Well yeah.
They spent the better part of two decades paying big publishers and sucking their cock and balls.
And G*mers have been cheering on the whoring out of PC gaming.
As long as Steam keeps giving me a great platform that doesn’t suck, as long as they continue to push Linux gaming forward, I’ll keep sending them money.
It’s weird because normally having a monopoly is really bad but all the competition pales in comparison to Steam and they actually provide a good platform. Maybe after Gaben dies Steam will go to shit but for now they’re not just the best but also doing way more than just being a place to buy games.
Thats the thing about gaming specifically. Like there will always be piracy for steam to compete with, and opensource technology like proton, wine. I thank steam for contributing to linux gaming, steamdeck etc, but will drop them in an instant if they go bad.
I’m expecting that to be the case, so I hedge my bets by also buying from GOG and praying for Gabe to have a long life.
Monopolies are just an effect of capitalism in its current form.
I’m more concerned with the games companies who aren’t even monopolies, and are already seen as shit services run by shitty people (unless anyone actually likes Ubisoft, EA, and their launchers???)Gamers have respect for Gaben, and I’ve heard more faith and less worry about his son taking over than practically the entire team of owners from Valve’s competitors. They have a monopoly because it’s a good service, and the fact that it’s has a user base as big as it does shouldn’t surprise anyone: they seem to be doing things right enough to not be a bother. That’s what matters more than the inevitability of a business getting big - there’s a lot more Nuance and that doesn’t just magically happen, nor is just pointing it out helpful in sensible critique.
I find it fascinating that Lemmings suddenly turn off their critical thinking skills when it comes to Valve. We really need to study this.
But they’re my favorite treat seller 🙁
What criticism of Valve do you have?
Aside from fostering and enabling a gambling addiction in millions of children?
Well they are being criticized for this in every relevant thread so I wonder if there’s something else for your critical thinking claim.
If only this was true.
This study is just asking managers, they didn’t talk to devs. Also how is it a monopoly when 80% expect to be using non steam distribution channels in 5 years? Maybe I’m missing something because the source study isn’t available without giving them your name and email but their stats look contradictory to me and their method is… Well corporate managers aren’t really devs IMO.
https://rokky.com/pc-game-distribution-report-2025
Unlike Google or Apple, I don’t think steam will remove your game for putting it on GOG or Epic, how is it even a monopoly? you’re not forced to sell there
It is a functional monopoly. I would be shocked if wasnt also a monopsony effect going on here where many devs are disproportionately getting their revenue from Steam and as such are functionally mandated a Steam release.
Then why aren’t 70% of games on GOG.
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Yeah I gotta say that I am a steam fanboy, but GOG is making me pause. After 20 years of being on steam (oh my god it’s been that long) I am finding myself preferring GOG. No DRM is pretty sick.
They want to fight back against steam the winner isn’t more DRM, it’s using valve’s own weapon against them, and using less DRM.
If it wasn’t for Valve’s aggressive support for Linux (and GOG being for-profit and hence inherently evil) then I’d definitely prioritize GOG.
Steam’s for-profit too. The term you’re looking for that describes CDPR but not Valve is “publicly traded” or simply “has shareholders”.
“For-profit” refers to a legally binding obligation to shareholders to maximize profit. It does not simply mean “wants money”. You can be for-profit without being publicly traded, but since Valve is private we’ll never know.
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I will always choose GOG over Steam if given the choice, but too many developers still think it’s okay to take your money without giving you true ownership of your purchase. Steam allows that exploitation and GOG does not.
This kind of whining and pearl clutching HAS to be funded by the shitty pretender platforms who can’t fucking hack it with their alternative business models. The market will tell, as these types love to fall back on as an argument, and the reason Steam does so well is because it’s consistent, accessible, and minimally invasive in the face of any complaints I’ve ever seen levied against it. When Epic stops shitting its pants, and Luna offers something original and competitive, we’ll see a change in this ‘monopoly’ status, but crying about it isn’t going to change the fact that Steam remains a quality product running at high efficiency. It’s Gabe’s game to lose, if he decides to exclude more producers and increase fees and profits for the company, that’ll hurt it, but this stinky rag article isn’t doing shit but telling on itself.
they do, and it’s all going to shit the moment gaben dies and is replaced by investor vultures.
