DeeBeeDoublePOV: You are the money on my bank account
Resplendent606The Gaben worship is just PR for a monopoly.
moomoomoo309I don’t really think steam is anti competitive, their product is just so much better than the competition that they’ve earned a monopoly position. Whenever another company has tried to dethrone steam, it’s lacked features or didn’t allow refunds or didn’t run on Linux or didn’t work as well with controllers - valve is just so far ahead on steam, it’d be monumentally difficult to catch up.
That’s still a monopoly
Basically, Valve is too big to compete with at this point, because any competing product needs to be more perfect out the gate for people to even consider using it. Which is hard to do when you are not as entrenched and don’t have the kind of money Valve has.
Raw wealth doesn’t matter as much as market capture. Valve makes more money per employee than almost any company in history. They don’t need Microsoft’s billions because they already own the toll booth for the entire PC industry. When you control the only road everyone has to drive on, you don’t need to be the biggest car company.
Valve makes almost $50 million per employee, raking in more cash per person than Google, Amazon, or Microsoft — gaming giant's 350 employees on track to generate $17 billion this year
Valve's unique approach to corporate governance is probably the reason why it's such an efficient company.
Not to mention those companies have divided priorities. Valve’s main income is Steam, they have a vested interest in keeping their product dominant. Microsoft and Epic simply don’t, because their stores are only side projects that incentivise their main income sources. But that’s not to say I want to substitute Steam with some other corpo giant’s latest money grab either.
The bigger question is why more consumer-friendly stores like GOG that sell DRM-free games can’t compete with Steam. High profile games have no incentive to release DRM-free versions of their titles on GOG because the bigger store where they make more money encourages DRM.
Valve gets a lot of clout in the Linux sphere because their adoption of open-source platforms is better than their competitors, and we have the mindset of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, but this is also what we were saying about Google and Android 15 years ago and we can see how that is shaping up. Something something “you either die a hero…”
TruscapeGOG can’t compete because their current strategy is blue ocean compared to Valve - they sell indie and older classic games at reasonable rates with the good hook of DRM-free downloads. Other than that, they don’t really have any way to really challenge Steam, and in my personal opinion that’s fine. Steam does have relatively lenient DRM policies (the real problem is companies that add additional stuff like Denuvo onto their game), but obviously can’t emulate GOG’s policies without alienating a ton of devs, and GOG can’t copy Steam’s policies or the same would happen with their existing users.
And Google, Amazon, Apple.
Steam peaks at ~40-45 million concurrent users so far. The Switch sold over 150 million units. Of course, there’s no way to know what the peak concurrent switch users were, or the total count of unique steam users from 2017-2025, but I still think these numbers are good indicators that Steam is NOT the gigantic monopoly that the vocal minority of haters think they are.
Just because they haven’t used the power they have doesn’t mean they should have it. A benevolent monopoly is still a monopoly, and we’re essentially just betting that a billionaire’s interests will always align with ours.
What’s your proposed solution? Open source can’t really fix this - distribution of proprietary games isn’t really geared towards FOSS. If all competing products are worse, why would anyone switch? Valve isn’t using any underhanded tricks to keep users on Steam, they don’t need to. Their competitors actually could catch up, theoretically, valve hasn’t pulled up the ladder. It’s just a matter of, y’know, making a product nearly as good as Steam, which is a monumental undertaking.
The idea that they don’t use tricks is not true. Valve’s “Price Parity” rules stop other stores from competing on price. For instance, if a dev tries to pass their 12% Epic savings onto the customer, Valve can kick them off Steam, where 75% of their revenue lives. That is a massive underhanded leverage.
Also, it is not just about making a better product. It is switching costs. Because our libraries and social circles are locked into a proprietary ecosystem, we aren’t choosing Steam every day. We are just stuck there.
The solution is not for a competitor to build a “more perfect Steam,” that is impossible because Valve has a 20 year head start on our data. The solution is mandated interoperability.
We need a system where:
- Digital ownership is portable. If I buy a game, I should be able to launch it on any client, not just the one I bought it from. My library shouldn’t be hostage to one company.
- *Social graphs are open. * I should be able to chat with my Steam friends from a different launcher, just like I can email a Gmail user from an Proton account.
- Price competition is legal. We need to ban the Price Parity rules that stop other stores from offering lower prices.
We did this with cell phone numbers (you can keep your number when you switch carriers) and the EU has been doing this with messaging apps. There’s no reason we should not do it for our multi-thousand-dollar game libraries.
My proposed solution isn’t necessarily FOSS, it is interoperability. We should be able to own our digital goods and social graphs independent of one billionaire’s storefront. Just because he’s been a nice gatekeeper so far doesn’t mean the gate should exist at all.
First of all, yeah, price parity sucks…but also the only thing it changes is that simply being cheaper isn’t an option. From my PoV all it does is it forces competition to compete on features. Which they all fail to do.
Also, it is not just about making a better product. It is switching costs. Because our libraries and social circles are locked into a proprietary ecosystem, we aren’t choosing Steam every day. We are just stuck there.
Friend, steam literally alows you to load games outside of steam. You absolutely can still rely on steam friends when playing even pirated games. Steam literally allows you to do it. And having more than one store installed, while not comfy, isn’t a sin - we are choosing steam due to it’s services - controller support, linux support, inbuilt forums, friend network, robust review system, robust return policy, great user support, and probably even more that I don’t know about due to being more niche.
The solution is not for a competitor to build a “more perfect Steam,” that is impossible because Valve has a 20 year head start on our data. The solution is mandated interoperability.
Again, bull. Let’s look at competition, sans “We only sell our own games” stores.
