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72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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100% agree to everything. Steam is monopoly. But they implement policies for gamers in mind, not money. If anything, devs should praise Steam for decreasing gaming piracy. Things that Valve do for gamers is incomparable to whatever EA, Ubi, Epic do.
So, no. It's enshittification.
They literally have no choice, this was under threat of being essentially cut off any banking system. It's fucked up, no questions about it, but it's a societal problem that needs to be addressed legally, as any single company is powerless against that. Even Apple would not survive being banned by visa & MC
This goes one way or another, some countries benefit from the unchanging conversions
I don't know how expensive it is to run Steam, and they certainly could afford to lower their cut with how much infinite money they have, but with how much Steam offers to developers and the potential cost of bandwidth, it doesn't really seem that bad?
The alternative is to be cut-off from those payment processors and only take money through some other means
That's the problem of the monopoly (or large dominant market share) - Steam doesn't have to compete for us with anyone.