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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.
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.
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.
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
I think they were viable but nobody trusts EA and Activision with keeping the game they buy.
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?