this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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That tends to happen when you have a monopoly on an industry where you get 30% of the revenue from other people's hard work.
Remind me again which game developer had to release their game on Steam? Or which publisher had no choice but to market on the platform? And are you the sole user forced to use Steam, or was that someone else...?
If I want my game to sell I have to release on Steam, though.
Interesting that first part... Respectfully, no one is entitled to sales on any platform. As a consumer, I've tried other launchers and stores. I hate them all. I choose to only use Steam (for the time being). It's simply choosing the superior option, but it is an option. I can't say the same for my internet, energy, or cable companies...
I’ve never said that. Of course if I‘m publishing a game I want it to be successful. If I was a book publisher, I‘d have to sell via Amazon, too, simply because a lot of people never buy anywhere else. It is a requirement to sell on Steam for a successful campaign, and OP implied otherwise.
It would really help if the would-be competitors focused on consumer-facing features rather than... whatever it is they're doing. GoG is doing a great job of this, but EGS is still missing even the most basic features years later, because they keep trying to get market share through buying exclusives and giving away free games and that's sadly never going to work out. They just don't understand what the consumers in the industry they're trying to operate in want.
Yeah sure, but acting like I don’t need Steam for my game to sell is untrue.
Sure, but the point I'm making is, it's not Steam's fault; they're simply doing a better job than their competitors of making their storefront attractive to consumers. Rather than blaming Steam, you should be blaming the other storefronts for not being able to capture market share.
I‘m not blaming anyone.
I know! There's this great game called Fortnite that no one has ever heard of because you can't get it on Steam. /s
It did well because EGS is so great /s It’s obviously the exception.
You can sell your game on Steam, in addition to other platforms as well.
You're not contradicting anything they said, and you're not contradicting that Steam is a monopoly.
Hey look, the contrarian is back! Wow! I thought you would take some time to reflect after your wack takes.
I don‘t think it’s very contrarian or whack to acknowledge the fact that I may need to sell on the biggest platform if I want my game to do well.
I'm referring to your prior comments and history speaking in communities. The most recent one I remember involved Portal, Half-life, and counterstrike.
You're not at Lembot_0005 level comments yet tho, so that's good.
Yes, harassing users without context based on previous comments in other threads is much more valuable for a community. I don’t even remember having contrarian opinions about Portal or Half-Life, they are my favourite series‘.
Doesn't make it less of a monopoly.
I think the difference here is that Valve isn't forcing a monopoly in the way our tech overlords like Google and Amazon do through acquisitions and regulatory capture.
Several companies have tried and mostly failed to compete with Steam, I'm primarily thinking of whatever the EA and Ubisoft launchers are. The two closest have been GOG whom I would argue is fairly successful considering what their goals are and Epic, whom I would say is much less so.
This is the key point people are missing.
Valve arent paying for exclusives or anything, they are just delivering a far better product than anyone else. GOG has it's DRM-free market, but outside of that, there's nothing close. Even if Epic Games had feature parity, fuck that company.
Amazon doesn't either. Most of the arguments defending Steam can easily apply to every other "bad" company.
The only thing that differentiates steam is their marketing budget targeting small forums and Reddit.
I never mentioned Amazon, but it's really no comparison, even the FTC in the USA has filed suits against them for monopolistic and illegal behaviour.
Ive never seen an advert for Steam myself, outside of on their own platform or a video on their own YouTube channel. They sell largely through word of mouth. I suppose recently they offered journalists to visit their HQ to show off their new hardware.
Technically Steam isn't a monopoly by actual definition.
What you, and others often mean with the term, is that they hold a majority market position.
Not to mention the companies that have legal decisions declaring they are a monopoly when they are only 80%+ of a market are in the context of those companies (Microsoft, google) behaving in an anticompetitive way using their majority market position.
So not technically a monopoly and not comparable to legally declared monopolies.
All of them.
Yeah, why do you buy things if you're against capitalism? Checkmate.
Go do your own game shop with the feature set of steam.
We have seen how well that was executed with Epic.
I wouldnt even call the GOG implementation bad but it obviously lacks the PR in comparison (+ games like CP2077 are also available on Steam)
You could defend Amazon with that logic. the fact that the barrier of entry is high is exactly what let's Steam, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo abuse of their soft monopoly.
Nothing justifies owning a billion dollars worth of of boats.
Mono=one poly=seller... and last I checked Steam is not the only seller of video games. They aren't even the only seller of digital video games. They aren't even the only seller of digital video games for SteamOS.
They are the largest because they do what's right by their customers and employees. As a 'for instance', I bought Portal 2 for the PS3 many years ago. I no longer have my PS3 but I can still play Portal 2 (as well as Portal which was just thrown in for me) on any PC.
Technically Steam is not a monopoly, but the way people commonly use the term these days is as simple as "majority market share".
Treat customers right and you get rewarded. They are the majority market shareholder because they have earned it, not through deceptive business practices but through being a great company.
If they were a monopoly they wouldn't allow other game catalogs on their systems, yet I have GOG and Epic on my Steam Deck. In fact, there isn't even a requirement for me to have Steam on my Steam Deck. Just because a company is the market leader doesn't mean they got there through unethical means.
You are equating "monopoly" with "abusive monopoly."
Google got its monopoly in internet search by being better than the competition. It's still a monopoly, even though it mostly plays by the rules.
No, Google pays off other browsers to use Google as the default search engine, among many other actual monopolistic practices. Steam does none of that and simply provides a product.
No, I'm not. I'm saying they aren't a monopoly by the simple fact that they aren't the only providers of the service they sell. And while they are currently in a position to use their power to make themselves a monopoly, they are not doing that and instead are playing fair with their competition.
Ah OK, so the classic monopolies in American History (Standard Oil - controlled 90% of its market; American Tobacco - controlled 80% of its market) were not monopolies.
And Steam controls 80%-90% of the video game market?
steam has a 75% marketshare of PC games distribution in the US. the 2nd biggest player, epic games, has a market share estimated from 3% to 7,5%. i can’t find data for steam’s market share outside the US, but i’d expect it to be even higher.
if google can be considered to have a monopoly on web browsers with 73% of the marketshare, even as alternatives (like safari, 13%) exist, i don’t see why steam wouldn’t count as well.
of the PC video game market, yes.
I wouldn't describe it as a "monopoly" per say. I'd describe it as "all of the competition is filled with idiots":
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