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Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad?
(www.digitaltrends.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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even the article itself touches on the fact that devs are mad, multiple times. the 30% cut is outrageous and discoverability is awful and easily sabotaged by review trolls. one of steam's biggest draws are it's sales, which have led to an extreme devaluation of indie games- anyone charging more than 20 bucks is considered to be overcharging while AAA games climb higher and higher in price. those same AAA games are often only available on steam
to their credit, the work they put into proton and them making that publically available was excellent of them. it's also good that they never tried to latch themselves onto the NFT and AI bandwagons. other than that, though? even if there was such a thing as a good monopoly, valve certainly ain't it
I dislike that a lot of the games are tied to needing to have the steam client open, also the steam client is a non-controllable aspect on my computer that I own. I can modify (with extensions and browsers) any experience I have online...except steam. I also don't like "leasing" games as that's all they do.
Last note is just I dislike putting any faith into a company to "do good" or to remain with their status quo. Companies are not "good", they are a service provider and shouldn't be anthropomorphized as such for being "good guys" or a company that "Cares"^tm^. The very fact that people are defending it by being sticklers of true definitions of a "monopoly" but hand-wave away the affects it has on the industry makes me concerned it will only become a bigger problem later on.