I agree that Valve has, in some instances, succeeded primarily because they're not aggressively anti-consumer in a market of aggressively anti-consumer alternatives. However, they are not innocent by any means.

Last I checked, they are still automated when it comes to the majority of their "customer services". Getting an actual human to consider things is expensive and they don't want to spend money on that.

(Edit: Their solution to cleaning up their storefront is algorithms and crowd sourcing. The don't manually do much of anything to filter the selection - it's more algorithms, policies, and crowd sourcing reviews, tags, reports, etc. This prevents them from looking like they are actively controlling the storefront and is waaaay cheaper. They would much rather let influencers publish recommended lists for free than pay someone to find and remove asset flip garbage games. Systems like this are what gets you results like the opaque decision to ban Horses and financially devastate an indie studio without telling them why. It's what gets you massive review bombs from China cratering reviews for great games because Valve isn't willing to spend time working out an alternative method for Chinese gamers to communicate with game developers about games sold on their storefront - because typical feedback methods like discord are banned in China. Valve's solution is to just default to filtering out reviews made in languages other than your own, entirely.)

They are very conscious of the numbers behind their success and the money that their platform and marketplace rakes in. They have worked with literal economists when it comes to their marketplace. Yet they turn a blind eye to concerns like skin gambling with children.

They do sometimes behave like bullies when negotiating with those who want to sell their games on Steam. The proportion of money paid out to devs/publishers is a factor of success and benefit to valve rather than anything else - if your game makes a lot of money (for Valve), you get a discount on the percentage taken. Some of that bullying behavior is also anticompetitive - as has been brought up in lawsuits. Their policies use "most favored nation" clauses.

• Basically if you want to benefit from Steam, the dominant marketplace, you have to offer Steam customers nothing less than you offer customers anywhere else. No discounts on another store or your website. No bonus content or service that might make a non-steam purchase feel better than a purchase on Steam.

Finally, they may not be anti-consumer but they haven't exactly been spending a lot of effort on improving the functionality of services that their platform has. The clearest example would be issues with their friends-related services like voice chat that have plagued the platform for a long time, though some have recently been improved. They know they are dominant and don't spend money when they don't need to in order to keep customers.

All said and done, I use them as my default though I've made efforts to be more dev and indie dev conscious. Unfortunately, greed fuels most of the world and makes it hard to do anything that favors anyone besides those with power.

Microslop… they all tried to make their own launchers to move away from Steam and they all failed.

Microsoft didn't fail. They bought Minecraft and Blizzard / Battle.net, two things that are money printers outside of Steam.

Microsoft ACTS like they fail because they demand higher profit margins from their gaming division to fund their AI investments.

Epic… Epic keeps throwing fortnite money to EGS launcher but keeps ignoring the most basic user demands.

EGS has an insane installed base because of Fortnite and Rocket League alone. League of Legends and Valorant are also available there but not Steam. Same with Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact.

It's just that these games drone out the other games on EGS and that's why they sell better on Steam. And what is that droning out usually called? A monopoly.

is it a monopoly because they wanted to become one?

Valve is a for profit company, one of their main goals is to make money.

It is a monopoly, but because nobody else is even trying. And that pisses me off.

It is a monopoly because they hooked everyone to their own proprietary third party software launcher, you should be pissed of about not owning any of your games

Damn, handheld virtually nonexistent since 2020

Don't be a bastard, and do the right thing. That's hard to do apparently.

A monopoly [...] is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service[1]. 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

A monopoly is just an observation of the market landscape. Doesnt require ill intent or anti-competitive practices. Steam is just a benevolent monopoly. Until its not...

is steam really over 95% of the market? i think that’s where the limit is

No, 8.6 billion out of 45 billion dollars. That's a fifth.

It's 75%. It's not crazy far up on the monopoly scale, but IMO enough to be called one.

But there is no "limit". If you are the only vegetable seller on the market, you have 100% market share. But as long as anyone else can set up another shop and compete equally, I wouldn't call it a monopoly.