Minecraft, Star Sector, Dwarf Fortress until recently. Stores like Epic and GOG and itch.io.

Plus Steam gives you content distribution, discussions, patches, all for free.

To be fair, Valve only has around 350 employees. The other companies have thousands more.

You don’t even have to release your game on pc to sell… Some don’t at all. Sticking to only consoles.

That’s how you go from sustainable to unsustainable due to chasing constant exponential growth then eventual enshitification that hits consumers to try to recoup all the lost money.

You’re describing the shitty business models of publicly traded companies that hire thousands then lay off thousands and keep trying to do whatever they can to raise stock prices due to not targetting a sustainable stable company for the longterm but quarter by quarter profit targets.

That steam has been more conservative with hiring is probably why they’ve been able to have the resources to go into hardware even if it flops unlike EA, Ubisoft, and Epic despite having way more employees.

Fuck valve too. Gabe has over a billion dollars worth of boats. Fuck him to hell and back

You are correct, though it bears stating that they make millions from kids gambling and they make billions for their software distribution platform, as one indicator of Valve’s priorities as a for-profit company.

Have you ever considered that different people can interpret things differently? Why are you jumping down someone’s throat for clarifying an ambiguous title?

Amazon tried and failed, too.

Eh, that could also include sales revenue, of which Valve pays out 70% to right holders.

Which is surprising, considering how much money they generate off amazon store.

All it takes is to give a good service like Valve does. But somehow, as in Zippy’s pic, competition keeps shooting themselves in a foot. Probably due to shareholders that Valve does not have.

Tbf, I wouldnt even touch Amazon with a kilometer long pole even if the game was free.
I order on Amazon only if the physical item is the cheaper AND easier option to order from (usually because I can only get thing A but not B).
If I can avoid it, I will try to.

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.[1]

Steam is not the only supplier of particular goods, they do not own the market, they have not the highest price and do not lack competition. It is just that their service is far better than whatever competition offers. Nothing stops Microsoft, EA and Epic to implement same features Steam does. Like, literally nothing. These companies have money to do so. They just chose not to.

I see what you’re going for, but most people seem to choose money over doing the right thing. Which brings us right back to capitalism ruining everything, again.

If I’d say to my publisher „but I don’t want to publish on Steam“ I can look for another publisher. You don’t need to defend Steam, I didn’t attack it by stating that you need to publish on the biggest platform.

You’re right, the 80% figure I read was from a small poll, it seems 75% is the more accurate figure.

That’s honesty. You don’t “owe me a reply” but replying selectively is dishonest. It’s pretending you haven’t heard any contrary information, when you have.

Now given the 75 is quite close to 80, I think calling Steam a monopoly in the market of pc video game distribution is quite fair, don’t you? The honest thing to do would be to change your mind in the light of what you didn’t know before.

I can’t wait for your company to do the same. You know, because it’s not hard. Heck, I invite you to do the same with 10 employees, since it’s so not hard.

A lot of indie companies would not exists if there wasn’t a storefront like Steam that handles worldwide transactions, distributes the game and increases their discoverability.

There are other options, such as itch.io.

If you think Valve’s cut should be lower, you’re free to make your own marketplace and compete.

I said it’s not hard to reach that high of a revenue per head measure if you don’t have 20k employees.
Google, MS and so much other mega corps have a similar revenue (dunno exact numbers), so they obviously have lower numbers.

So calm down.

That’s the whole point though. Most companies keep hiring to make more money. Staying lean takes discipline.

Levels.fyi data from 1 October 2025 reveals senior engineers at £206,000 ($375,000) total, but Valve’s equity-heavy model amplifies this, drawing top talent without micromanagement.

This article was here the other day and made it sound like employees are treated very well.