Steam is a self perpetuating monopoly because people love having all of their toys in a single place. Just one more confirmation that it’s pointless to try to compete until regulators take a look at this situation.
Every other platform is simply worse. The only one who even tries to be better is GOG, of which they do a good job for DRM free, which gets sales from me.
My question to you is: why would anybody buy something other than on those two platforms? There is not a single advantage to Epic’s or Amazon’s game store I can think of. They don’t have good Linux support, they don’t have a good review system, they don’t have forums, they don’t have mod delivery systems, they don’t have any better sales, they don’t have family sharing, they don’t have in-home streaming.
Edit: And don’t get me started on the Microsoft store…
About the linux support, not only its bad, they seem to actively hate it. Some games after getting bought by epic(like rocket league) lose their Linux support
ahhh damn. It was a post from the person that submitted the wine merge request for Adobe installer support. In it was a screenshot of a steamdeckhq post about his WINE patch he did and Tim Sweeney having a mocking reply to the post about Linux and Adobe users. The dev was celebrating that Tim for whatever reason got a bit triggered about people celebrating his work to get the Adobe installer working in WINE
I hope their Android store offers a good experience and succeeds since Play Store just sucks. But Valve pretty much made Linux gaming, if you saw what it looked like before they got involved you would understand. And they are the only big video game company that still does some good stuff in addition to the bad stuff.
Epic burned 95% of their good will among gamers, if not all of it. They allowed play 2 earn and other crypto shit just to be contrarians, delisted and ended support for old Unreal games and are pretty much just The Fortnite Studio at this point, which itself is seen as an amalgamation of everything wrong with gaming by some, they struck exclusivity for highly anticipated games so that people have to buy it from them, stories of crunch and Tim defending and supporting every new technology gold rush including Grok producing fucking CSAM.
It’s not hard to see why people have so much animosity towards them.
Indies don’t release there either. I wrote about an observation in this comment thread - small devs are no longer releasing their games outside of Steam because they need all sales to go into one pot - if they split it between stores they rank lower in the only store that matters.
They don’t have to. You don’t need to abuse your monopoly to be a monopoly (although Valve does in different way). Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price despite having lower cut. In the end customers and developers lose.
There’s also the question of what happens when Gabe dies or retires. Unless he’s a secret communist and has plans in place to make it into an employee coop it’ll be sold by his estate to private equity.
Your screenshot doesn’t support your text, and from what I recall they say that:
if you put your game on sale cheaper elsewhere (but are selling steam keys), you need to have a similar (not even identical) sale on Steam at some point.
You can’t undercut Steam’s price and sell the freely generated CD keys that add the game to a steam account elsewhere for a lower price.
That’s it. It’s actually about the CD keys, not the game itself. There’s no rule about selling the game on another store, using that store.
Found the doc I was thinking of. They actually just say “a worse deal”, so it’s not even about a lower price.
Your screenshot there seems to be quoting this page, in fact.
My point is that they absolutely don’t enforce pricing, that was something one dev said in a lawsuit and you’ll notice they didn’t get agreement from people. You’re welcome to check the documentation out, or find any other source that isn’t bad reporting based on a lawsuit that wasn’t successful?
Yeah it totally has nothing to do with proton, steam input, steamvr, mods, remote play / together, family library sharing, flexible refund policies, or the multitude of other things that other stores don’t do.
They take 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales. Sony uses that kind of money to sell PS5 at half the cost, employing 3 Linux devs is the least Valve can do.
Can you please outline for me what the policy was before and after the EU intervention? It’s my understanding that it changed nothing about the actual refund process, which has always been flexible, but was purely about the wording during checkout. Correct me if I’m wrong. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t refund a game that I played less than 2 hours, and I’ve been on steam for 17 years.
Edit: Looking at the EU regulation, it appears they don’t actually require Steam to offer refunds once you download/play the game. So their longstanding global policy is better than what is required by EU law. I believe they EU action just forced them to parrot the stricter EU refund guideline (14 days without downloading) during checkout, meanwhile they still provide their regular relaxed policy of allowing you to download and play for up to 2 hours and still refund it within 14 days.
Maybe if you had an egregious example of a game not functioning at all, they might issue a one off. But I was denied one trying to refund one of the cod black ops games that crashed within 10 mins of starting a match for weeks until they finally patched it.