I’d say it’s more of a ‘de facto’ monopoly, as every other storefront sucks so bad.
It’s ironic that Valve doesn’t have shareholders forcing horrible decisions that make people hate a platform to maximize short term profits, yet they reap in crazy amounts of money per year in comparison to public companies with dogshit monetization. Funny how that goes huh?
I mean, provide evidence that it doesn’t? Why would we have to seek dev opinions to prove this?
Remind people that a monopoly isn’t illegal. Abusing a monopoly to prevent competition and using a monopoly as a means to create unfair market conditions in other categories - Windows and web browsers in the past or Apple’s monopoly on iOS software distribution.
Consoles are even more restrictive than an iPhone is still in the US and was in the EU. Complain about Steam all these devs and people want, unless it can be proven that Valve is using their market share to stop other companies from competing well, it’s a moot point calling them a monopoly. That Wolfire lawsuit when I read the initial court filings they put out was a joke. It was citing Twitter posts and blogspam articles citing anonymous forum posts
Steam was not the first PC digital distribution store. It wasn’t even great until like 2006/2007. In the early days Impulse could have been competitive but Stardock sold it to GameStop who in dumb move of the last 2 decades did nothing with it. Desura did not improve. GFWL was terrible. Windows Store used to have issues with making storage unreclaimable without a reformat of the drive. Direct2Drive never improved. GamersGate just stayed a key seller. GoG was never going to grow without regular day one games which wasn’t going to be competitive as DRM free. Humble Store stayed a key seller.
Amazon and Epic’s idea was to just give away games. Ubisoft and EA stores barely even had games they didn’t publish. So sparse I bet they didn’t have self publishing tools. Those 2 puzzlingly regularly had issues maintaining login sessions persisting over time. PC gaming is dieing was the mainstream meme until like 2015. Epic on Android doesn’t even have a library of owned games view and it’s been almost a year since that released.
Valve didn’t make Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Stardock+GameStop, Direct2Drive, … all under invest and/or mismanage their PC game store platform efforts. It’s not up to Valve to stop making the platform more appealing. EGS is 7 years old. Those other companies have been doing PC game stores for much longer. I remember buying and downloading PC games from Amazon before Prime gaming. It was just like Direct2Drive. Since 2004 Direct2Drive was always a storefront for any publishers game whereas Steam didn’t start listing 3rd party games until 2005.
If any service was comparable to like end of 2013 Steam, that would easily be second best store platform. Instead every store is like 2010 Steam with nicer animations, bigger buttons.
It’s not Sony and Nintendo’s fault that since the Kinect on the 360, Microsoft hasn’t been able to manage their studios to be competitive with Nintendo and Sony studios
100% agree to everything. Steam is monopoly. But they implement policies for gamers in mind, not money. If anything, devs should praise Steam for decreasing gaming piracy. Things that Valve do for gamers is incomparable to whatever EA, Ubi, Epic do.
But they implement policies for gamers in mind, not money
- sucky currency conversion rates they refuse to update
- they take 30% cut
- they are banning games on behest of Mastercard and Visa
So, no. It’s enshittification.
sucky currency conversion rates they refuse to update
This goes one way or another, some countries benefit from the unchanging conversions
they take 30% cut
I don’t know how expensive it is to run Steam, and they certainly could afford to lower their cut with how much infinite money they have, but with how much Steam offers to developers and the potential cost of bandwidth, it doesn’t really seem that bad?
they are banning games on behest of Mastercard and Visa
The alternative is to be cut-off from those payment processors and only take money through some other means
That’s the problem of the monopoly (or large dominant market share) - Steam doesn’t have to compete for us with anyone.
they are banning games on behest of Mastercard and Visa
They literally have no choice, this was under threat of being essentially cut off any banking system. It’s fucked up, no questions about it, but it’s a societal problem that needs to be addressed legally, as any single company is powerless against that. Even Apple would not survive being banned by visa & MC
Absofuckinglutely. Being a monopoly happens when your product is just that good. What you do when you are a monopoly, that’s a different matter. And Valve is doing OK so far, yeah, not perfect, but that’s how these things go.
Does this mean Steam is guaranteed to always be equally good? No.
Does this mean Steam is an evil monopoly right now? No. At the moment they are just a monopoly as people prefer them over the competition.
