Retailers threaten to ban Steam games!

[BengaBenga]

ssj12 said:

BengaBenga said:

ssj12 said:

totalwar23 said:

Good. Everytime I look at a game at a retail outlet, I have to constantly look in the back to see if it's Steam integrated or not.

And why don't you just buy your games on Steam? the majority of the time they are easier to get installed, have better purchase deals, and amazing sales.

The point of the non-Steam sellers is that Steam could grow out to be the iTunes of gaming, where Valve dictates the market, like Apple is doing with songs and apps. Now maybe you can trust them not abusing that power, but I surely prefer actual competition preventing one party deciding which games you can play.

Not saying I blame Valve for that, they grew because they're offering the best deal, but it seems other (online) retailers had enough and will stop at nothing to lose all their market share.

Valve might control 60% of the digital download market but you, and these retailers, fail to realize Valve has a ton of competition. Impulse, Direct 2 Drive, Amazon, GameStop, Nvidia, etc all are in direct competition to Valve. Impulse is the 2nd largest DD retailer for PC followed by D2D. Valve might have majority, but they will never manage to control the DD market completely like Apple is controlling the music download service at the moment. And even Apple is threatened if Sony released the rumored music channel on the PSN, Microsoft releases something like it on XBLA, and other smaller services gain more popularity.

I don't fail to realize that at all, I'm fully aware of that. Actually iTunes has quite some competition as well. The thing you don't adress is the iTunes apps situation, where Apple, not the customer, decides. iTunes obviously can do that because they own the platform.

With game developers adding Steam content to their games you could end up with the same situation in PC gaming, as there will be less and less reason not to buy on Steam, if you have to access that while playing anyway.