They are currently a very benevolent monopolist: they don't seriously compete with publishers that use their platform. They only occassionally produce a great Half-Life or DOTA game as a some sort of "halo effect" demo to encourage the industry to move forward (e.g. to show how VR is done right with Half-Life Alyx). Avoiding releasing Half-Life 3 might have been good for their neutral role. They are like a TSMC of game distributors, who explicitly promised not to compete with their customers.
They remain one-stop shop for games. The gamers don't have to weigh down their systems with a bunch of different bloated game stores, each "needing" several GB of memory occupied at all times and adding minutes to machine startup.
Not to mention conflicts between a bunch of different anti-cheat and anti-piracy technologies on the same machine. And stores with bad UX (e.g. that make you suffer additional wait screens or naggings; Steam is as unobstructive as it gets).
Compare that to Netflix: at the begining, it was a "one stop shop" for movies, it had a lot of classic movies and TV for reasonable price. When the concept was proven, the production houses revoked the license for content. Competition came to the sector and each movie production house set up their own subscription based streaming service. You need to keep paying a whole bunch of services if you want to be able to keep up with all popular TV production or watch classic movies.
So, the competition would in theory be great. But even if stores didn't have subscriptions, the gamers don't want to fill their personal data, check privacy settings, configure, troubleshoot, debloat, ... a different app store for each game. When people have a slice of time to play, they don't want to deal with all of these.
I'm sure that when Valve forgets what keeps them successful and start becoming a Netflix, the Steam store will get replaced.
I mean, is it not possible to sell a small % of your shares to cover the tax?
Moreover, you could create a multi-tier share structure where controlling ownership belongs to the founder whereas financial interest in the business belongs to the holders of other equity flavors, which is fairly common (e.g. Meta, Snap are structured this way).
Then the founder can [choose to] sell those cash-flow-stocks while holding on to the ownership stock.
It's utterly hyperbolic to suggest that a wealth tax would kill privately-controlled corporations.
Well, they may never even may be able to "become a Netflix" because the practical-slash-IP situation is so different.
Apparently, the world is "used to" the way intellectual property works (or doesn't work, depending on your view) for TV shows and Movies, in a way that probably wouldn't fly for video games; which is to say -- in both you're going to have to compete against "free" or "on the internet" or whatnot. I suspect monopolizing video games is much harder than TV and Movies (probably because we're so beholden to arguably odd copyright ideas?")
True, there's a hole in my reasoning. Netflix became today's Netflix probably not due to its own fault, but because of inherent characteristics of its market. Its much easier to move browser-consummable media (video, music, ...) around different stores than locally installed software. It's much easier to disappear certain show or video.
Browser also severely limits the bloat, mutual compatibility and privacy issues (and also Android and iOS up to certain extent). This makes technologically much easier to have a bunch of different content stores on the same device.
Steam can absolutely be replaced. There's lots that could be improved in the process of sifting through tens of thousands of games to find the ones I want to play. I have Epic's store installed on my gaming PC as I still play Fortnite. It has none of the things I want improved over the Steam experience. Literally none.
Put up or shut up Epic. I'm unemployed so you can hire me to do it for you, but I'll bet you'd rather just whine about it.
I've never seen a large business whine as much as Epic does, and they pick fights with their biggest partners all the time, too. If anything capitalism seems broken because they remain around.
Okay, if steam is holding gaming back, why hasn’t an alternative emerged? Apparently Valve maintains healthy margins after taking a 30% cut. What’s stopping other companies from taking a smaller cut and passing the benefits to consumers. Gamers are notoriously complaining about high costs of games, I’m sure that’s a viable strategy?
Valve also allows non exclusive distribution on PC. Games don’t have to launch on steam exclusively. Why do others not capitalize on that?
Seems like it’s mostly a “grapes are sour” argument pointing to valve and saying they’re greedy enough to allow us to profit.
PC Gamers literally just don't want to use a second launcher so it doesn't matter what you offer them. See how Epic offered games for free and it still didn't matter.
See also how it took Epic like five years before they implemented adding more than one item to your cart at a time. And how they have no forums, no reviews, barely a friends' list, terrible game integration (always-on unmutable voice chat lol), etc etc. Their product just sucks, simple as that.
I used Epic Launcher for a while, and very seriously used their store. Their free games did bring me over initially but I was happy to spend money..
Except that the experience just sucked. It was mediocre. My biggest gripe is that launching games was really slow, the store was kind of painful in lots of little ways and it was sort of annoying to deal with them in general.
Maybe they fixed those issues but it was too late to retain me. I literally repurchased the games I was still playing on steam which didn't have those issues.
