Competition like GOG or itch isn’t “piss poor”, they offer exactly the features their customers expect.

What is a “steam game”?

Stop making excuses for every other company that has failed to compete with Valve. It has not been out of the price range for competition of other companies. Big publishers have been making storefronts for about 2 decades and proceeding to underfund and mismanage every attempt.

Steam was not the first digital storefront on PC. They were not a huge behemoth company by 2014. They were not bigger than Epic was by the time EGS launched. Not bigger than EA when Origin launched. Not bigger than Ubisoft when Uplay launched. Not bigger than Microsoft when GFWL launched. Not bigger than Amazon anytime these past 15 years of digital downloads from them. I doubt it took Valve tens of billions of dollars to make 2014 Steam right before SteamOS launched, 2014 because not a single storefront platform has reached feature parity with end of 2014 Steam.

Steam launched in 2003. A single ten billion dollars, I wouldn’t be surprised as about the accumulative revenue of Valve 2003-2014.

Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else.

What is the policy of any other store. Of you want a solution here go lobby the government you live under to mandate inheritance of digital goods

We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library

This is a game by game case as it’s up to what DRM is implemented if any. A ton of games you can just copy the folder around and click the executable. We’re you not around during the SecuRom and StarForce days. GFWL install limit days.

Call people what you are yourself, a social media warrior, but that doesn’t make you any less ignorant of PC gaming markets than whomever you’re crying about. You won’t be taken seriously when you’re making excuses for a bunch of companies historically and a number to this day larger than Valve was when building Steam up

Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)

Valve isn’t in a vacuum. iOS, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo. All closed software ecosystems unlike a Linux machine or currently a Windows machine. Still waiting for that 2 minute advertisement to begin download or download fees on actual closed platforms. Waiting for public companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, … to start charging download fees and pre-download advertisements on purchased games.

GFWL Gold subscription for online play is about 20 years old and failed spectacularly against a Steam that wasn’t even a tenth the userbase it has today. Now you’re losing hair over subscriptions to get advertisement free downloads of games you’ve purchased. Come back to reality of how the markets gone for PC gaming in the last 20 years

I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.

No good competitors because they don’t have money? Excuse me? Are you seriously trying to paint Epic Games as some poor small underdog company?

Yes, Steam will eventually go to shit. But it’s not shit right now, and the competition can’t even be bothered to have a shopping basket feature in their store, something every online store already had since the dawn of online stores 20 years ago.

I wouldn’t buy shit on Epic for so many fucking reasons. They’re not a realistic competitor in terms of their DD product. They make money on fortnite and their engine.

Their revenue for their games store for “3rd party titles” was $285 million in 2024, compared to Steam’s 10800 million overall revenue… only 37x higher, clearly epic is a strong competitor. Maybe you wanna claim something silly like valve’s first party sales were 10.5 billion or something.

And where are those millions going, pray tell? Because they’re sure as fuck not going into the development of a good storefront.

Epic has enough resources to make competition against Valve. They would rather cry about how they can’t get away with being cheap.

“everything else is shitty so they aren’t any worse” is not an argument man

My steam account is from 2003. I’m vividly aware of the overall DD market and it’s changes over time from a user perspective. I was here before it existed like so many others.

The last really good alternative to steam we had was Stardock’s Impulse… which they sold out because brad’s a tool and couldn’t stand up a team internally that was separate from his game development aspirations. If he did, they would be as big as valve today. Instead we have more shitty elemental games and more shitty galciv games and all their DLC.

Anywho, you’re still fucked no matter how much you suck valve’s dick once they enshittify. Can you truly say they will not enshittify?

Oh look, yet another person who doesn’t understand what monopoly means.

There’s no good competitors because the money isn’t there to build one. […] Would take tens of billions of dollars today to get in there on top of having near feature parity.

This is ridiculous bullshit. Epic had shitloads of money, they just couldn’t find their ass with both hands. It took them years to implement a freaking shopping cart.

A commodity controlled by one party.

Sometimes, there are many sellers or substitutes, but a single company still retains outsized market power — that’s called monopolistic competition.

A monopoly is a market structure with a single dominant seller in a particular industry.

Sounds like Steam fits that description pretty well. I agree that steam isn’t a strict monopoly, there is competition, but they are so far and ahead they still function as a monopoly in their area.

Since you’d rather throw mud than talk terms, I guess that’s where this ends.

Epic’s incompetence doesn’t matter to me. Find me another alternative that isn’t riding on the coattails of pre-existing billions in revenue.

Fortnite makes exponentially more than their DD platform.

GOG is the closest thing to a competitor imo but their philosophy restricts them from really competing on day 1 game sales outside of a minority of titles.

Everybody else is a seller of adult games, indie titles, or simply a key seller for steam games.

Find me another alternative that isn’t riding on the coattails of pre-existing billions in revenue.

Why would I? I’m not making any claims myself, merely pointing out the ridiculousness of yours.

You didn’t do that though. I said for a competitor to come along that they would need to sink tens of billions of dollars, like uber did. I fail to see how this is a ridiculous statement. Epic being incompetent doesn’t have any relation to what a real competitor would need to do to gain a foothold with say a meager 25% of valve’s share.

Epic didn’t do enough to gain serious market share. They haven’t given up but I don’t see them making any inroads without further investment to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. They literally need to build up their platform to be substantially cheaper (e.g. by offering subsidies) while also making it fit for use (by spending way more money on quality devs.) They haven’t… and nobody cares except folks like you who think they’re a serious competitor as justification for white knighting for valve. lol

“Comodity controlled by one party”. Except it’s not controlled by one party.

Outsized market power, what left out are the actions taken to make such an outsized market power. Monopolies are not a passive that form all by themselves. They are created through expansion acquisition, and aggressive crushing of competition. Disney and Nintendo do these actions. Valve does basically… Nothing.

A single dominant seller, but again leaving out all the rest I have written above.

There is nothing Valve can stop doing to be less “a monopoly”. All they’ve done is provide a pretty decent service, and nobody else can be arsed to top that, even companies with the resources to do so.

That’s not a monopoly.

285m in revenue is not 285m in profits. Their publishing deals with companies probably don’t leave much left for actual income, and i’d be surprised if they operate with profit if you exclude first party titles.

Anywho… Why are you so hyper focused on epic, and not the market as a whole?

They’re one company and everybody hates them. I don’t give a shit about them. GOG is rocking ~40m in 2024 revenue… and they have a bit of a unique offering with 0 DRM and offline installers. Their nature keeps developers away since there’s an assumption that without DRM you won’t sell anything.

What else is there that is even remotely relevant compared to steam? I don’t know of any for PC games (windows/linux/mac) - mobile may make more money but that’s a separate market.

By your definition, lets imagine a world where Amazon had 100% of the market and there were no other competitors, even if it happened naturally, without malicious intent, they wouldn’t be a monopoly? Come on.

I dont see ‘has to act a specific way’ in any definitions of monopoly. A monopoly isnt about being evil, or ‘actions taken to make such an outsized market power’ even if thats often part of the result, but just describes their position in the field.

This isn’t about how a company got there, it’s about where they currently are. Steam may not have crushed competitors aggressively like Disney or Nintendo, but its market dominance and control over PC game distribution still fits the textbook definition of a monopoly.

Steam has ~79.5% of the PC gaming market, I’m one of their customers and love their service, but that doesnt change that “monopoly”fits them.

That’s not my definition. That’s just the definition. And you’re using a corporation that is actively monopolising the logistics market, even so far as breaking the law to kill any competition, as an example. Nicely done.