It doesn't "prohibit" them but Valve actively fosters a "culture" of Steam first which had sadly infected the modding community of people uploading only to Steam and even start adding DRM to mods hosted there (locking out non-Steam gamers) which is something platform neutral modding sites (eg, Nexus, ModDB, etc) never did. That's why they are called out on it - they are not just another mod site giving an option to host to everyone like moddb vs Nexus, but rather they are actively trying to turn the formerly open modding community spirit into an exclusionary walled garden. They are tolerable if mods are available elsewhere, but incredibly toxic to the modding community when they aren't because of actively encouraging "No Steam, No Buy".

And Bethesda's "paid mod nonsense" was the offspring of an earlier failed rip-off joint proposal between Valve & Bethesda to demand an extortionate 75% 'cut' (45% Bethesda / 30% Valve / 25% modders) from every $ donated with people actually doing the work getting very little (link). Valve & Bethesda were positively rubbing their hands with glee at those planned levels of 25/75 "inverted" cuts (vs the usual 70/30). At one point they even paid the wrong people when some scammers were randomly uploading other people's Nexus mods and Valve couldn't be bothered to check the uploader and mod creator were the same. In the end it lasted a mere 5 days for a reason but for those with short memories it was absolutely as much Valve's idea as Bethesda's.

An ironically perfect description of steam_api.dll which simultaneously answers your earlier "abusing their market leader status by trying to create barriers to entry" question and "someone has to, and they will most likely monopolize it" comment... ;-)

Maybe I'm out of the loop, but I haven't seen anything about Steam putting DRM in Workshop mods. And I think I recall seeing that there's a way to download Workshop mods without Steam, but I may be wrong on that since there are better places to get mods. But since there aren't restrictions, the choice to use Workshop vs. something else seems to be up to the modder. So I still don't see the problem with Workshop specifically.

Yeah, that was a thing, and I hated the idea. I got the impression that the reason that Steam got onboard (outside of potentially getting a cut) was that Bethesda was threatening to start their own store and leave Steam entirely. In the end, Steam changed course (as you noted), Bethesda did open their own store so they could have full control of their paid mods, but it ended up that there was no demand for paid mods which meant that the Bethesda store failed. So Steam is not completely clean on that one, but I feel like that incident was more so Bethesda trying to exploit their market dominance in the modding community.

But steam_api.dll is not necessarily a barrier to running a game. IIRC, there are even some GOG games that ship with it included, but it doesn't keep the game from running. I think that people have found steam_api.dll similarly bundled in Epic releases. And then Epic API stuff ends up in both Steam and GOG games. The devs have a choice of which APIs they want to implement, and they can even support multiple APIs at the same time. So that seems like rather fair competition because the devs can support whatever they choose to support.

I don't know if Scheme fits the technical definition of a monopoly (though I feel it does). I do know that seeing every release I would have been interested in being tied to that store client and its DRM was enough to make me leave PC gaming for nearly a decade and a half out of sheer disgust.

Steam Workshop walls off access to the mod files only to those on Steam who owns the game there. In the past some utilities/websites existed which gave outsiders access but Steam has started to crack down on them.

Yes, it is up to the modder where they upload their stuff. But the argument is Steam Workshop fosters exclusivity even when it doesn't directly mandate it. When someone uploads a file to, say, NexusMods they limit their consumers to members of that website, but owners of the game from many platforms (or even non-owners) can download the mods if they want. Equality exists as long as compatibility plays nice, yeah? Steam is for Steam customers of Steam versions of the game. And when modders there start only concerning themselves with Steam, then they hold very little other concerns for other customers from other platforms. Fostered exclusivity occurs. You don't know what's on either side of the fence when the walls block off the view.

If Steam Workshop wanted to be open for all they could have designed it so that anyone could download the mods in a form transplantable to different platform releases. Basically, open a new website in direct competition with NexusMods or ModDB. But no, the made it a walled garden, and the plants there rarely spread beyond the fence. Some do, not many.

But what makes something a "walled garden" and at what lengths are platforms obligated to spend their own resources to support other competing/unrelated platforms? By the same token, one could argue that Nexus, ModDB, etc. are technically walled gardens since they haven't gone out of their way to integrate with Steam, GOG, etc. And then Nexus Mods actually requires an account to download files which means that you are required to join their ecosystem before you can use the service. (Not sure if ModDB has similar restrictions based on size limits, etc.) So my point is that I'm still not seeing where Workshop is a special case that is preventing other modders from doing what they want.

This the general point that I'm trying to address in all of this discussion, really. I feel like there's this tendency for people to flippantly slap the label "monopoly" on companies that they don't like, but in the end it's only the technical definition for monopoly that matters. It's fine for people to dislike a company based on personal preference, but making the leap from "dislike" to "monopoly" requires a larger burden of proof, IMO.

