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72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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There's a difference between being feature-rich and popular and being a monopoly.
Call me when Steam is buying competing stores to shut them down.
Now, in terms of PC gaming monopolies, let me introduce you to "Microsoft".
I think there is a distinction to be made between being a monopoly and doing anti-competitive behavior.
Steam hasn't done any anti-competitive behavior that I am aware of, but they do have enough market power to be considered a monopoly. Consider how companies like EA and Activision tried to maintain competing platforms but caved because those platforms were not viable compared to Steam. That's monopoly power.
theres basically one anti conpetitive measure they hold primarily, and its the one that states the listing price of a game must be the same on all platforms policy. stops devs from having a lower listing price on other platforms.
other than that its usually other platforms shooting their selves.
I'm pretty sure that that only applies to steam keys being sold on other sites. If it's being distributed in some other form, it can be cheaper.
This “most favored nation” clause in contracts is huge! It means that even if another store takes half of Steam’s cut (say, 15% vs 30%), the game can’t be sold for less, meaning other rival stores can never compete on price. In other words, Steam drives up prices for games economy-wide. Amazon does something similar, and this was part of the basis the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against them.
Say I sold a game for $10 on Steam and GameStoria. With the 30% you suggest I would take home $7 from Steam and $8.50 from GameStoria. I make more with a competitor who is willing to take less and of their instead wanted to charge more, Steam would be more profitable.. The consumer doesn't see anything but a $10 game.
You must be joking
Bullshit. Being the most popular platform does not automatically make a monopoly, this is armchair lawyer nonsense.
It's true that I am not a lawyer, so feel free to not take what I say as what the law says. I think that the law certainly should consider Steam to be a monopoly with its level of market power, even if it doesn't currently.
From what I have heard from actual lawyers, monopolies are not currently illegal under US law anyways. They're only illegal when combined with anticompetitive practices. That's my best understanding as a non-lawyer, anyways.
Yes, this, so many people use words but don't know what they mean.
Yes, Steam is an effective monopoly.
You don't need to literally be the only possible option, the entire market, to be 'a monopoly'.
Economists very often refer to a company that has just a vastly oversized market share and other kinds of market influence, ws compared to the next comptetitor or set of competitors, as a monopoly.
Like uh, Walmart has a decent chance of having a local, effective monopoly on the grocery market, if you live in a whole lot of US cities.
And also yes, when it comes to anti trust law... yeah you generally have to do things that are either current anti competetive or anti consumer practices, of have done them in the past to acquire your monopoly status, to be broken up by a possible Sherman Act based action.
It is actually possible to become a monopolist without doing anything particularly uncommon in the market, or underhanded... its possible that just no one bothers to meaningfully compete with you untill its too late.
Failing to make a product that doesn't suck shit does not make a monopoly for your competitor.
In fact, Steam is de facto not a monopoly because of the very existence of GOG. EA and Activision tried to break in to this arena but failed to provide a product that actually switched people off of steam, because they failed to provide a comparable experience to steam. GOG did, and they're doing fine.
By this logic Google isn’t a search monopoly because DuckDuckGo exists, despite Google buying default placement in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc to make sure no other search provider can compete, with their bribe to Apple alone totaling $20 billion a year to maintain their search dominance. What do you think monopoly power is if not that?
Can you describe where Steam has done anything even approaching that, ever?
EA and Activision stores didn't fail because Steam bought them out and bullied them out of the market, they failed because they were trash products. Steam doesn't buy "default placement" in anything. They just have a good product that people want to use over alternatives.
Point out a situation in which Steam has acted anti-competitive and I might agree that you have a point, but I can't think of any situations to call out here.
Whether something is a monopoly or not is independent of anti-competitive practices. It's about market power.
If there's a genuinely good product that's popular because it's good. There's no need to step in and give shittier products more share in the market.
The point in breaking up monopolies is to be more fair for consumers. If you want to say they're technically a monopoly because they have a large share of the market then fine. But I don't see that as a bad thing until it starts abusing its power.
I agree that Steam is pretty good as it is, and there are certainly more pressing concerns. However, in an ideal world, what Steam does should probably be handled by the public sector because it's a natural monopoly. People like only having to go to one place to find their games, but that place doesn't have to be controlled by a for-profit corporation.
Videos games aren't like food or housing. If you want to buy a game you can look up all the different sites selling it and buy from which ever one you think is best.