At some point, in the early days, Steam was a bit rough. I remember a summer where occasionally steam would stop launching and you had to reinstall it (back when it was a blocky dark green app). But Steam got over those teething pains and has been really high quality since.
Itch.io is great, I don't use their launcher (just haven't tried it) but I use them and enjoy them. Their checkout experience is fairly sane. It's not as if I refuse to use other platforms.
There's a little more to it than "just a launcher." My Steam account dates back to the release of Half-Life 2. Loads of games, thousands of dollars spent, and a service that's been reliable for over 20 years. Why would I use a different service? I'm not unique, everyone else using Steam is in the same boat, just with less time invested.
They've undoubtedly locked us all in, but they've shown themselves to be trustworthy and reliable.
> A former Epic Games developer is calling out Steam users, saying that they wouldn't move on from Valve's store even if a better alternative emerged.
Second para:
> Kiaran Ritchie, former principal animation engineer at Epic Games kicked off discussions surrounding Steam's 30% sales cut last week (with the assertion that "you could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week"). Which in-turn led noted Steam hater Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to assert that "Valve has held gaming back for years" – because the person whose company proudly asserted it had "vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher" knows what's holding gaming back!
Third para:
> Ritchie elaborated on their opinions on the 30% cut in a separate post, with the post saying that while developers are paying 30% in order to access Steam infrastructure, "in reality it is purely to get access to the massive Steam userbase." He adds "PC developers have no option but to distribute through Steam or lose the vast majority of sales."
Curious, where does it answer my question in the first paragraph? Could you elaborate?
Presumably, that was a response to other storefronts/launchers appearing, which means the competition did force them to change behavior. Companies don't give up revenue without cause.
Once you have a sufficient good solution that you like, you will not switch to another sufficient good solution unless you are highly motivated to switch. It can not be just 5% better or 10% better, it needs to be meaningfully better so that you are motivated to undergo the switching cost.
Part of that switching cost is your purchased game library only works with the platforms you purchased it from. A fact that currently greatly benefits mostly Steam on desktop platforms.
So I do expect that a court case in the future will be Epic Games suing Steam in order to have "game portability" between game platforms.
I think there's not a lot of value in "launchers", at least to the end user. Like I might play a game for hours but spend at most a minute in the launcher.
I mean, I really appreciate how Steam Big Picture gives me a console like experience on my PC and how the Steam Deck works like a PS Vita or a Nintendo Switch. But really if I had to click on a desktop icon to play a game or find it the same way I find other applications on Windows, Mac or Linux, I'd just do it.
So I guess you could make a better launcher but there's only so much upside!
I'd say though it's a very San Francisco mindset to be obsessed with things like launchers: like wanting to have some space you can colonize to interpret everyone's experience. Next thing you know it is stuffed with ads and "discovery" in the store would be all about paid discovery, users would be trained that it's a terrible idea to go browsing for things in the store, like it is on Apple, etc.
I like this quote:
Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at research and analyst
firm Newzoo told GamesRadar+ that "As long as Valve is independent and not a
publicly traded company," it looks impossible for Steam to be overthrown as the
de-facto PC gaming marketplace.
which points to Steam's ability to respect the gamer experienced because it's run by a gamer. Any company run by accountants is going to endanger that sweet 30% cut by eating the seed corn to get another 1%.
> "Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users,"
I don't think that's necessarily true. If there was a launcher that was at least as good as steam in every aspect, and also had access to more games it would stand a chance of competing. Especially if its store also had lower prices.
A lot of it is just how good the Steam launcher is. I hope the companies understand this. The only reason I use Steam over GOG or Epic or any alternative is because the launcher just works. It's fast. The Epic launcher, when I was forced to use it to play Borderlands 3, felt excruciating to use. GOG Galaxy is the same.
On the other hand every single time everyone is glazing over the unregulated gambling market created by Valve which is available to everyone regardless of their age and location. The whole empire is running on the Steamweb API and Valve could shut it down any single day if they want but they don't because... we know the answer.
I'm not a fan of that, either. But they have made gaming on Linux move from the Tux Racer days to the current state of almost every game I want to play is playable on my favorite OS, so I can cut them a little slack for previous obviously bad decisions. Compared to almost any other corporate overlord we might have had, they seem to me to be by far the best that we could reasonably have hoped for.
It is a problem yes. And usually whataboutism doesn't matter, but in this case it really does: have you looked at the microtransaction gambling in Epic properties? It's far, far, far more invasive, omnipresent, and required to play (like Fortnite). You can completely ignore the microtransactions aspects of Team Fortress 2 and it's great. You can't (literally, you can't) ignore the microtransactions and gambling in Fortnite.
> It's far, far, far more invasive, omnipresent, and required to play (like Fortnite)
Did they do something to Fortnite that I don't know about? I thought the only thing Fortnite did was allow pay-to-win in their community games (just like Roblox), otherwise the main game is still cosmetic only like Valve's games.