That is not correct at all. A monopoly does not need to abuse their power, nor did they need to be abusive to gain their market power. Though it could be argued that Valve did abuse their way into the market power by providing their DRM for free which their DRM competitors, like Securerom, Tages, ect, could not provide their services for free, and caused many of the top publishers to put Steam's DRM onto physical versions of games, which is the single biggest reason why Steam is in the position it is in.

anyways, a monopoly does not mean any kind of abuse happened at all, nor does it mean that any kind of abuse is happening. In some markets it's not unusual for a service to have a monopoly simply for being the first mover, which if you don't consider Valve giving away their DRM for free as abuse, then Steam being the first mover is the reason why Steam has the monopoly power it has.

In the law a monopoly is based on it's market share only, not on what it did or currently doing to gain that market share. In the EU and the UK, something is considered as having a monopoly power just for having 25% market share, which Steam definitely has that, meaning Steam has monopoly power in the EU and the UK. In the USA, it's more complicated, and differs from court to court, but in general something is considered to have a monopoly power if it has 60+% of the market share, in which Steam has that as well. So Steam does have a monopoly power, but having a monopoly power is not illegal at all. To note, everything Epic has been doing to gain market share is actually not against the law and is considered good for creating competition, and Epic can do that due to it's small market share, if Epic ever reaches a certain market share they wouldn't be allowed to do that kind of stuff anymore.

But Steam having it's monopoly power it has is also why it's been bad for consumers, because of the lack of actual choice of where they want to buy games. While GOG existed, very little amount of games actually released to GOG, most released exclusively to Steam. Epic gets a lot of crap for it's exclusive contracts, but honestly Epic doing that got them into a massively bigger position into the market to the point that even more games than ever before are being released to more than one store now, giving customers more choice on where they want to buy their games. To me, it looks like it even helped out GOG in the long run because GOG even seems to be getting more games recently than it has before in the past, and I think that is because since Epic has convinced many developers and publishers to release their games to a second store that releasing to a third store, like GOG, really isn't that much more work anyways. All this happening because Epic got a tiny amount of games exclusive to their store, as well as Epic's excellent marketing strategy of marketing Epic Games Store through the free games.

I don't find it a coincidence that my increase in how much money I spend per year on GOG has gone up through 2020-2022, the time frame that Epic Store has been gaining more market share and convincing more dev/pubs to release to more than just Steam. This year alone, nearly all the games I bought on GOG were games that were also on EGS, and many of them from dev/pubs who didn't release to GOG in the past and only ever released to Steam in the past.

You may not like Epic's methods, but so far I have seen the positives in the industry of what Epic did far out weigh the negatives of a small amount of games exclusive to their store.

Braggadar already answered - mods are not games. Traditionally mods have always been DRM-Free - until Steam Workshop came along. Nexus, ModDB, Github, etc, do not actively block off gamers from downloading them. Steam is trying to "normalize" doing exactly the equivalent of walking out of a high street store with a shiny new Doom 2 disc only for the manager to yell after you "Hey, you can play Plutonia but not TNT, this is a feature not a bug! It's our store giving you choice!". Trying to pass that off as some positive is ridiculous, very anti-consumer and the exact opposite in spirit as to what the modding community has been all about for the past 30 years.

That's a very dumb example given it's the .dll that does the DRM check that actively blocks games from running... Games on GOG that don't work if you delete bundled steam_api.dll, pretty much are the Steam version copy / pasted here with a "loopback wrapper" that fakes having the Steam client running (surprising closer to how cracks work than people would like to admit). It's a lazy release that's literally what people don't want from a clean DRM-Free build and is not certainly not any kind of positive "competition" at all.

Just stop with these ridiculous false equivalences. Nexus, ModDB, etc, don't need to "integrate" to each store client to get their mods to work because they don't segregate based on store client in the first place and they already naturally work for everyone. Steam version? They work. GOG version? They work. 25 year old disc version? They work. That's the exact polar opposite of what a walled garden is... Your comment on Steam's "burden" is also back to front - there's far more work involved in actively dividing up then gating content behind a client, verifying licenses, etc, than simply not doing so by default. For paid games it's there to protect sales. For free mod content the only reason for doing so is active hostility towards pre-existing mod sites and anti-competitive behaviour towards stores. There's a time and a place for blaming the modder, but the song & dance routine that Valve are perma-blameless for actively encouraging the fragmentation & segregation of the formerly united modding community and do everything possible to bring it about 'must be everyone else's fault but Valve' is a fanboy cry that's long worn thin.

Are you for real? The entire primary point of steam_api.dll is that it's the thing the game's .exe calls to handle the Steam DRM client check then reports back whether A. The Steam client is running, and B. That the game is owned on said account. It's literal purpose is to be a barrier to running a game years before Steam invented achievements in 2008. That it's been shovelled into some lazy GOG / Epic releases as a stub isn't a good thing. If anything it's more proof of an unhealthy market dominance that negatively affects other stores...

