I remain baffled at how few studios sell their games directly on their own site.

The practical barriers are virtually nonexistent, so I’m assuming there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?

Do people here, on Lemmy of all places, still not worry about Valve being a monopoly?

It worries me, deeply. Especially with how the community already makes up excuses for them doing anticompetitive things.

There is only one way that ends.

I can’t think of a single example of a “happy sustainable monopoly” in history, but at best they must be vanishingly rare.

oblig

santa, gaben has been good this year, give him another boat

100% hard agree. Not launching an IPO is the single best thing Gaben has ever done. Letting in corporate executives would utterly destroy Valve and run them into the ground to fund their golden parachutes. It's happened time and again. Professional "executives" do not run companies for the benefit of the customer they run them into the ground to make themselves richer. Kudos to Gaben for being intelligent enough to recognize this and keep Valve private.

Well that's because pretty much all of the competition are terrible.

There hasn't really been much innovation in digital market space since the concept arose. Valve started it and a few other companies over the years of tried, including Microsoft and all have failed.

I think valve succeeded because they weren't trying to make a digital market place, it started out as just a distribution platform so not every decision was about how to make the most money out of the customer. You make the money on the games, not the platform and then you build up from there.

Probably not. Even MS couldn't do it and they owned the platform. Now Valve push Linux. No other store really runs on that, and certainly not in a way that lets you run games written for Windows.

Epic are closest to being a competitor, and they're still just a free games platform that will only run until the Fortnite money stops coming in.

Have they tried making a better product?

Or scratch that. Have they tried making a product that is as good?

Valves secret is that selling digital games is profitable 100% of the time, so they never needed to enshittify.

A lot of services are straight up unprofitable and need to go to extreme lengths of ruining the experience just to make a single positive dollar. Those lengths are also often poorly thought out or actively destructive to the platform. Valve just sells games with essentially 0 overhead past servers (insanely expensive, btw, but you know what i mean)

Turns out that the best business plan is a profitable one out of the gate with people who care about their work instead of vampires that bleed your customers dry