would be completely extraneous personally and provide zero value). I do however think if we really looked at the numbers there probably should be some questions here at the very least in the terms of the impact on the industry.

Conservatively if we look at Steam as taking a 20% cut (down from 30% with the sliding scale pricing) and that "healthy" unit margins in a hypothetical competiitve state would like be 10% you could say Steam itself is benefting to the tune of 10% from being in an low challanged market position. This means something like $6 on a $60 game or what $100m if $1b in annual revenue, or $1b if $10b. If we want be rather pessimistic there that's what possibly something like $1b per year in the industry going into subsidizing whatever "pet" project Valve is interested or just profit to stakeholders.

Another way to look at it is I think it's fair to say Microsoft via DirectX provides the most functional value towards PC gaming. Would PC gamers be happy with them taking a 10% cut or $6 per new game $60 game?

 

[pcchen]

Another way to look at it is I think it's fair to say Microsoft via DirectX provides the most functional value towards PC gaming. Would PC gamers be happy with them taking a 10% cut or $6 per new game $60 game?

That's not really a fair comparison, no? Especially considering that Microsoft haven't been actually update DirectX for how many years, while Steam provides continual services.

 

[arandomguy]

That's not really a fair comparison, no? Especially considering that Microsoft haven't been actually update DirectX for how many years, while Steam provides continual services.

In terms of the game distribution side? I'm not saying these distribution platforms shouldn't make any money and take no cut (that wouldn't be realistic), I assigned I feel a pretty generous 10% as the base line. But they take more than that with the reasoning that it's because they provide additional services that are of importance to the target market, in this case PC gaming. This means an additional 10% cut for things like all the social media type features.

I guess to be fair I should've been more encompassing and not just used the term "DirectX" only. Microsoft just came out with DirectSR no? What about DirectStorage? Do those things provide more value to PC gaming or things like Broadcast, achievements, remote play, chat...? Well I guess we can say TBD to be fair.

The other issue though with this hypothetical is that Microsoft currently does not have a direct stake in PC gaming which limits the incentive to investment. I'd guess in a hypothetical if that weren't the case and they did have that cut you'd see higher incentive to push PC gaming on Windows.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

ResetEra is a place I'd never want to be.

Yes I figured, which is why I made sure to mention that's completely irrelevant to how popular it is. "This example that directly contradicts my narrative doesn't count because I don't like it".

On most forums nowadays the users' opinion is more like this -the replies say it all-:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/imran-khan-bloodborne-pc-ps5-was-at-one-point-in-the-works.1666690/

By your own admission, that forum is dead. So now this forum that 'gets no new users' becomes..."most" forums.

The one that has 100k+ posts a day? Oh, it doesn't factor in because of...'woke'.

The woke mentality and the "cancelling" philosophy isn't for me. I love women and that's it.

Again, completely irrelevant to the argument that forums are dead and are populated solely by older gamers. The forums you populate are, perhaps. The gaming forums that don't have their userbase consist solely of 40-somethings that still get driven to rage by youtube culture war grifters because they're terrified that 'booba' will be taken from them seem to have a far more active and diverse userbase, for some reason.

 

[pcchen]

In terms of the game distribution side? I'm not saying these distribution platforms shouldn't make any money and take no cut (that wouldn't be realistic), I assigned I feel a pretty generous 10% as the base line. But they take more than that with the reasoning that it's because they provide additional services that are of importance to the target market, in this case PC gaming. This means an additional 10% cut for things like all the social media type features.

I guess to be fair I should've been more encompassing and not just used the term "DirectX" only. Microsoft just came out with DirectSR no? What about DirectStorage? Do those things provide more value to PC gaming or things like Broadcast, achievements, remote play, chat...? Well I guess we can say TBD to be fair.

The other issue though with this hypothetical is that Microsoft currently does not have a direct stake in PC gaming which limits the incentive to investment. I'd guess in a hypothetical if that weren't the case and they did have that cut you'd see higher incentive to push PC gaming on Windows.

DirectStorage is hardly used by any games, so it's even harder to compare it to Steam. DirectSR is also not something new, but just a way to standardize upscaling techs (just like most of DirectX, there's nothing wrong with this approach). If Microsoft developed their own upscaling tech they might be able to charge some kind of money (certainly not 10% of course).

Steam is actually in a special position because they are not "required" in any artificial way. They are not like, say, App Store on Apple's platforms, or Playstation store, etc. You are free to use other platforms on Windows. I mean, Microsoft even has their own "Microsoft Store" on Windows. Yet, most people are still using Steam. It's also not that there are lack of competitors, as other people mentioned. Even CD Project Red, who has their own distribution platform (GOG), sold more games on Steam than on their own.