The rest people have answered. Reading your early posts in the thread, you're obviously one of those "Garbage Epic are human scum for gating content behind their client with the full approval of publishers, and despite the fact in some cases it was the publishers who approached Epic, it must be Epic who are 'abusing their financial power to create barriers' by doing this, but Valve are innocent and pure charity workers when they do exactly the same thing with Steam Workshop mods" people who will always have a very noticeable set of double standards regarding making special exceptions for Steam vs the world for the same behaviour.

Just for you here's a healthy reminder of Valve's own push for exclusive 3rd party titles when they were the same age Epic were:-

"We are very happy to announce the launch of Darwinia on Steam. Introversion has teamed up with Valve to release Darwinia on their online games distribution platform making it available to millions of new gamers. As part of the launch and Steam's exclusivity, we will no longer be offering Darwinia as a download option from our site, although it will still be possible to purchase shipped boxed copies. At Valve's request we will also be removing the demo from our site for about a month."

https://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=40203

Q: What's the difference between Epic vs Valve regarding aggressively pushing timed exclusives during their early years?

A: None. None at all.

I'm advocating for government regulation to impose an open standard for PC game APIs, which every company would have equal access to, which would remove barriers to entry; create a level playing field and foster competition. In the same way that there has been regulation for decades in many other industries, such as wireless standards, power outlets, light bulbs (and many other examples).

Suggesting that would amount to a government 'monopoly' is ridiculous. Governments are not in the business of producing video games and would not be monopolizing anything through regulation. In fact, it would be the polar opposite of a monopoly - an open standard that would be available for anyone to use.

After all, isn't that the whole point of the concept of a 'free market' in the first place? Free competition between suppliers on a level playing field, which is supposed to benefit consumers. A market that has been allowed to be captured by a single corporation is not a free market and does not benefit consumers.

At a glance... The EU requires abuse (TFEU Article 102). The UK does indeed define companies in a "dominant position" as controlling a certain percentage of the market, but the CMA doesn't seem to really have a problem with that unless those dominant players are abusing their power.

But that's my point. The mod distribution platforms are currently independent, and mod devs can release wherever they please. Steam is not preventing people from posting mods elsewhere so I don't see the problem. If Steam was restricting distribution outside of Workshop, then I would completely agree with everything you are saying. Most notable mods seem to release on better platforms anyway with Workshop being viewed as an inferior mod platform that isn't very notable. (At least in my experience.)

But Steam indeed does allow for their API to coexist with other APIs in the same application, it can be bypassed, and Valve will not litigate if it is circumvented for release on other platforms. Steam also does not require their API at all for games released on Steam, and some devs choose that option. Steam also allows for other APIs (EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Epic, etc.) to be used in games hosted on Steam, and they also allow other 3rd-party DRM systems as well. So the devs have a choice when it comes to the Steam API.

So as I said before, I don't necessarily like what Steam does, but I still think it's a stretch to try to call Steam a monopoly at this point based on the textbook definition. Maybe Valve will change some policies and cross a line later though.

I clearly do not view politicians in as benevolent of a light as you do, but government-mandated software APIs of any type will never be a good thing because the government restrictions would get in the way of developers being able create what they want in the free market. And then you have to consider that you're putting biased, non-technical politicians and/or bureaucrats in charge of technical decisions which is not a good idea either. Not to mention that any new feature/change would require that someone lobby some politicians and then wait for legislation to be passed which means that only the largest/wealthiest devs would be able to afford to have this API standard changed.

TFEU Article 102 doesn't state that a monopoly is one that abuses their power, it simply says that a dominant market share holder cannot abuse their power. It's not illegal to have a monopoly in the EU, UK, and the US, it's only illegal to abuse that monopoly power. Steam does have a monopoly power, so any new competitor coming to the same space is going need to do some heavy competition to obtain more and more market share, like heavy marketing through free games, exclusive games to their store, marketing through coupons. Features won't do it because those can be copied by Steam anyways if a new competitor happen to create a must have feature, pricing cannot be done outside of temporary sales and temporary coupons due to Valve requiring price parity or better pricing than Steam's competitors even for non Steam versions of the game.

In a typical conversation, the term "monopoly" only gets used in a negative context and usually implies that antitrust action should be taken against a company (which was implied by the post I originally replied to). Maybe that's not the point you're trying to make here, but if you thought that Steam was not abusing their market leader status and/or not subject to antitrust litigation then I really don't think that we would be having this conversation.

So just to reiterate what I said before in possibly clearer terms: For the reasons I have already stated, I don't think that Steam is currently abusing their dominant market position in a way that should be grounds for antitrust action against them, but that's not to say that they couldn't reach those levels of abuse sometime in the future.