Despite facing increased competition in the space, not least from the Epic Games Store, Valve’s platform is synonymous with PC gaming. The service is estimated to have made $10.8 billion in revenue during 2024, a new record for the Half-Life giant. Since it entered the PC distribution space back in 2018, the rival Epic Games Store has been making headway – and $1.09 billion last year – but Steam is still undeniably dominant within the space.
Valve earns a large part of its money from taking a 20-30% cut of sales revenue from developers and publishers. Despite other storefronts opening with lower overheads, Steam has stuck with taking this slice of sales revenue, and in doing so, it has been argued that Valve is unfairly taking a decent chunk of the profits of developers and publishers.
This might change, depending on how an ongoing class-action lawsuit initiated by Wolfire Games goes, but for the time being, Valve is making money hand over fist selling games on Steam. The platform boasts over 132 million users, so it’s perfectly reasonable that developers and publishers feel they have to use Steam – and give away a slice of their revenue – in order to reach the largest audience possible.
Epic pays handsome sums for exclusives, can’t blame the devs for taking it. They go to Valve to not miss out on the gigantic market share cause it’s a monopoly. And I do complain about Nintendo and PlayStation exclusives ;)
But they could release their own installer like CD project Red and other studios do. They don’t want to miss out on the ease of the installer that enables a larger market share. That’s not a monopoly. Literally.
No. The vast majority of potential customer will only buy if it’s on Steam. This is not about features, it’s about market access.
Right but that’s an ease of purchase thing. They could buy elsewhere. The option exists, there is no lack of viable options and people still take it. Not by definition a monopoly.
So you are angry that people are lazy and don’t shop around too much. Your issue is with the consumer so you want someone to step in and force them different because you don’t like their actions?
If a monopoly exists because the competition is incompetent it is still a monopoly. If someone offers a teleport service and it is the only one on the market because no one else can figure out how to do it, it is still a monopoly. I don’t want anyone to step in, I want customers/users to not defend the monopoly like it’s their favourite football club, to think about what can happen if they rely on the services of a monopoly too much and yes, to „shop around more“.
You are insistent on not changing your perspective on it being a monopoly because you want it to be one.
It’s not like your scenario. Other people have figured it out. Epic game store is right there and so is GOG and others. People do buy from them and some prefer them.
The problem is that you want it to be a monopoly as an excuse for why people are using the service more than others. That is simply not the case. You ignore that people do shop around sometimes and others don’t cause it’s easy and not everyone is how you think of them.
You are Don Quixote yelling at the windmills thinking it’s gonna save the country. Have an actual alternative you want instead of just being upset how things are.