this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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When I think of monopolies, I think more of telecomms, of Wal-Mart and their selling at a lose to kill off competition, Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software, and other examples. Unless I'm missing something, Steam didn't do that, they were just first in the game and built a better product than the others did. Offering a better service that attracted customers. Now do I think it's too large and would welcome competition, absolutely. But monopolies typically aren't though just having larger market share with a better product.
If Steam did something like oh, pay developers/publishers to be exclusive to their platform, then yeah you'd have a good argument there.
Steam has had monopolistic policies. There just so benign compared to other monopolies of the current time, that they seem pedestrian.
Im not anti steam, but i try to never be pro any company.
Gabe Newell is still a billionaire and thusly a piece of shit. Just that one the list of billionaires he's on the lower end of ones needing rectifying.
Nope. MS was declared a monopoly because of marketshare and therefore had to add support for competing software.
Monopoly is from marketshare. How it is obtained doesn't matter. Once you are the biggest company you need to have restrictions placed on you so that smaller companies have a chance to compete.
Nope on Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v./_Microsoft_Corp. It was restricting the web browser market.
Point two, it's if they also hamper competition or capabilities to compete. Steam, as shown in this thread and how it operates, hasn't done that. Now you can give a good thumb of the nose at Epic for their paid exclusives, but that didn't get them anywhere toward dominating a market. Also, competition exists in various forms as well. It's not monopolized.
I hate monopolies and no friend of big companies, but come at them with the right cudgel, not made up dross.
If bundling a web browser is an uncompetitive act that requires government intervention then Apple, Google (Android), and commercial Linux distros would also be sued by the government. Microsoft was sued, not for the action in isolation but because of their monopoly position. They didn't get their monopoly from bunding a web browser. They already had a monopoly. People overwhelmingly chose Windows because it was the best. At the time Linux didn't have consumer friendly distros and MacOS was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from 1982.
Steam's monopoly destroyed ownership of games. You used to buy a game at Egghead, and when you were done playing, you could sell it for whatever the free market said it was worth.
Steam's monopoly also means you can't open a small game store- they wiped out those businesses just like Walmart. Vendors deal with Walmart because a tiny profit of being in every Walmart is better than a large profit from a few stores exactly like vendors sell on Steam.
Purposely making code and behind the door deals to exclude any browser development or success for years does, yes.
Steam didn't destroy ownership of games, scuzzy business practices in the entire industry did. It also affects non-gaming software, movies, most media actually. It wasn't Valve going "Let's remove ownership!" In fact it has crept into the physical realm with right to repair and subscription services in cars.
So is Netflix a monopoly then because it wiped out video rental stores? It wasn't Valve alone again, it was a collusion in the video game industry to go all digital to maximize profit and not have to make concessions to retailers. That's why they also tried their own platforms.
Edit: You are again mistaking a successful business in a capitalist society with monopoly. Monopoly is again, the manipulation of market forces and regulatory control. Not I just do business better.
There was no code to exclude other browsers. Netscape at the time was the monopoly web browser. Netscape failed because Netscape 4 was a disaster. JWZ wrote about it extensively. I personally experienced Netscape's failure. Netscape 4 had a bug in their dialer that couldn't handle area codes. When I called to tell them, despite having already paid tens of thousands to Netscape in licensing fees, they wanted $80k to look at the problem. I called my friends who ran other ISP's to ask them what they were doing because Netscape 4 was broken. They said they weren't even trying- they were shipping only IE 4 on their CD's. I wanted my customers to have the choice so I spent the development time to work around Netscape's bugs and had my tech support field the calls.
Netscape ran themselves off a cliff. The Netscape coders themselves said so. It is utterly ridiculous to claim that MS sabotaged them somehow with "code and deals".
As I already said, monopoly is a label given to businesses that have dominant marketshare. It doesn't matter how it is obtained. Once you own the market, you have restrictions placed on you that smaller companies don't have to keep the free market working.
That's not the definition used by the government. You are declared a monopoly and after that restrictions are placed on your actions.
It’s funny because last I heard this argument in real life it came down straight from GameStop corporate who were afraid (this was like 20 years ago) of Steam so they went hard on crying about Steam being a monopoly and bad for gamers then banned Steam games from the store.
Fuck all billionaires. Steam is not a concern I have ever, though.
Steam's policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn't add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from Steam.
Now, if Steam was just one amongst many small games stores, the gamedev could just ignore that, but Steam has such much of the Market of digital game sales that gamedevs cannot ignore having their games taken down from the Steam store.
Oh, by the way, this applies to Indies as much as it does to the rest, so we're not just talking about widelly hated AAA publishers here.
Steam absolutelly is using their dominant market position to shaft both gamers and game devs, including Indies.
Which is why simping for Steam is so, so sad.
Does anyone have a source on that? I couldn't find that clause in their docs, all I could find that is in this: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
To me, that reads that this is only about selling steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like humblebundle for example), developers are free to sell non-steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like GOG or epic) for cheaper.
So all of the major ecommerce players do this. I’ll get banned from Amazon if i sell my own products i manufacture on my own website cheaper than Amazon.
So we get around it with a different sku.
That’s all you have to do on Steam.
Now I’d love for this to not be the case but no way anyone wins this case against Steam because it’s not about Steam. It’s about all of ecommerce, and they pay (bezos etc) the fucking president off.
Valve bans developers from selling their games cheaper on other platforms. So if those services want to take a smaller cut than valve does, so Devs can sell their games cheaper on their platform, they can't or they lose access to steam, by far the biggest platform.
This is blatant monopolistic bullshit.
I've just checked their steamworks partner documentation. This only applies to steam keys.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
That, imho, is quite reasonable, because Valve provides these keys to the developer free of charge, i.e. the developer does not have to pay 30% commission on these keys.
Developers are free to sell their games on other storefronts (like Epic or GOG) for a lower price than they do on steam, permanently.