Valve: Has reasonably priced games on sale frequently

Makes the Steam Deck

Actively supports Linux, both for VR and regular gaming

Has the best customer service out of any competitor

Has the best store experience out of any competitor

I mean.....it's not surprising that they're a monopoly, but that doesn't make them a bad one.

In general, I'm not a fan of steam. I know i know, I'm saying this in THE steam community.

Steam is DRM, its terrible drm that can be bypassed with an easily downloaded crack tool, but drm nonetheless.

If a game I want is on GOG I will gladly get it there over buying it on steam.

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've been seeing a fair amount of discourse lately that Gabe Newell might be the only reason why Steam is a benevolent monopoly, and it's why I only buy games on Steam when there's no other option, when they're not otherwise available on GOG and Itch.io.

Because Steam says for now that they'll have a failsafe in place to make our games playable even if the company goes under. Steam doesn't nickel and dime people, for now. Steam is doing important work for Linux, for now. Our profiles are fun and customizable like the internet used to be, for now. Steam's DRM is so light it hardly exists, for now. But what's going to happen to our huge libraries when Gabe retires or dies?

I hate that I even have to think this way, but I for one don't want to have all my eggs in one basket, especially when the competitors' policies are doing more to protect users right now.

Well, since I use Linux, Steam is the only platform that cares about my money. The competition chose not to support my system.

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.

As long as Steam keeps giving me a great platform that doesn't suck, as long as they continue to push Linux gaming forward, I'll keep sending them money.

People misunderstand the issue with monopolies. Monopolies, by themselvs, are non-issues. It's what they do in their position of monopoly that can be illegal, through anti-competitive behavior. Steam does none of that BS

Remind people that a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing a monopoly to prevent competition and using a monopoly as a means to create unfair market conditions in other categories - Windows and web browsers in the past or Apple's monopoly on iOS software distribution.

Consoles are even more restrictive than an iPhone is still in the US and was in the EU. Complain about Steam all these devs and people want, unless it can be proven that Valve is using their market share to stop other companies from competing well, it's a moot point calling them a monopoly. That Wolfire lawsuit when I read the initial court filings they put out was a joke. It was citing Twitter posts and blogspam articles citing anonymous forum posts

Steam was not the first PC digital distribution store. It wasn't even great until like 2006/2007. In the early days Impulse could have been competitive but Stardock sold it to GameStop who in dumb move of the last 2 decades did nothing with it. Desura did not improve. GFWL was terrible. Windows Store used to have issues with making storage unreclaimable without a reformat of the drive. Direct2Drive never improved. GamersGate just stayed a key seller. GoG was never going to grow without regular day one games which wasn't going to be competitive as DRM free. Humble Store stayed a key seller.

Amazon and Epic's idea was to just give away games. Ubisoft and EA stores barely even had games they didn't publish. So sparse I bet they didn't have self publishing tools. Those 2 puzzlingly regularly had issues maintaining login sessions persisting over time. PC gaming is dieing was the mainstream meme until like 2015. Epic on Android doesn't even have a library of owned games view and it's been almost a year since that released.

Valve didn't make Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Stardock+GameStop, Direct2Drive, ... all under invest and/or mismanage their PC game store platform efforts. It's not up to Valve to stop making the platform more appealing. EGS is 7 years old. Those other companies have been doing PC game stores for much longer. I remember buying and downloading PC games from Amazon before Prime gaming. It was just like Direct2Drive. Since 2004 Direct2Drive was always a storefront for any publishers game whereas Steam didn't start listing 3rd party games until 2005.

If any service was comparable to like end of 2013 Steam, that would easily be second best store platform. Instead every store is at best like 2010 Steam with nicer animations, bigger buttons. And today there's way more resources to make a competitor. More cloud service providers with mature onboarding tools. NPM install. A lot more open source databases. Kubernetes. Git. Etc. Should be able to do better than 7 year old Steam in 7 years from these companies that were far larger than 2002/2003 Valve when they got into PC game distribution. The big publishers were probably all wealthier than Valve up to like 2015

It's not Sony and Nintendo's fault that since the Kinect on the 360, Microsoft hasn't been able to manage their studios to be competitive with Nintendo and Sony studios

You don't say.

They don't have a monopoly. They just have the best platform. It offers a lot of quality of life features along with the games and rarely causes issues. I can't even recall them ever doing anything anticompetitive. There are other platforms available to purchase from if you don't like steam. GoG for instance. Or Epic if you want to support assholes.

Steam is naturally the only platform gamers care about because they're the only platform that acturally targers gamers, all other platforms target devs (except GOG who targets gamers that specifically want offline copies without DRM)

Then why aren't 72% of games on GOG.

They have the largest share and can direct the market/development, no question, but they not a monopoly. I think GOG has a good shot to complete as time carries on. At least while Gabe is still alive, they've been relatively ethical.

If the choice of largest developer platform is between Steam and companies like Epic, EA, or Microsoft, Steam still looks like a better alternative.

72% of devs meaning 72% of developers = people or 72% of developer studios = a bunch of suits?

75% of respondents were senior managers of C-suite level.

Ah ok, so pointless people. They could ask an AI...

Monopolies are just an effect of capitalism in its current form.
I'm more concerned with the games companies who aren't even monopolies, and are already seen as shit services run by shitty people (unless anyone actually likes Ubisoft, EA, and their launchers???)

Gamers have respect for Gaben, and I've heard more faith and less worry about his son taking over than practically the entire team of owners from Valve's competitors. They have a monopoly because it's a good service, and the fact that it's has a user base as big as it does shouldn't surprise anyone: they seem to be doing things right enough to not be a bother. That's what matters more than the inevitability of a business getting big - there's a lot more Nuance and that doesn't just magically happen, nor is just pointing it out helpful in sensible critique.