The criticism is right in a vacuum, but suppose that Epic Games got their way and successfully replaced Steam. Then what? We'd just end up with a new corporate landlord over PC gaming, albeit one that is also a private company and maybe charges lower fees, but has somewhat less proven reputation than Steam to not make future greedy changes to needlessly screw over users.
The issue is all the "replacements" are very studio specific. If they really were smart, they'd pull together resources, launch a new company under the competing studios support, and give themselves better pricing for games sold. They'd get more into their pockets, and a small cut to keep the new platform sustainable.
All I read in that article was another bunch of whinging from EPIC again. If they want to displace Steam, than they are going to have to put in 110% effort to at least make the same thing Steam is, or better. So far they haven't tried hard enough and failed miserably. Saying you can replace Steam with a quick bit of vibe coding really misses the point in what Steam covers.
Here's a few things Steam does:
- Digital store
- Cloud features for saving, achievements etc..
- Multiplayer and social tools. Discussions, guides etc..
- User workshop for mods, which is just amazing for the games that support it fully
- Streaming and remote play
- Library sharing with the family
- Offline access
- Mobile access
- Steamworks for developers
- Proton for Linux, just fantastic, and how I use the ecosystem today
There are probably more things I have missed, but I don't know of any other platform that does the above?
If Tim and his team spent as much time on making their platform better than on whinging they might have something to compete with. He could have had another draw card with UT4 but he killed that, for his cash cow Fortnite. He put all his eggs in one basket and realises he doesn't have enough for an omelette now.
I would love another competitor and I think that is GOG, if they can keep up the momentum and stick to their difference, encouraging studios to release DRM free games. I use both platforms and I am happy with both.
They are probably right though, why would I move to another platform, when my whole library is already with Steam. I am not going to waste that money to use another platform, and I don't need or want the fragmentation that currently exists for streaming content. There is probably room for another successfull platform, Steam really does need proper competition to keep them on their toes.
I don’t know if other services couldn’t have done that. I think the important bit is that I never feel shafted when I’m using Steam. Ever since the beginning I’ve been able to click purchase, and have a game downloadable within minutes to hours (depending on size). All the extra nonsense they’ve added has never stood in the way of that core experience.
> "you could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week"
I don't know much about the person who said this, but it strikes me as missing the point of what we do when we build products: you could vibe code Steam the program in a week, sure. You can't vibe code the trust Steam has in a week, nor can you vibe code the two-sided ecosystem they've built in a week.
I think that, realistically, the first step to real competition to Steam in the PC digital storefront space is the inevitable IPO of Valve software. It's only a matter of time.
Steam can absolutely be replaced if they fuck up. The thing is, they don't. Even GOG (which is my prefered platform for oldies) and itch.io (which is my prefered platform for indies), which are smaller and thus have less bloat and should iterate quicker didn't manage to install interesting feature Steam has added over the years. Remote play especially, as someone who bought in ~2019 128GB or RAM and a titan RTX (yeah, bad investment at the time, though i'm happy now when i see the cost) for his server and want to play on another computer, on a different room, was the best thing that ever happened to me.
And of course as a primary 4X multiplayer gamer, the "join game" button on steam profile is something every platform should look to implement (once they have a correct mod workshop equivalent).
I recently switched to 100% pirated games (I own copies) on a permanently offline Win10 box. I started to enjoy gaming again when I did. Everything just works, no bullshit.
Previously I used Steam. I have ~700 games in my library. I now purchase from my phone.
That being said. This is a Microsoft forced solution. I refuse to use Win11 or online Windows anything.
Epic, which used to receive my business, changed the privacy rules to access my purchases and was blacklisted on my network as a result. Sunk cost be damned.
Anything can be replaced. Epic went out of their way to be blacklisted and Steam did not.
It's not even about wanting other stores to fail, which I don't. That's an unproductive line of thinking for anyone, I believe.
My Steam account is old enough to drink. I've had it for some two-thirds of my life, not even adult life but life entirely. All of my games are already there. It's like if a friend invited you to come play video games in 1989 but he doesn't have the cool NES games you want to play, they're all back at my place. What, we're gonna play Clu Clu Land all day? Give me a break.
Even if I was to switch to Epic, outside of the supposed altruism of "We take less of a cut from developers!" what is the benefit for me as a gamer, or as a consumer? The Epic Games Store has very few games I can't get elsewhere, even on console, and the experience compared to Steam is just lackluster. It just is. Valve has had a lot of time to iterate on it, and Steam was absolutely despised for the first several years of its life, but the experience of using the two platforms could not be more different. Beyond that, if I do switch, I still need to have Steam installed because all like seven million of my games are already on Steam, and they can't be moved.