This must means that Steam is doing something right. And IMHO it's not just a single feature. It's probably everything. Its branding certainly helps, but one must remember that Microsoft Store is builtin and people probably are more familiar with Microsoft than with Steam, but yet Steam still wins on this front.

 

[see colon]

Every time they "innovate", it just ends up costing consumers more and more money.

This is sometimes true. I think it's obvious that some things they popularized were in the goal of extracting revenue from the consumer, because they are a business after all. But some of the things you've mentioned aren't exactly their inventions. There was paid DLC for PS2 games, for example. Microsoft didn't invent that with Xbox 360. And Microsoft has innovated with some things that didn't cost the consumer more. Achievements, Xbox Play Anywhere, and... I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion on it's value to the consumer, but the Games for Windows program. Not the app, the certification program that Microsoft put in place to get the GFW badge on the box. As a PC player, the days before GFW were the wild west. And one of the greatest things Microsoft did was standardize the support for game controllers on PC with GFW. GFW required controller support with a default configuration. Prior to this you had to manually configure a controller, and figure out what "Controller 1 button 9" was instead of knowing it was "X". This cost the consumer nothing.

Microsoft has also lead the charge for accessibility in games. They released a dedicated accessibility controller, which has a cost, but also have 0 cost to consumer options like system level button remapping and copilot. Xbox All Access is a financing option that essentially has a negative interest rate, saving the consumer money. And Xbox's backwards compatibility is top tear, with limited support for games from every generation of Xbox at no additional cost to the consumer for games that they already purchased.

So perhaps sometimes they innovate and it costs the consumer more money, but not every time.

 

[cwjs]

That's not really a fair comparison, no? Especially considering that Microsoft haven't been actually update DirectX for how many years, while Steam provides continual services.

DX12 (along with hlsl, dxc, and all of the rest of the ms rendering development stack) is updated all the time -- the fact that you see changelogs all the time for steam and never for developer APIs is because you play games on steam, but don't develop software.

 

[eastmen]

MS history in the industry has been to drive services and I don't buy a game console for services. It's why they're in the kerfuffle of irrelevance that they're in at this point in time. Paying for online was their doing. Forcing developers to charge for DLCs that they wanted to release for free(XBLA), etc. Every time they "innovate", it just ends up costing consumers more and more money.

We can do this talk with everyone out there. I remember going from my nes to my genesis to my saturn and never needing a memory card and boom there is sony requiring memory cards. I remember buying my dreamcast and not needing to pay for hardware to access the internet but boom there was sony charging for it.

I mean all companies want to monetize product. DLC delivered via a service costs the service provider money. Data storage and having the massive bandwidth to push it isn't free. Just like it isn't free to press and ship discs or manufacture and image carts. We all got along fine having to pay for that however.

 

[Albuquerque]

Mod mode: it's probably best if we don't focus on trying to define political land mines like "woke" in this thread. There's never been a proper definition of the word provided anywhere that I've found, and even if one were to surface, I suspect it's going to be strongly aligned to political ideology rather than anything logical or quantitative. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, let's just leave the politics out of this particular thread.

Plenty more political space to play in the RPSC forums

 

[Nesh]

We can do this talk with everyone out there. I remember going from my nes to my genesis to my saturn and never needing a memory card and boom there is sony requiring memory cards. I remember buying my dreamcast and not needing to pay for hardware to access the internet but boom there was sony charging for it.

I mean all companies want to monetize product. DLC delivered via a service costs the service provider money. Data storage and having the massive bandwidth to push it isn't free. Just like it isn't free to press and ship discs or manufacture and image carts. We all got along fine having to pay for that however.

Er correction. Online wasn't a major feature for PS2, since Sony didn't see the online infrastructure mature enough yet to market it and support it en masse. Sony saw it as a niche for PS2 for that gen.
Hence why you had to buy additional hardware for the very limited games that were designed for it.

As the console matured and more online games rolled out, online functionality was actually incorporated into the hardware in the slim consoles themselves. But the support and demand were still not massive.

Sega required a subscription fee for the Dreamcast. Sony did not require a subscription fee IIRC. Sony didn't require a fee for PS3 online either, until it became a thing with MS.

The PS3 came with a build in HDD and supported normal HDD's, whereas the 360 initially was released if I recall without a HDD and demanded proprietary storage units (edit: one version with a 20GB proprietary HDD and one without any storage).

 

[arandomguy]

DirectStorage is hardly used by any games, so it's even harder to compare it to Steam. DirectSR is also not something new, but just a way to standardize upscaling techs (just like most of DirectX, there's nothing wrong with this approach). If Microsoft developed their own upscaling tech they might be able to charge some kind of money (certainly not 10% of course).

