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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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I don't know if I would say they're a monopoly there are other options/store fronts out there...it's just that the vast majority outside of GOG suck. in fact they all suck OTHER than Steam and GOG.
And as a Linux user...I ain't got much of a choice. Steam, now, just works for me. I don't even have to toggle the compatibility option anymore or hell even mess around with proton if I don't want to. install steam via whatever package manager or flatpak and i'm off to the races.
Anything other than Steam is unlikely to work. EA, Epic, and Microsoft have all essentially told me they don't want my business simply because I use Linux.
I think it qualifies as a monopoly because of the network effect of having so many users and so many games on it. Especially on the developer side, it's basically mandatory to release your game on Steam because the number of users you can reach is so much higher than any other platform.
That being said, it's not a monopoly that most people have a problem with because they generally continue to serve users well even though they have enough market power that they could enshittify things. If they were a public company they almost certainly would have done that by now.
You can sell your game for different prices on different platforms, you just can't sell steam keys that way. If you purchase a game on Itch and it gives you a steam key, that's still a steam purchase and is subject to this restriction. If you purchase a game on Itch and it hands you an installer then you can buy that game at whatever price they want to sell it at.
And yet Steam keys have been sold for less than Steam prices for over a decade.
Like the recently released ARC Raiders.
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/arc-raiders/info/
All time low of $31.92 vs $39.99 on Steam. Current low is $34.17 for a Steam key.
That’s just not true in practical terms. If you want your game to be discovered and you don’t have a massive advertising budget, it’s not a serious option to try to forego selling on Steam while staying in business as a game developer. That’s like saying Amazon isn’t an ecommerce monopoly because you’re not “forced” to sell there, even though that would mean bankruptcy and irrelevance for most sellers.
If Steam suddenly introduced a policy that prohibited devs from selling on other platforms alongside Steam, most devs would choose Steam because they would make way more money on Steam than elsewhere.
The power to do that is monopoly power, regardless of whether Steam is abusing that power currently. I think that their behavior on the whole is pretty good, but that doesn't make them not a monopoly.