> "Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users," Ritchie says,
The metrics to win over Steam gamers aren't hard - and it could be done with another well-funded and like-minded CEO. The problem is that the metrics that Steam wins with are for users, not board members, not C-suite, not investors, not shareholders. Valve is no saint, but they are pretty damned close to as close as a capitalist can get.
Steam created a platform that works for developers, gamers and the platform itself. It is managed well. They pushed Linux gaming. They are not perfect and monopolies are dangerous but currently they are beneficial for the gaming community as a whole. They have not won capitalism they just have a consistent product that they didn’t enshitify to squeeze out ever short term earnings they can. I only fear that at some point someone greedy takes over and ruins it. Epic failed to create a proper alternative even with a good example and many many years of time to iterate on it.
Wow. What propaganda. People use Steam because Valve isn't evil. It's as simple as that.
Epic is evil. They're at the bleeding edge of in-game gambling with microtransactions. And they actively compete with their customers. Epic has even used their position with the Epic engine to clone a business customer's game and release it for free in their walled garden. As a gamer Epic stole the game Rocket League from me after I purchased the native linux version from the company Psyonix. Then Epic bought Psyonix and said there'd be no changes to Rocket League. 6 months later and no linux or mac clients people bought could play the game. Epic just buys game companies and puts their games behind it's app store and/or gives them away for free to try to lock people into their app store. They're abusive and exploitive and they constantly lie and make things worse for every game they buy.
People don't like that kind of behavior from Epic so they chose not to use their products and app store. This is just crybullying from Epic.
Forgot to add to my own post, but itch.io is fantastic too for all the other indie stuff I want. Does feel like Steam, GOG and itch cover off most things required across the ecosystem.
It's not cool that they successfully made themselves a rent seeker on PC game installation because gamers below a certain age didn't want to learn how to click on setup.exe. We needlessly gifted them a closed platform where it had previously been open in a way that Playstation (for example) is not.
You're completely missing the fact that they established themselves as a trusted e-shop, with consumer friendly policies, in a day before people trusted PayPal. It had a lot less to do with 'not wanting to click setup.exe' and more 'Mom trusts Steam because her coworker told her it's safe' to a generation of kids without CCs.
I think Roblox, Minecraft, WoW, LoL, and Fortnite all prove it's fully possible to operate outside that closed platform and see success, as well.
Only up to a certain point. Valve still doesn’t recognise inheritance and people dying as a very real thing.
They expect families to just throw away dad’s login details because he died.
I understand that this is most likely the licensing legalese they have in place that forces it this way, but it really is time that someone in the EU took Valve to court to test this.
Difference here is that absolutely nothing is stopping you from still distributing your game that way. You are not forced into the Steam marketplace nor must you to be successful (ex. Starsector), it's simply generally good business to do so.
As a small game developer, the steamworks SDK takes care of so many things I no longer have to care about. I don't have to run NAT punching infrastructure, I don't have to run a presence server and matchmaking services, handle user PII, cloud saves, workshop mod hosting (which can get very large with texturing and media), etc etc. It has an attractive value as a game developer too, not just as an end-user.
The largest games of all time never came to Steam - Minecraft and Roblox. but their launchers are light and accessible - Pretty close to Steam in terms of experience, even though they are filling with ads and bloat more recently. GTA V took forever to leave the awful Rockstar launcher and suffered for it.
Having played through literally every era of PC gaming, back to typing "mode co80" to play Zaxxon on my IBM PC... this is bunk. Steam is fantastic, and the first place I go to for most gaming. In fact, I get annoyed if I can't go to Steam in some cases.
They are currently a very benevolent monopolist: they don't seriously compete with publishers that use their platform. They only occassionally produce a great Half-Life or DOTA game as a some sort of "halo effect" demo to encourage the industry to move forward (e.g. to show how VR is done right with Half-Life Alyx). Avoiding releasing Half-Life 3 might have been good for their neutral role. They are like a TSMC of game distributors, who explicitly promised not to compete with their customers.
They remain one-stop shop for games. The gamers don't have to weigh down their systems with a bunch of different bloated game stores, each "needing" several GB of memory occupied at all times and adding minutes to machine startup.
Not to mention conflicts between a bunch of different anti-cheat and anti-piracy technologies on the same machine. And stores with bad UX (e.g. that make you suffer additional wait screens or naggings; Steam is as unobstructive as it gets).
Compare that to Netflix: at the begining, it was a "one stop shop" for movies, it had a lot of classic movies and TV for reasonable price. When the concept was proven, the production houses revoked the license for content. Competition came to the sector and each movie production house set up their own subscription based streaming service. You need to keep paying a whole bunch of services if you want to be able to keep up with all popular TV production or watch classic movies.