If you're a game developer, then the ability to sell games does buy food and housing, and you sell a lot more games on Steam than anywhere else.
And if you want to sell on a good platform that platform is going to want to take a cut.
yes, it is "is independent of anti-competitive practices", a monopoly is when there is only one company providing a product or service
Um, there is more than one type of anticompetitive practice? Amazon uses predatory pricing to drive companies out of business, Microsoft uses tying to sell Teams, Google uses self-preferencing for their own services in search results, Facebook acquired Instagram rather than compete with them, etc.
One of Valve’s favorite anticompetitive cudgels is requiring “most favored nation” clauses in their contracts, prohibiting devs from selling for less on other storefronts (which Amazon also has used).
None of which are related to Steam nor has Steam done anything resembling any of these examples to my knowledge.
Valve prohibits people from selling steam keys for less on other storefronts which I think is perfectly reasonable. You can list your game on Steam for $20 and distribute it on Itch for $5 or even free and Steam has zero problem with this, so long as you aren't distributing steam keys via that storefront. This is to try and prevent a developer from leveraging Steam for advertisement purposes but making all their actual sales off-platform.
GoG has, like, 1/5th the market share of Steam. It's not nearly big enough to prevent Steam from having monopoly power. If Steam came out with a policy saying that games could not be on both Steam and GoG, the vast majority of devs would release on Steam. That's monopoly power which Steam has, regardless of whether they are currently abusing it or not.
If they do anti-competitive behaviour then that would make them a monopoly.
"Steam is so popular because they're good not because they're a monopoly"
"Oh yeah? Well what if Steam was a monopoly? They would be a monopoly then right!"
Even if there were literally no other competitors, GOG holding 1/6th of the market share (your words) absolutely precludes Steam from being a monopoly.
You're using a different definition of monopoly from what I'm using. To quote Wikipedia:
I'm using the latter of those definitions. I don't think it's particularly useful to only consider it a monopoly when there are literally no competitors. I think it is useful to consider it a monopoly when it has dominant market power. Steam's estimated 75-80% market share is dominant market power.
So how often does steam charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises?
One doesn't have to actually use a power in order to have that power. If I was carrying a loaded shotgun, I would have firepower. I wouldn't have to actually fire the gun to have firepower.
Also, one could argue (and Epic Games has) that Steam's 30% cut is overly high for digital distribution. I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but that doesn't really matter to the question of whether Steam has dominant market power.
I think they were viable but nobody trusts EA and Activision with keeping the game they buy.
Words don't matter. Do well and have a platform that most prefer? You're a monopoly. People don't realize that to be a monopoly you must be the only source and actively prevent access to or other sources of the same product. How many of those using the term monopoly regarding Steam have GOG Galaxy, Epic, Battle.net, and etc. installed on their machines, ya think.
Being the best does not a monopoly make!
Edit: Further, and speaking of Epic, I never heard of Steam paying devs to pull their games from other platforms for exclusivity deals.
Seriously. Part of the reason they're even so popular is because they aren't actively pursuing profit maxxing/enshittification business practices to corner the market and consolidate market share like every other one of these blood sucking cretins. They really are one of the extremely short list of corporations that ACTUALLY win in the marketplace because their product really is just that good. Running the steam deck with Linux, contributing to the development of Wine/Proton, and telling Microsoft to kick rocks has made me a Gaben fanboy for life. If Steam was the ONLY way you could purchase PC games, I'd honestly be fine with that, as long as Valve remains a private company under the iron fist of Mister Newell.
Remaining a privately held company is really the only protection from enshittification. Not a guarantee, mind you.
Gabe Newell is a man with a red button on his desk that, if pressed, will immediately grant him 11 figures to distribute as he pleases. It's labeled "sell Valve to Microsoft/go public". Newell hasn't pressed the button. Newell and his employees are satisfied with "making shitloads of money" and don't need to "make more shitloads than last year, forever".
I can reasonably say that Newell probably won't press that button during his lifetime. Similarly, I'd trust anyone with that button to hold onto it no matter what, because "if it's getting pressed, it should be me pressing it."
Once Newell dies, many bets are off. That's a really, really tempting button to press. There are very few humans likely to not press it.
Yep, exactly.
They don't have a board of investors demanding LINE GO UP FASTER, the way that say, MSFT did, demanding their games division hit a 30% profit margin for the last 5 years, and then I guess being surprised that that level of short term thinking blew it all up.