I’m in France. Local implementation of the EU law may be different in other countries (that’s how EU laws work) but here every digital content store, including Steam, just has you ticking the box that says “You agree to no use your legal period of 14 days to cancel this purchase”, and then they can do whatever they want.
Steam’s refund policy is their own. And though it’s mostly a good thing for customers, in my opinion, it’s also an attempt to defuse some valid criticism. Easier to keep not controlling any of the broken or zero effort unity tutorial/asset flip shit that gets released on the store routinely if you can tell people “just refund”.
I wouldn’t mind using other services if any of them were competent. Steam gives me one-click Linux support for Windows titles, massive control reconfiguration capabilities, and a full suite of the normal expected features: achievements, cloud saves, forums, etc. Name me any competitor who even comes close. They dominate because they put in the work. Everyone else wants their slice of the pie but won’t bother to develop features worth using.
If epic put money into bringing linux gaming decades ahead of where it was instead of hating on it I would have jumped ship even if they didn’t make linux supported hardware that lives on my recliner.
Nobody cares about Linux, it has user share close to a margin of error in a poll of 1000 people. Valve employing 3 Linux devs doesn’t offset damage to consumers and devs.
and the bulk of the users can enjoy being forced to upgrade to hardware with even more spying being the only difference just to run a shittier version of their old operating system rental cloud compute and game streaming. I’ll reassess when gabe dies or if they start firing off u.s. politics level red flags but worst case I have drm free/stripped copies of every game I might play again or recommend on offline hdd and tape.
literally just said I would reasses if he died OR things went that way
and literally every other company is aready doing their version of ‘that’ to their clients but yes lets attack the ones that haven’t yet then if they do I guess we can switch back to ignoring it like the rest of them
Aren’t you bothered by the fact that most Valve games these days rely on gambling for monetisation? Aren’t you bothered they don’t make an effort not to advertise gambling to children unless forced to like in Netherlands or Belgium?
that should absolutely be regulated globally and it better damn well include roblox and literally every gacha and shooter game too. Parents should really be doing the wallet voting and politician mailing there but I’ve seen dads quiet their kids by letting them roll gacha on the phone while waiting to pay for food and when I told my friends about the pedos on roblox situation they told me off saying I don’t know what its like to have kids… When the parents are happy to feed their children to the machine what the fuck can I do about it?
GOG. If you’re a solo player, this is the place, for no other reason than their highly principled mission to do DRM free games. No, it’s not all the games, but even so. That and supporting CDProjekt appeals, to me anyway.
GOG has recently been sold to one of its original founders so it no longer has any ties with CDProjekt. Purchasing games on it now means you’re supporting GOG itself, which is nice.
Why do you think epic gives games away for free? They thought this was the main factor so they decided to build a library for you to not want to leave, but it turns out that it isn’t the only reason people like steam. I have a huge library on epic now (99% free giveaways), but I still would prefer to buy a game on steam especially if they utilize the steam workshop.
“no, you can’t have community page! Stop developing Proton and Lepton! You have to stop doing sales and deny more game from being sold in your platform and be generally shitty to your customer just so Epic Gamestore can catch up!”
I epic hasn’t done anything but the bare minimum plus trying to buy their way into the market. Additionally, I don’t trust them a single bit. If they actually managed to get market share they should enshittify before you could blink.
I have even less nice things to say about all the other publisher run marketplaces.
GoG is cool because of their DRM policy and preservation. Steam provides labels for anticonsumer practices so consumers can be informed and does the cool stuff for Linux compatibility.
What exactly are you wanting regulators to do that you think will make people want to use EGS?
EGS is used as an example. They don’t charge devs until they earn $1M so you’d think games would release there at least but we now have many many Steam exclusives. It’s gotten to the point where indie games release demos on Itch.io but don’t release full games outside of Steam because they need algorithmic momentum there.
Check out EU DMA and how it impacts gatekeepers like Valve (even if Valve somehow dodged that label, probably because their finances are private).
Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).
Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.
If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.