So, the competition would in theory be great. But even if stores didn't have subscriptions, the gamers don't want to fill their personal data, check privacy settings, configure, troubleshoot, debloat, ... a different app store for each game. When people have a slice of time to play, they don't want to deal with all of these.
I'm sure that when Valve forgets what keeps them successful and start becoming a Netflix, the Steam store will get replaced.
They arent publicly traded so they can choose to not be assholes. Gabe intentionally chose this route, he only answers to customers.
Non-founding shareholders are the root of all evil
I wish more companies would choose to do this honestly.
And also hope that laws wont kill such companies
https://www.palladiummag.com/2026/09/22/wealth-taxes-could-k...
I mean, is it not possible to sell a small % of your shares to cover the tax?
Moreover, you could create a multi-tier share structure where controlling ownership belongs to the founder whereas financial interest in the business belongs to the holders of other equity flavors, which is fairly common (e.g. Meta, Snap are structured this way).
Then the founder can [choose to] sell those cash-flow-stocks while holding on to the ownership stock.
It's utterly hyperbolic to suggest that a wealth tax would kill privately-controlled corporations.
Why was this downvoted?
Well, they may never even may be able to "become a Netflix" because the practical-slash-IP situation is so different.
Apparently, the world is "used to" the way intellectual property works (or doesn't work, depending on your view) for TV shows and Movies, in a way that probably wouldn't fly for video games; which is to say -- in both you're going to have to compete against "free" or "on the internet" or whatnot. I suspect monopolizing video games is much harder than TV and Movies (probably because we're so beholden to arguably odd copyright ideas?")
> I'm sure that when Valve forgets what keeps them successful and start becoming a Netflix
By your own reasoning, Netflix did not 'become a Netflix' by doing anything wrong.
True, there's a hole in my reasoning. Netflix became today's Netflix probably not due to its own fault, but because of inherent characteristics of its market. Its much easier to move browser-consummable media (video, music, ...) around different stores than locally installed software. It's much easier to disappear certain show or video.
Browser also severely limits the bloat, mutual compatibility and privacy issues (and also Android and iOS up to certain extent). This makes technologically much easier to have a bunch of different content stores on the same device.
Steam can absolutely be replaced. There's lots that could be improved in the process of sifting through tens of thousands of games to find the ones I want to play. I have Epic's store installed on my gaming PC as I still play Fortnite. It has none of the things I want improved over the Steam experience. Literally none.
Put up or shut up Epic. I'm unemployed so you can hire me to do it for you, but I'll bet you'd rather just whine about it.
I've never seen a large business whine as much as Epic does, and they pick fights with their biggest partners all the time, too. If anything capitalism seems broken because they remain around.
Okay, if steam is holding gaming back, why hasn’t an alternative emerged? Apparently Valve maintains healthy margins after taking a 30% cut. What’s stopping other companies from taking a smaller cut and passing the benefits to consumers. Gamers are notoriously complaining about high costs of games, I’m sure that’s a viable strategy?
Valve also allows non exclusive distribution on PC. Games don’t have to launch on steam exclusively. Why do others not capitalize on that?
Seems like it’s mostly a “grapes are sour” argument pointing to valve and saying they’re greedy enough to allow us to profit.
PC Gamers literally just don't want to use a second launcher so it doesn't matter what you offer them. See how Epic offered games for free and it still didn't matter.
See also how it took Epic like five years before they implemented adding more than one item to your cart at a time. And how they have no forums, no reviews, barely a friends' list, terrible game integration (always-on unmutable voice chat lol), etc etc. Their product just sucks, simple as that.
I used Epic Launcher for a while, and very seriously used their store. Their free games did bring me over initially but I was happy to spend money..
Except that the experience just sucked. It was mediocre. My biggest gripe is that launching games was really slow, the store was kind of painful in lots of little ways and it was sort of annoying to deal with them in general.
Maybe they fixed those issues but it was too late to retain me. I literally repurchased the games I was still playing on steam which didn't have those issues.
At some point, in the early days, Steam was a bit rough. I remember a summer where occasionally steam would stop launching and you had to reinstall it (back when it was a blocky dark green app). But Steam got over those teething pains and has been really high quality since.
Itch.io is great, I don't use their launcher (just haven't tried it) but I use them and enjoy them. Their checkout experience is fairly sane. It's not as if I refuse to use other platforms.
But Epic just lowkey was not a great platform.
There's a little more to it than "just a launcher." My Steam account dates back to the release of Half-Life 2. Loads of games, thousands of dollars spent, and a service that's been reliable for over 20 years. Why would I use a different service? I'm not unique, everyone else using Steam is in the same boat, just with less time invested.
