this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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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.