Thank you. I’m not against any of that, except maybe some definition needs to be applied to what is infra and what is store. For instance, a big part of what people like about steam is that they have reliable reviews. That would need to remain true with this split. I think there is a fine line to walk between enforcing interoperability and compromising or letting other companies leech on steam for no reason. You also seem to be implying that regardless of what store you purchase something on, you can access it from any other store because steam manages the licenses? Seems strange to me.
It’s not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Valve owners were rewarded handsomely for this already, there’s no reason for this to continue until heat death of the universe because there’s not that much value added that they provide now.
It’s cool that they pay salaries of like 3 Linux devs and piggyback on Wine work that Codeweavers funded for the past 30 years. You’d think there’s so much more they could do with 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales however which is why they need competition.
Details of such breakup can be ironed out but it’s important to keep in mind that this option exists and was used before successfuly.
In a scenario where I will own all of my games on Epic, and more than I own on Steam, I would still not use Epic, lol. Learn about the value some time.
The only better alternative (for me) would be a bunch of DRM free stores feeding their catalogues to an open source front-end that has everything that Steam already does.
Like Heroic, Lutris, Playnite, etc. But way more developed features and with official vendor support and a built-in unified store that supports all catalogues in the same view, like a federated marketplace.
That would be the only thing capable of moving me away from Steam completely.
Steam is a self perpetuating monopoly because people love having all of their toys in a single place. Just one more confirmation that it’s pointless to try to compete until regulators take a look at this situation.
Every other platform is simply worse. The only one who even tries to be better is GOG, of which they do a good job for DRM free, which gets sales from me.
My question to you is: why would anybody buy something other than on those two platforms? There is not a single advantage to Epic’s or Amazon’s game store I can think of. They don’t have good Linux support, they don’t have a good review system, they don’t have forums, they don’t have mod delivery systems, they don’t have any better sales, they don’t have family sharing, they don’t have in-home streaming.
Edit: And don’t get me started on the Microsoft store…
About the linux support, not only its bad, they seem to actively hate it. Some games after getting bought by epic(like rocket league) lose their Linux support
Saw this today from the guy that did the WINE development to get the Adobe creative suite installers working
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qidql1/it_appears_that_i_have_rage_baited_tim_with_my/
“Removed by moderator”
ahhh damn. It was a post from the person that submitted the wine merge request for Adobe installer support. In it was a screenshot of a steamdeckhq post about his WINE patch he did and Tim Sweeney having a mocking reply to the post about Linux and Adobe users. The dev was celebrating that Tim for whatever reason got a bit triggered about people celebrating his work to get the Adobe installer working in WINE
I hope their Android store offers a good experience and succeeds since Play Store just sucks. But Valve pretty much made Linux gaming, if you saw what it looked like before they got involved you would understand. And they are the only big video game company that still does some good stuff in addition to the bad stuff.
Epic burned 95% of their good will among gamers, if not all of it. They allowed play 2 earn and other crypto shit just to be contrarians, delisted and ended support for old Unreal games and are pretty much just The Fortnite Studio at this point, which itself is seen as an amalgamation of everything wrong with gaming by some, they struck exclusivity for highly anticipated games so that people have to buy it from them, stories of crunch and Tim defending and supporting every new technology gold rush including Grok producing fucking CSAM.
It’s not hard to see why people have so much animosity towards them.
I saw what it looked like. We had native ports and Wine (rebranded as Proton by Valve so that it looks like their own product).
EGS is just one store. Devs don’t even bother releasing games outside of Steam and you can’t make the same argument against GOG or Itch.io.
Pointless to try competing? I guess we’d know if there was ever a real competitor on the field.
There’s GOG, there’s Itch.io. What’s wrong with them?
GOG recently got on my radar since I heard they’d be focusing more on Linux support
Even if GOG gets Linux support it won’t make the devs come there.
I don’t mind not having large games, even if it ends up being an indie fest I’d be very content with that
Indies don’t release there either. I wrote about an observation in this comment thread - small devs are no longer releasing their games outside of Steam because they need all sales to go into one pot - if they split it between stores they rank lower in the only store that matters.
Valve is a private company. Are they going around buying out competition like an end game capitalist?
They are where they are at is because they do what they do well and people have voted with their wallets.
One of the few times capitalism has “worked” and all because it’s not a publicly traded company.
I really wonder where we would be if most big companies were not on the stock market as opposed to being on it.