They've undoubtedly locked us all in, but they've shown themselves to be trustworthy and reliable.
The article answers your question in the first paragraph.
First para:
> A former Epic Games developer is calling out Steam users, saying that they wouldn't move on from Valve's store even if a better alternative emerged.
Second para:
> Kiaran Ritchie, former principal animation engineer at Epic Games kicked off discussions surrounding Steam's 30% sales cut last week (with the assertion that "you could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week"). Which in-turn led noted Steam hater Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to assert that "Valve has held gaming back for years" – because the person whose company proudly asserted it had "vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher" knows what's holding gaming back!
Third para:
> Ritchie elaborated on their opinions on the 30% cut in a separate post, with the post saying that while developers are paying 30% in order to access Steam infrastructure, "in reality it is purely to get access to the massive Steam userbase." He adds "PC developers have no option but to distribute through Steam or lose the vast majority of sales."
Curious, where does it answer my question in the first paragraph? Could you elaborate?
Well as a linux gamer, I'm ok with this. Nobody has been more successful at getting linux to be a first class gaming platform.
if by gaming your mean mandatory root kits sold as anticheat
Id software did much more, and much earlier, for linix gaming
Anticheat doesn’t work on Linux (and neither do the games that support them) so I’m not sure what you’re taking about.
Most do. The mentioned rootkits don't.
Don't play the games that have anti-cheat then? There are so many other games to play.
I know idsoftware ported their key 3-4 titles to linux back in the glory days.
What else did they do?
Do you have a better solution for cheating?
> Valve could easily lower the distribution fee while maintaining healthy margins.
I'm sure that's true, but Steam did reduce their take for games making over certain thresholds: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/03/valve-changes-revenue-shar...
Presumably, that was a response to other storefronts/launchers appearing, which means the competition did force them to change behavior. Companies don't give up revenue without cause.
Once you have a sufficient good solution that you like, you will not switch to another sufficient good solution unless you are highly motivated to switch. It can not be just 5% better or 10% better, it needs to be meaningfully better so that you are motivated to undergo the switching cost.
Part of that switching cost is your purchased game library only works with the platforms you purchased it from. A fact that currently greatly benefits mostly Steam on desktop platforms.
So I do expect that a court case in the future will be Epic Games suing Steam in order to have "game portability" between game platforms.
I think there's not a lot of value in "launchers", at least to the end user. Like I might play a game for hours but spend at most a minute in the launcher.
I mean, I really appreciate how Steam Big Picture gives me a console like experience on my PC and how the Steam Deck works like a PS Vita or a Nintendo Switch. But really if I had to click on a desktop icon to play a game or find it the same way I find other applications on Windows, Mac or Linux, I'd just do it.
So I guess you could make a better launcher but there's only so much upside!
I'd say though it's a very San Francisco mindset to be obsessed with things like launchers: like wanting to have some space you can colonize to interpret everyone's experience. Next thing you know it is stuffed with ads and "discovery" in the store would be all about paid discovery, users would be trained that it's a terrible idea to go browsing for things in the store, like it is on Apple, etc.
I like this quote:
which points to Steam's ability to respect the gamer experienced because it's run by a gamer. Any company run by accountants is going to endanger that sweet 30% cut by eating the seed corn to get another 1%.> "Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users,"
I don't think that's necessarily true. If there was a launcher that was at least as good as steam in every aspect, and also had access to more games it would stand a chance of competing. Especially if its store also had lower prices.
> "Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about"
Agreed, I also would care about a Steam replacement if it were better. Metrics I care about and my perception:
- Hasn't rug-pulled my games or publishers in a significant way.
- Has contributed back to the community in a number of ways.
- Spent the last 20 years being (mostly) solid and reliable.
A lot of it is just how good the Steam launcher is. I hope the companies understand this. The only reason I use Steam over GOG or Epic or any alternative is because the launcher just works. It's fast. The Epic launcher, when I was forced to use it to play Borderlands 3, felt excruciating to use. GOG Galaxy is the same.
On the other hand every single time everyone is glazing over the unregulated gambling market created by Valve which is available to everyone regardless of their age and location. The whole empire is running on the Steamweb API and Valve could shut it down any single day if they want but they don't because... we know the answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling
I'm not a fan of that, either. But they have made gaming on Linux move from the Tux Racer days to the current state of almost every game I want to play is playable on my favorite OS, so I can cut them a little slack for previous obviously bad decisions. Compared to almost any other corporate overlord we might have had, they seem to me to be by far the best that we could reasonably have hoped for.
It is a problem yes. And usually whataboutism doesn't matter, but in this case it really does: have you looked at the microtransaction gambling in Epic properties? It's far, far, far more invasive, omnipresent, and required to play (like Fortnite). You can completely ignore the microtransactions aspects of Team Fortress 2 and it's great. You can't (literally, you can't) ignore the microtransactions and gambling in Fortnite.