It’s amazing how many people don’t actually understand what a monopoly is. Every time the topic comes up you see people say things like “well there’s more than one store therefore it’s not a monopoly.” That’s never been the actual use of the word in practice. If that were true it would be so stupidly easy to circumvent monopoly laws and regulations. I mean more than it already is of course.
your own source says
A monopoly is when a single company or entity creates an unreasonable restraint of competition in a market. The term “monopoly” is often used to describe instances where there is a single seller of a good in a market.
also wikipedia
“A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, ‘single, alone’ and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, ‘to sell’) is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller’s marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolythe problem with the “steam is a monopoly” argument is that they are not abusing their position, like the companies that got into hot water before (like microsoft with internet explorer, trying to push web standard their way)
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Yes, when an entity creates an unreasonable restraint of competition in the market. As Steam has an overwhelming control of the market that absolutely qualifies. Also I’m going to go ahead and quote the rest since you left it out for some reason. Probably because it was devastating to your argument.
A monopoly is when a single company or entity creates an unreasonable restraint of competition in a market. The term “monopoly” is often used to describe instances where there is a single seller of a good in a market. In a legal context, the term monopoly is also used to describe a variety of market conditions that are not monopolies in the truest sense. For instance, the term monopoly may be referring to instances where:
- There are only two sellers of a given good (duopoly)
- There are very few sellers of a given good (oligopoly)
- There is a single buyer of a given good (monopsony)
- There are only two buyers of a given good (duopsony)
- There are very few buyers of a given good (oligopsony)
- There are many buyers or sellers, but one actor has enough market share to dictate prices (near monopolies)
In essence, the term monopoly may be used any time that a market for a good is controlled by a limited number of actors.
so okay the first 5 is irrelevant (right?), so it’s a “near monopoly”, one actor dictates the prices
but it’s ea and the like floating 100$ games, valve is just taking their 30% cut of whatever people ask, and do their own thing. other platforms can do what they want on their own platform, as long as they’re not selling steam keys.
i’m not buying the “market is controlled by steam” argument
i get that as a dev, if you want the best exposure on pc, your only realistic choice is to sell on steam, because it’s so popular, but many people start out on itch, and when they get big enough, launch on steam. and they’re still on itch too.All right the fact that you just said you have no choice but to sell on Steam has pretty much invalidated all the other parts of your argument. That alone is enough.
Also you might want to check a little bit about steams practices when it comes to pricing. They have a lot more influence on pricing than you seem to imagine.
i didn’t say steam was the only choice, in fact, i just described another way that many devs choose
regarding the price: is it steam that keeps raising them?
Steam has a monopoly: yes. Steam, like apple, takes a cut from all payments in the store, and micro transactions. Considering how Steam is a company, and could just be evil, and bad, like Google, it’s:
-Contributions and implementation of the opensource software Proton-Ge, which lets me just download a windows game and play it, off steam, and is also available, free & opensource on other platforms like Lutris. -Regular deals which make it the best place to buy games, if you choose to do so. -Steamdeck
Make it a (mostly) positive force, imho. However, a billion dollar company being able to do discounts below any small game distribution companies, is bad.
Boo fucking hoo. Market can try and compete instead of using shady ways to agitate players to join their subpar service.
Nobody hates on Steam being a monopoly. Devs should thank Valve that their policy decreases piracy drastically.
If all monopolies would be like Steam, we would have no arguments against monopolies.
Nobody hates on Steam being a monopoly
That’s the problem imho. Right now they are “benevolent monopoly” for most of it’s users, except:
- currency conversions (famously Poland has the highest game prices on Steam in the world because Steam does not want to update the currency rates).
- innovation (Steam does not innovate Steam, they r&d othe products)
- accessibility (no way to make fonts bigger) (Those are my issues with it, there’s definitely more)
We know since at least 70’s, that when a company hits 4% market share, it stops innovating and competing with other companies, because buying the competition out and increasing the market share is safer and higher return (every 5% increase was 10% increase in profit, because they have to compete less).
- innovation (Steam does not innovate Steam, they r&d othe products)
But do they not?
Proton is a clear innovation they’ve implemented into their store front.
They have new lab experiments every so often, currently there’s a release calendar.
Family sharing.
Game recording.For some of those you could argue it’s an already existing concept, but even so. The implementation is certainly novel. And they are certainly continuing to improve a store front unmatched in features by any other.