They don’t have to. You don’t need to abuse your monopoly to be a monopoly (although Valve does in different way). Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price despite having lower cut. In the end customers and developers lose.
There’s also the question of what happens when Gabe dies or retires. Unless he’s a secret communist and has plans in place to make it into an employee coop it’ll be sold by his estate to private equity.
He’s definitely not a communist, but there are other ways to choose a successor for a company.
Obvious falsehood. Did you just choose to omit relevant nuance? The post is literally about games which are free on EGS and non-free on Steam.
It’s the first point of agreement Valve signs with a dev publishing on Steam.
Your screenshot doesn’t support your text, and from what I recall they say that:
That’s it. It’s actually about the CD keys, not the game itself. There’s no rule about selling the game on another store, using that store.
Found the doc I was thinking of. They actually just say “a worse deal”, so it’s not even about a lower price.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3
Your screenshot there seems to be quoting this page, in fact.
My point is that they absolutely don’t enforce pricing, that was something one dev said in a lawsuit and you’ll notice they didn’t get agreement from people. You’re welcome to check the documentation out, or find any other source that isn’t bad reporting based on a lawsuit that wasn’t successful?
Yeah it totally has nothing to do with proton, steam input, steamvr, mods, remote play / together, family library sharing, flexible refund policies, or the multitude of other things that other stores don’t do.
They take 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales. Sony uses that kind of money to sell PS5 at half the cost, employing 3 Linux devs is the least Valve can do.
They’ve been doing way more than employing 3 Linux devs.
That thing they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to enact under threat by the EU?
Can you please outline for me what the policy was before and after the EU intervention? It’s my understanding that it changed nothing about the actual refund process, which has always been flexible, but was purely about the wording during checkout. Correct me if I’m wrong. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t refund a game that I played less than 2 hours, and I’ve been on steam for 17 years.
Edit: Looking at the EU regulation, it appears they don’t actually require Steam to offer refunds once you download/play the game. So their longstanding global policy is better than what is required by EU law. I believe they EU action just forced them to parrot the stricter EU refund guideline (14 days without downloading) during checkout, meanwhile they still provide their regular relaxed policy of allowing you to download and play for up to 2 hours and still refund it within 14 days.
Before? Their policy was: we don’t issue refunds.
Maybe if you had an egregious example of a game not functioning at all, they might issue a one off. But I was denied one trying to refund one of the cod black ops games that crashed within 10 mins of starting a match for weeks until they finally patched it.
And even that was an upgrade from: never.
I’m in France. Local implementation of the EU law may be different in other countries (that’s how EU laws work) but here every digital content store, including Steam, just has you ticking the box that says “You agree to no use your legal period of 14 days to cancel this purchase”, and then they can do whatever they want.
Steam’s refund policy is their own. And though it’s mostly a good thing for customers, in my opinion, it’s also an attempt to defuse some valid criticism. Easier to keep not controlling any of the broken or zero effort unity tutorial/asset flip shit that gets released on the store routinely if you can tell people “just refund”.
And yet, they still beat out their competitors on this front.
Nope
I wouldn’t mind using other services if any of them were competent. Steam gives me one-click Linux support for Windows titles, massive control reconfiguration capabilities, and a full suite of the normal expected features: achievements, cloud saves, forums, etc. Name me any competitor who even comes close. They dominate because they put in the work. Everyone else wants their slice of the pie but won’t bother to develop features worth using.
If epic put money into bringing linux gaming decades ahead of where it was instead of hating on it I would have jumped ship even if they didn’t make linux supported hardware that lives on my recliner.
Nobody cares about Linux, it has user share close to a margin of error in a poll of 1000 people. Valve employing 3 Linux devs doesn’t offset damage to consumers and devs.
and the bulk of the users can enjoy being forced to upgrade to
hardware with even more spying being the only difference just to run a shittier version of their old operating systemrental cloud compute and game streaming. I’ll reassess when gabe dies or if they start firing off u.s. politics level red flags but worst case I have drm free/stripped copies of every game I might play again or recommend on offline hdd and tape.„Gabe wouldn’t do that to me”.
