Depends. Whoever will follow up, can charge the company into a public one

certainly possible. I just think Gabe isn’t the only Gabe who works at valve.

The problem with this “anti-monopoly” rhetoric is that players want to play on the same platform as everyone else.

Nailed it, this is an ad for their company, that’s all the poll is, and of course it backs up the purpose of the company, almost like they set out from the beginning to create a poll with the results they wanted. Once they did that, they fired up their email (or hired a PR company) and spammed every news outlet they could to get them to cover. Steamdeckhq was dumb enough to take the bait, literally advertising this company for free, and OP continued that idiocy by posting here.

Is it a monopoly though. Monopolies are there to protect the consumer, not really the seller. A developer does not need to use steam at all. I really don’t think steam can control the pricing like that. Like, if steam started to raise prices on people buying the games, then I feel like people would still jump ship. Places like gog and itch.io exist. There are plenty of game stores as well, Microsoft, Nintendo, ea.

The problem developers have is they feel if they make a PC game, that they have to put it on steam and no other platform or they won’t make money. But the developer still has choices and I feel like steam is pretty reasonable with their cut and the tools they offer developers. A developer can even sell their game on a different platform at the same time they sell it on steam. They can even sell steam keys on their own website if they wanted to.

To call steam a monopoly is a bit of a stretch. People still have plenty of choices and steam isn’t circle jerking their consumers.

What makes Steam so compelling for consumers is that it’s more than just a digital storefront and launcher. They’ve expanded into so many different areas: Steam Input, Steam Remote Play, Steam Friends, Steam Workshop, Proton, Steam Marketplace, etc.

There is so much they do that it’s not really just a store anymore – it’s an all-in-one platform. Most competitors do not come close to equal in any of these features; they usually just have basic launchers and maybe decent friend systems.

In my opinion, GOG is the best competitor yet because of their DRM-free installers and GOG Galaxy on windows which allowed you to have all your games in one place.

Maybe they tried to target only senior managers but were only 75% successful.

Also, the conflict of interest is apparent in the first 4 words of your quote, which explains why they picked such a weird study population.

Steam is the reason I was able to get away from windows without having to give up a lot of games (and probably would need to do annoying troubleshooting for the ones that do work, since most of the compatibility issues I have seen were because the game tried to run natively instead of via proton).

Yes if GOG is an option I go for that.

They really need to split all those things off.

Are they a store? A launcher? A forum?

They should pick one thing and let other people do the others.

If only all monopolies were so user-positive.

All monopolies come into being super user-positive: it’s the moment they need to make money that shit hits the fan.

Is: Google Chrome is an overly appreciate, open source, web browser… then they came to shut down ad blocker “we gotta got +80% web browser share, what are you gonna do about it?”