Lmao valve is hardly a defacto monopoly unless you want to be so incredibly granular about what specific market they're a monopoly in as to be entirely pointless.

I personally get most of my games from GOG and itch.io these days. And I've never bought anything from the Epic store whatsoever.

I will say though that I find it kind of weird how much hate Epic gets for their store. Like, I understand that someone prefers Steam, or doesn't want to buy stuff from Epic etc. - but what we see goes way beyond that. Epic has people actively campaigning against it, as if its mere existence is insulting. I don't really get why.

As for the 30% cut... Developers will try to price their games competitively, and within customer expectations. So with or without Steam's 30% cut, you can expect games to be similarly priced. The large 30% cut from Steam is basically coming out of the developer's revenue rather than from your pocket. (I'm under the impression that GOG also has a similar 30% fee. Epic has a lower fee. And on itch.io the seller gets to choose how money goes to itch.io anywhere from 0% to 100%. So itch.io is the best deal for developers in terms of fees.)

I will always support valve because of their amazing Linux support but if GOG finally made a client for Linux then I would try to use that more. I wish Epic would also support Linux but with massive douchebag Tim Sweeney running the company, that will never happen.

I get it. Steam doesn't seem to do exclusivity deals with 3rd party titles. So you could still sell your game on gog and humble without issue.

A monopoly is a monopoly. Just because Steam is a good store today doesn’t mean they deserve to hold a monopoly over the pc gaming market. So what happens when Valve has crushed every competitor? Gamers and devs have nowhere to go if Steam turns to shit. Eventually there will be a change of guards at Valve’s C-suite when Gaben retires or is dead. There is a good chance that those new execs will hollow out Steam and extract all the value out of it for their own benefit by screwing over the customers and developers. And they can get away with that if there is no competition. Competition is what keeps Valve in check.

Actual unpopular opinion: I don't give a fuck, I want my launcher to launch my games, all of them do it, Steam just comes with a shit load of extra stuff I don't care about. I buy my games where they're the cheapest and with all the free games on Epic I rarely use Steam anymore. If they're the same price I'll go with the platform that give the devs the biggest share of the profit and that's not Steam.

Edit: See? That was the unpopular opinion..

I buy all my games on Epic Games Launcher becomes it has less DRM than steam. If you have kids, they can't play 2 completely different games on two different computers.

It's like your kid not being able to play Mario kart on her switch because her brother is playing Halo on Xbox in another room. Steam doesn't support that. Epic games doesn't have a problem with you having 2 different games being played on 2 different computers, so I buy my games there whenever I have the choice because it's the more consumer-friendly platform.