> It's far, far, far more invasive, omnipresent, and required to play (like Fortnite)
Did they do something to Fortnite that I don't know about? I thought the only thing Fortnite did was allow pay-to-win in their community games (just like Roblox), otherwise the main game is still cosmetic only like Valve's games.
The criticism is right in a vacuum, but suppose that Epic Games got their way and successfully replaced Steam. Then what? We'd just end up with a new corporate landlord over PC gaming, albeit one that is also a private company and maybe charges lower fees, but has somewhat less proven reputation than Steam to not make future greedy changes to needlessly screw over users.
The issue is all the "replacements" are very studio specific. If they really were smart, they'd pull together resources, launch a new company under the competing studios support, and give themselves better pricing for games sold. They'd get more into their pockets, and a small cut to keep the new platform sustainable.
All I read in that article was another bunch of whinging from EPIC again. If they want to displace Steam, than they are going to have to put in 110% effort to at least make the same thing Steam is, or better. So far they haven't tried hard enough and failed miserably. Saying you can replace Steam with a quick bit of vibe coding really misses the point in what Steam covers.
Here's a few things Steam does: - Digital store - Cloud features for saving, achievements etc.. - Multiplayer and social tools. Discussions, guides etc.. - User workshop for mods, which is just amazing for the games that support it fully - Streaming and remote play - Library sharing with the family - Offline access - Mobile access - Steamworks for developers - Proton for Linux, just fantastic, and how I use the ecosystem today
There are probably more things I have missed, but I don't know of any other platform that does the above?
If Tim and his team spent as much time on making their platform better than on whinging they might have something to compete with. He could have had another draw card with UT4 but he killed that, for his cash cow Fortnite. He put all his eggs in one basket and realises he doesn't have enough for an omelette now.
I would love another competitor and I think that is GOG, if they can keep up the momentum and stick to their difference, encouraging studios to release DRM free games. I use both platforms and I am happy with both.
They are probably right though, why would I move to another platform, when my whole library is already with Steam. I am not going to waste that money to use another platform, and I don't need or want the fragmentation that currently exists for streaming content. There is probably room for another successfull platform, Steam really does need proper competition to keep them on their toes.
dunno how to bullet list...
I don’t know if other services couldn’t have done that. I think the important bit is that I never feel shafted when I’m using Steam. Ever since the beginning I’ve been able to click purchase, and have a game downloadable within minutes to hours (depending on size). All the extra nonsense they’ve added has never stood in the way of that core experience.
> "you could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week"
I don't know much about the person who said this, but it strikes me as missing the point of what we do when we build products: you could vibe code Steam the program in a week, sure. You can't vibe code the trust Steam has in a week, nor can you vibe code the two-sided ecosystem they've built in a week.
I think that, realistically, the first step to real competition to Steam in the PC digital storefront space is the inevitable IPO of Valve software. It's only a matter of time.
Steam can absolutely be replaced if they fuck up. The thing is, they don't. Even GOG (which is my prefered platform for oldies) and itch.io (which is my prefered platform for indies), which are smaller and thus have less bloat and should iterate quicker didn't manage to install interesting feature Steam has added over the years. Remote play especially, as someone who bought in ~2019 128GB or RAM and a titan RTX (yeah, bad investment at the time, though i'm happy now when i see the cost) for his server and want to play on another computer, on a different room, was the best thing that ever happened to me.
And of course as a primary 4X multiplayer gamer, the "join game" button on steam profile is something every platform should look to implement (once they have a correct mod workshop equivalent).
I recently switched to 100% pirated games (I own copies) on a permanently offline Win10 box. I started to enjoy gaming again when I did. Everything just works, no bullshit.
Previously I used Steam. I have ~700 games in my library. I now purchase from my phone.
That being said. This is a Microsoft forced solution. I refuse to use Win11 or online Windows anything.
Epic, which used to receive my business, changed the privacy rules to access my purchases and was blacklisted on my network as a result. Sunk cost be damned.
Anything can be replaced. Epic went out of their way to be blacklisted and Steam did not.
It's not even about wanting other stores to fail, which I don't. That's an unproductive line of thinking for anyone, I believe.
My Steam account is old enough to drink. I've had it for some two-thirds of my life, not even adult life but life entirely. All of my games are already there. It's like if a friend invited you to come play video games in 1989 but he doesn't have the cool NES games you want to play, they're all back at my place. What, we're gonna play Clu Clu Land all day? Give me a break.