I always like people just trying reverse justify Steam's postion. Using what you're syaing you can argue that all the supposed "features" people say Steam has are nothing new other. Like that host of features the other poster listed, broadcast, remote play, achievements, whatever all exist in an alternative capacity. But again I don't really want to delve too long on the Steam specific debate here as I don't feel it's likely going to get anywhere and it's just going to end up being an agree to disagree thing. I feel Steam has much inherent intertia among a large segment of the user base (much like many of these platforms) that their effectively shaped the defacto standard of how those users view things should be.

Steam is actually in a special position because they are not "required" in any artificial way. They are not like, say, App Store on Apple's platforms, or Playstation store, etc. You are free to use other platforms on Windows. I mean, Microsoft even has their own "Microsoft Store" on Windows. Yet, most people are still using Steam. It's also not that there are lack of competitors, as other people mentioned. Even CD Project Red, who has their own distribution platform (GOG), sold more games on Steam than on their own.

This must means that Steam is doing something right. And IMHO it's not just a single feature. It's probably everything. Its branding certainly helps, but one must remember that Microsoft Store is builtin and people probably are more familiar with Microsoft than with Steam, but yet Steam still wins on this front.

Again the problem with these platforms is how do new comers compete? Everyone likes to bring up natural competition but the reality is way more complex. There isn't a better "mousetrap" situation. For one your past purchases of mousetraps dont' get invalidated if you were to switch mouse trap brands. You don't leave your existing social circle and community when you switch mouse trap brands. And I can go on and on. On top of that your existing mousetrap brand can almost certianly immedetialy iterate so you don't need to switch at all and face those issues. So why ever switch?

Are there concrete examples of realistic proposals to compete?

Mentioning CD Projekt Red actually highlights the problems involved. Is there any issues with GoG in terms of the core function of game delivery? Doesn't GoG offer something in that the service is completely DRM free and non binding to a platform/launcher, isn't that what users supposedly wanted? Yet we know CDPR still cannot viably just sell on their own platform.

The relevance of how these specific platforms got their insurmountable inertia and whether or not htat should be a factor is another debate I feel. But I don't feel a so called "natural" monopoly is anything less problematic if the results are the same.

Again I want to generalize this more since I don't want just go too far into the weeds of the Steam debate but to highlight my general issue with how these platforms work in terms of lockin. I'm trying to convey that I feel it's problematic that your past purchasing decisiosn and the purchasing decisions of others should have such a direct practical impact on your purchasing decisions going forward.

Digital distribution in theory should've enabled more direct producer to consumer distrubtion with lower power to the "middle" of that chain. Yet what we're seeing is that it isn't the case and that we're actually trending in the opposite direction.

 

[pcchen]

Isn't that the same as, say, DirectX? Actually, I'd argue that it's worse with DirectX, because once you developed with DirectX it can be difficult to migrate to another API, unless you only use some game engines.

What I don't understand with your argument is that, compared to many other products (not just Steam, let's say Windows or other platforms), Steam is probably the least artificially "locked in" product. The GOG example I used actually shows that people don't really care about DRM free so much. I personally purchased The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 on GOG, not just because I like DRM free, but also because I believe CD Project RED will get more of my money, but apparently most people don't think that way, and I won't say they are wrong either, because these are still the only two games I have purchased on GOG.

My point is that Steam seems to me probably among the only platforms that actually keep their users by making their products great for their users (and game developers) instead of using some sort of tricks to artificially lock people in. AFAIK they don't do exclusive deals. They don't even do something like "buy some game here and get discount points for other games" deal, at least not to me. These are all very common tricks on platforms that tries to lock people in.

I do understand the concerns of possible monopoly, but again monopoly itself is not wrong. Abusing the position is wrong. From what I've seen I just don't see that. If there are any evidence that Valve is abusing their position I do believe that they should be kept in check, but if not, I don't believe it's fair to curb a business just because they are good at doing something.

 

[Lurkmass]

My point is that Steam seems to me probably among the only platforms that actually keep their users by making their products great for their users (and game developers) instead of using some sort of tricks to artificially lock people in. AFAIK they don't do exclusive deals. They don't even do something like "buy some game here and get discount points for other games" deal, at least not to me. These are all very common tricks on platforms that tries to lock people in.

I do understand the concerns of possible monopoly, but again monopoly itself is not wrong. Abusing the position is wrong. From what I've seen I just don't see that. If there are any evidence that Valve is abusing their position I do believe that they should be kept in check, but if not, I don't believe it's fair to curb a business just because they are good at doing something.

Valve takes a 30% revenue cut from developers without providing much value in return for them and it's not like they're using it to do modern game development in any significant capacity. I don't think other competitors need to be held accountable for using underhanded methods if they are willing to put forward more equitable arrangements that are both attractive to themselves or other developers in other ways ...