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.
I wouldn't describe it as a "monopoly" per say. I'd describe it as "all of the competition is filled with idiots":
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, why do you buy things if you're against capitalism? Checkmate.
All of them.
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.
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.
Amazon tried and failed, too.
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.
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.