Even if I was to switch to Epic, outside of the supposed altruism of "We take less of a cut from developers!" what is the benefit for me as a gamer, or as a consumer? The Epic Games Store has very few games I can't get elsewhere, even on console, and the experience compared to Steam is just lackluster. It just is. Valve has had a lot of time to iterate on it, and Steam was absolutely despised for the first several years of its life, but the experience of using the two platforms could not be more different. Beyond that, if I do switch, I still need to have Steam installed because all like seven million of my games are already on Steam, and they can't be moved.
> "Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users," Ritchie says,
The metrics to win over Steam gamers aren't hard - and it could be done with another well-funded and like-minded CEO. The problem is that the metrics that Steam wins with are for users, not board members, not C-suite, not investors, not shareholders. Valve is no saint, but they are pretty damned close to as close as a capitalist can get.
You couldn't get a competitor financed.
Steam created a platform that works for developers, gamers and the platform itself. It is managed well. They pushed Linux gaming. They are not perfect and monopolies are dangerous but currently they are beneficial for the gaming community as a whole. They have not won capitalism they just have a consistent product that they didn’t enshitify to squeeze out ever short term earnings they can. I only fear that at some point someone greedy takes over and ruins it. Epic failed to create a proper alternative even with a good example and many many years of time to iterate on it.
>Epic failed to create a proper alternative even with a good example and many many years of time to iterate on it.
not to mention the money (hundreds of millions) spent on securing exclusive launches.
The same could be said about any social media or content hosting and discovery platform.
Wow. What propaganda. People use Steam because Valve isn't evil. It's as simple as that.
Epic is evil. They're at the bleeding edge of in-game gambling with microtransactions. And they actively compete with their customers. Epic has even used their position with the Epic engine to clone a business customer's game and release it for free in their walled garden. As a gamer Epic stole the game Rocket League from me after I purchased the native linux version from the company Psyonix. Then Epic bought Psyonix and said there'd be no changes to Rocket League. 6 months later and no linux or mac clients people bought could play the game. Epic just buys game companies and puts their games behind it's app store and/or gives them away for free to try to lock people into their app store. They're abusive and exploitive and they constantly lie and make things worse for every game they buy.
People don't like that kind of behavior from Epic so they chose not to use their products and app store. This is just crybullying from Epic.
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The biggest moat of Steam is not being greedy assholes.
GOG is doing fine. itch.io is good enough.
Epic is just crap and it shows.
Forgot to add to my own post, but itch.io is fantastic too for all the other indie stuff I want. Does feel like Steam, GOG and itch cover off most things required across the ecosystem.
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It's not cool that they successfully made themselves a rent seeker on PC game installation because gamers below a certain age didn't want to learn how to click on setup.exe. We needlessly gifted them a closed platform where it had previously been open in a way that Playstation (for example) is not.
You're completely missing the fact that they established themselves as a trusted e-shop, with consumer friendly policies, in a day before people trusted PayPal. It had a lot less to do with 'not wanting to click setup.exe' and more 'Mom trusts Steam because her coworker told her it's safe' to a generation of kids without CCs.
I think Roblox, Minecraft, WoW, LoL, and Fortnite all prove it's fully possible to operate outside that closed platform and see success, as well.
> with consumer friendly policies
Only up to a certain point. Valve still doesn’t recognise inheritance and people dying as a very real thing.
They expect families to just throw away dad’s login details because he died.
I understand that this is most likely the licensing legalese they have in place that forces it this way, but it really is time that someone in the EU took Valve to court to test this.
People use steam because they actually like the software. It isn't a big mystery.
Difference here is that absolutely nothing is stopping you from still distributing your game that way. You are not forced into the Steam marketplace nor must you to be successful (ex. Starsector), it's simply generally good business to do so.
As a small game developer, the steamworks SDK takes care of so many things I no longer have to care about. I don't have to run NAT punching infrastructure, I don't have to run a presence server and matchmaking services, handle user PII, cloud saves, workshop mod hosting (which can get very large with texturing and media), etc etc. It has an attractive value as a game developer too, not just as an end-user.
The largest games of all time never came to Steam - Minecraft and Roblox. but their launchers are light and accessible - Pretty close to Steam in terms of experience, even though they are filling with ads and bloat more recently. GTA V took forever to leave the awful Rockstar launcher and suffered for it.
Having played through literally every era of PC gaming, back to typing "mode co80" to play Zaxxon on my IBM PC... this is bunk. Steam is fantastic, and the first place I go to for most gaming. In fact, I get annoyed if I can't go to Steam in some cases.
Like many other terms, "Rent seeker" has lost all meaning. A company providing an innovative and superior service is now "rent seeking".
>because gamers below a certain age didn't want to learn how to click on setup.exe
launching the installer/game is probably one of the least impactful components of steam, and certainly not why it got popular