But, on the flip side... who the fuck knows what's gonna happen when Gabe either passes the torch or quits.
Hooray capitalism, lol.
Steam does force the sellers on their platform to not give better discounts elsewhere. So basically if you see a game that’s 20% off on steam and it is ATL, you won’t find it 30% off anywhere else.
Not necessarily a monopoly but definitely not allowing competitive pricing.
Now that I think about it, it’s probably why Epic has to go with the “timed exclusive” approach instead of just giving you a bigger discount.
Not actually true. They only require price parity for steam keys. Basically don't sell steam copies anywhere cheaper than on steam. Any other copy you can sell for whatever price.
I believe the clause applies to any storefronts as it operates on the MFN pricing principle.
But let’s say it doesn’t, and you’re correct and you could buy the same game on itch, gog, humble, epic, M$ store, ubi store, whatever else.
Did you ever actually see any of the stores promote better pricing on their first party platform? I haven’t.
Did you ever see assassins creed games being 5$ cheaper if you buy them on the ubi store as an example?
Same as the above for humble, epic, EA, Microsoft?
That’d be a pretty effective way to drive people to your storefront and drive first party sales with additional profit to the first party… and yet for some reason that practice apparently doesn’t exist.
I am almost 100% sure that’s not done out of the goodness of the shareholders hearts and has more to do with the legal spaghet of it all.
But at the end of the day the above is speculation, I have no concrete way to prove it one way or the other besides the limited observations that I’ve made over the years.
I had tracked ubisoft vs steam prices over the years, and usually if you wanted to pay less Ubisoft was the way to go for Ubisoft games.
Like Far Cry 6 $6 all time low on Ubisoft store and $11.99 all time low on Steam.
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/far-cry-6/info/
What do you mean it doesn't exist? Epic got me to download their launcher because they were selling gta 5 for free. How could I have found that out if I only play on steam???
They don't want to drive you to your storefront so that you get the games cheaper. They want to sell for the same price without paying commission. They want to pocket the difference, not give it to you.
I've never seen a reliable source display steam has price parity. Their steam key price parity however is very clearly displayed. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Even that isn't true which a quick search on isthereanydeals before buying games will show a lot of times when it comes to steam key prices.
Recent example is ARC Raiders. https://isthereanydeal.com/game/arc-raiders/info/
Current best price is 15% off for $34.17 versus $39.99 on Steam. And all time low was $31.92.
People are missing out on deals if they assume Steam store price is the lowest price for Steam games.
But the key price is the same, they giving you a discount. They can't change the price of 100$ to 80$ without giving a 20% discount.
They can set retail price to $1000 for all I care. As long as the actual sale price is $10 for instance is all that matters. And putting off permanent price for as long as possible to not devalue products and get more customers during sales due to thinking it is a deal is common strategy.
Its actually why when epic did coupons and covering the discount some publishers opted out because they didn't want their games to sell that low yet even if the profit taken is the same. Because they were aware price tracking sites would lead people like me to pass on future sales seeing that the price had been lower, so deciding to wait instead of "overpaying" compared to the all time low.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/teething-pains-for-epic-games-store-as-publishers-opt-out-of-debut-mega-sale-
It does matters because is how price parity works, promotions has a beginning and end date, it's not based on the lowest price at a time but in the consistency of the price.
I linked their own guidelines regarding steam key prices. They do require price parity with steam for steam keys. (with some exceptions)
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Key word being comparable as opposed to same. And its not even theoretical. Just looking at games from isthereanydeals which provides historical lows over the years from numerous storefronts shows that many games have had sales cheaper than Steam.
And personal experience too buying many steam keys over buying from Steam because the prices were lower.
You could try to argue how comparable means same, but I'd say how real world sales has steam keys lower than the steam store is what matters more, since its actually what we pay.
Not true. I just checked the first game currently discounted I know on GOG's front page: Ghost Runner. It's at -75% (7.49€) on GOG but full price (29.99€) on Steam.
Price parity doesn't mean no discounts. All games in all platforms are the same fucking base price, each store front applies different discounts for different products based on their metrics. The other guy is right, EGS doesn't get 30% cut like steam but their games is not 15%-20% cheaper, if they give you a 15% once in the blue moon doesn't mean shit.
Compare to lowest all time price on steam, not current price. Pretty sure it’s going to come out to the same.
Goal post.