- Epic Store - Literally antithesis to all you wrote. They push free games for you to build your library, buy exclusives to remove the forced price, advertise themselves as much as they can to push through steam’s domination…but they don’t support anything aimed at consumers. They don’t give a diddly doo about you. Thus, they fail…better yet, managed to piss people off.
- GOG store - They tried to innovate and find their niche and…they did it. Oh my, it’s like if you actually offer something it gets apprwciation from clients. It’s small compared to steam and doesn’t offer that much client-side, but with what they offer, they found themselves in stable position and with good public opinion.
- Itch.io - Similiarily to GOG, they used a niche and created sctually somewhat rich ecosystem there. And again, similiarily to GOG, they achieved stability. Supporting both comments and forums and alloeing creators to be close to their community, they became great place to start up and test waters. But they lack friend networks (AFAIK), game invite integration and all that. Although it seems they are okay with their niche…also I believe that their shop actually did chomp that niche away from steam, so they prove that competition is possible.
And just to be clean - I am not against your interchangable library idea, although I am not really for it either. I just really disliked how you described steam as some monstrous entity holding people by ransom.
I appreciate the civil discussion, but I think you’re confusing “convenience” with “freedom.”
You mentioned adding non-Steam games, but that’s just a shortcut. You lose the “Join Game” buttons, the cloud saves, and the lobby invites. That is the definition of a social moat. You can leave, but you’re socially penalized for doing so.
As for competition, the fact that GOG and Itch.io have to hide in tiny niches just to survive proves my point. When the #1 player has 75%+ of the market, they don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be too big to leave.
My solution of mandated interoperability is exactly how we fixed the phone industry. You can switch carriers and keep your number. We should be able to switch launchers and keep our friends and games. If Steam is truly as perfect as you say, they should have nothing to fear from a system where users are actually free to leave. A benevolent gatekeeper who refuses to unlock the gate is still a gatekeeper.
You mentioned adding non-Steam games, but that’s just a shortcut. And it’s exactly how I mentioned it. It’s simply a way to use some of steam features - for free - even if you use different shop. Their controller support, friend list, library access. A limited amount of access but nonetheless, yet again, something they provide that they don’t have to and other shops (except GOG I believe?) don’t support.
You lose the “Join Game” buttons, the cloud saves, and the lobby invites. That is the definition of a social moat. You can leave, but you’re socially penalized for doing so.
Cloud saves should be handled by whatever alternative you choose, and both join game and lobby invites should be ideally handled by game - that’s how it began, didn’t it? Steam simply offered option for games to extend it to friends chat out of the game. And hell, today even Discord of all things has something like this.
As for competition, the fact that GOG and Itch.io have to hide in tiny niches just to survive proves my point. When the #1 player has 75%+ of the market, they don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be too big to leave.
I admit, bad wording on my part. But while Itch relies on niche, in GOG’s case I meant their initiative of saving old games. Other than that, they are really competing as a full alternative. And…I just learned GOG does not publish it’s number, huh. But they are constantly growing from what I saw published, so evidently, you can throw gauntlet at Steam and do well. And I just learned that they aren’t really that for on feature parity, with library integration being something unique, huh. No wonder people on lemmy praise it xD
My solution of mandated interoperability is exactly how we fixed the phone industry. You can switch carriers and keep your number. We should be able to switch launchers and keep our friends and games. If Steam is truly as perfect as you say, they should have nothing to fear from a system where users are actually free to leave. A benevolent gatekeeper who refuses to unlock the gate is still a gatekeeper.
I just want to underline, again, that this is the first time I am facing that point and thus, have no opinion of my own yet formed, so I am not gonna say anything as it would simply be reductive. First reaction is mixed from me - number is one thing, forcing a store front to suddenly have to change contracts with game providers, clash with legal and all that to essentially allow you to carry over hundreds of products seems iffy. On the other hand, these are just copy keys at the end of the day so the only question is how easy would it be contract-wise? Dunno. And that’s why I am witholding forming an opinion as of now.
At the end I wanna mention only that our talk made me look up some stuff about both GOG - which I now appreciate a lot more, they really are closing in feature-wise to steam - and phone operators. The second one especially was a weird thing to discover. I was a kid when the number carry-over came to be and, honestly, believed it was some weird marketing strategy…fun to know it was one of early EU thingies.
It is awesome that you looked into the phone number carry over history! That is exactly the kind of forced change that everyone thought would be impossible or “iffy” until it became law. Now, we can’t imagine a world without it.
To your point about the difficulty: the reason it feels “iffy” is that we’ve let these stores build walled gardens. The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is already solving this for other tech sectors. It mandates that gatekeepers provide APIs for Real-Time Data Portability.
If Valve was designated a gatekeeper, they wouldn’t have to hand out keys manually, they would just have to allow a secure, standardized way for you to prove to GOG or Epic that you own the game.
You are right that GOG is doing great work, but the reason their Library Integration is often buggy is that they are scraping data that Steam doesn’t want to share. My point is that we should not have to rely on GOG’s clever workarounds. We should have the legal right to our own data.
If we move from a world of stores to a world of protocols (like email or phone numbers), the best product wins because it is actually better, not because it is holding a $2,000 library hostage.
They are anticompetitive, just not in an obvious way that is antagonistic toward consumers.
But the Steam platform does not maintain its dominance through better pricing than by rival platforms. Instead, Valve abuses the Steam platform’s market power by requiring game developers to enter into a ‘Most Favored Nations’ provision contained in the Steam Distribution Agreement whereby the game developers agree that the price of a PC game on the Steam platform will be the same price the game developers sell their PC games on other platforms.
While I’m willing to forgive requiring price parity when it’s a steam key, which will ultimately be redeemed on Steam and utilize all of the services provided by Valve, this should not apply to other platforms that distribute the game themselves.