literally just said I would reasses if he died OR things went that way
and literally every other company is aready doing their version of ‘that’ to their clients but yes lets attack the ones that haven’t yet then if they do I guess we can switch back to ignoring it like the rest of them
Aren’t you bothered by the fact that most Valve games these days rely on gambling for monetisation? Aren’t you bothered they don’t make an effort not to advertise gambling to children unless forced to like in Netherlands or Belgium?
that should absolutely be regulated globally and it better damn well include roblox and literally every gacha and shooter game too. Parents should really be doing the wallet voting and politician mailing there but I’ve seen dads quiet their kids by letting them roll gacha on the phone while waiting to pay for food and when I told my friends about the pedos on roblox situation they told me off saying I don’t know what its like to have kids… When the parents are happy to feed their children to the machine what the fuck can I do about it?
If gambling can be regulated then why not monopolies? This was more to point out Valve won’t behave unless forced to.
GOG. If you’re a solo player, this is the place, for no other reason than their highly principled mission to do DRM free games. No, it’s not all the games, but even so. That and supporting CDProjekt appeals, to me anyway.
GOG has recently been sold to one of its original founders so it no longer has any ties with CDProjekt. Purchasing games on it now means you’re supporting GOG itself, which is nice.
Dec 2025
https://www.gog.com/blog/gog-is-getting-acquired-by-its-original-co-founder-what-it-means-for-you/
Why do you think epic gives games away for free? They thought this was the main factor so they decided to build a library for you to not want to leave, but it turns out that it isn’t the only reason people like steam. I have a huge library on epic now (99% free giveaways), but I still would prefer to buy a game on steam especially if they utilize the steam workshop.
I wonder what the regulator will make steam do.
“no, you can’t have community page! Stop developing Proton and Lepton! You have to stop doing sales and deny more game from being sold in your platform and be generally shitty to your customer just so Epic Gamestore can catch up!”
EU seems to have the right idea with Digital Markets Act.
I epic hasn’t done anything but the bare minimum plus trying to buy their way into the market. Additionally, I don’t trust them a single bit. If they actually managed to get market share they should enshittify before you could blink.
I have even less nice things to say about all the other publisher run marketplaces.
GoG is cool because of their DRM policy and preservation. Steam provides labels for anticonsumer practices so consumers can be informed and does the cool stuff for Linux compatibility.
What exactly are you wanting regulators to do that you think will make people want to use EGS?
EGS is used as an example. They don’t charge devs until they earn $1M so you’d think games would release there at least but we now have many many Steam exclusives. It’s gotten to the point where indie games release demos on Itch.io but don’t release full games outside of Steam because they need algorithmic momentum there.
Check out EU DMA and how it impacts gatekeepers like Valve (even if Valve somehow dodged that label, probably because their finances are private).
Would you buy a game on EGS instead of Steam? And why?
Or, you could just answer by question directly
I’ve done so in this community it repeatedly over the course of ~2 years. If you don’t want to make an effort why would I.
If you already have an answer then copy paste it. If you already have an answer then why do this weasel dance? You clearly don’t have an answer.
Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).
Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.
If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.
Thank you. I’m not against any of that, except maybe some definition needs to be applied to what is infra and what is store. For instance, a big part of what people like about steam is that they have reliable reviews. That would need to remain true with this split. I think there is a fine line to walk between enforcing interoperability and compromising or letting other companies leech on steam for no reason. You also seem to be implying that regardless of what store you purchase something on, you can access it from any other store because steam manages the licenses? Seems strange to me.
It’s not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Valve owners were rewarded handsomely for this already, there’s no reason for this to continue until heat death of the universe because there’s not that much value added that they provide now.
It’s cool that they pay salaries of like 3 Linux devs and piggyback on Wine work that Codeweavers funded for the past 30 years. You’d think there’s so much more they could do with 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales however which is why they need competition.
Details of such breakup can be ironed out but it’s important to keep in mind that this option exists and was used before successfuly.
In a scenario where I will own all of my games on Epic, and more than I own on Steam, I would still not use Epic, lol. Learn about the value some time.
The only better alternative (for me) would be a bunch of DRM free stores feeding their catalogues to an open source front-end that has everything that Steam already does.
Like Heroic, Lutris, Playnite, etc. But way more developed features and with official vendor support and a built-in unified store that supports all catalogues in the same view, like a federated marketplace.
That would be the only thing capable of moving me away from Steam completely.