Key distinctions between Steam and similar contenders in other spaces (google play store, the apple app store) are that:
1. Steam isn't bundled with the OS, it must be installed.
2. Steam isn't a gatekeeper to installing software (as the app store is and in a somewhat different way as google has proposed doing with their plans to require app signing).
At least the US, and I assume most legal schemes, require an attempt to monopolize, simply being the best player in town isn't enough. Perhaps if the steam deck, etc. achieved a high level of market dominance you could argue that bundling steam was anticompetitive, but I don't see it yet.
Valve has market power though, which is a key part of a monopoly.
If tomorrow Steam decided to charge 30% extra to developers with the stipulation that sticker price must equal that of outside Steam, developers wouldn't have much of a choice but to eat the cost, because PC gamers are extremely reluctant to leave their Steam library and features.
A good example of market power is Apple vs Spotify. When Apple launched Apple Music, they changed Music.app into Apple Music on every iDevice in the world, with a handy subscription pop-up the first time you launched it.
This was massively anti-competitive overreach despite Apple not technically being a monopolist. You can easily install Spotify, and Spotify was much bigger. Without making this move, Apple Music would have crashed and burned, but Apple basically forced themselves into the market, using their marketshare and user migration reluctance as a crowbar.
The fair competition thing to would have been to show a pop-up on first Apple Music app launch, asking "hey, would you like to try one of these streaming services?", and show Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and Deezer in a random order. Just like Microsoft and their browser pop-up.
Then again, aside from a decade of stagnation (2010-2020 Steam saw very few updates, until Valve started working on the Deck), Valve hasn't really abused their position. Gabe Newell famously said that piracy isn't a pricing problem, it's a service problem, and Valve is a private company, so as long as he is at the helm I assume Valve is going to continue delivering good service. After that.. who knows.
The even more anti-competitive thing Apple does vs Spotify and all competitors is avoiding app store fees, while forcing all competitors to pay them.
To have the same profit, Spotify has to charge $13/mo when apple music charges $10/mo with all else being the same.
That's very obviously the App Store monopoly being used to give Apple Music a massive unfair advantage that is practically impossible to break through.
Steam does not have anything like that, if someone else decides to make "Epic Game Launcher" tomorrow for PC, that new company doesn't need to distribute it on the "Steam App Store" and pay valve 30% of all sales.
This meant in apple music, the user could open the app and it would work including paid features.
In spotify, you could open the app and it would tell you "You can't subscribe here, sorry" and couldn't even link you to a webpage you could subscribe at.
I'm certain a non-zero number of users couldn't understand what to do with that apple-approved error and gave up.
Maybe there's a reason that apple lost in court for that one.
"Monopoly" is a distraction. The issue is abuse of market power. Having market power is fine. You can't punish people for being successful.
Steam doesn't abuse being successful to lock out competitors. You can sell products sold through Steam via other platforms too. You can sell outside of Steam and give your customers Steam keys for the game. You can install Steam on different platforms alongside other stores and programs.
Nothing Steam does makes it harder for consumers to buy games from Valve's competitors. That's what matters, not whether Steam is very successful.
To be clear, I don't think Valve has abused their position at all. I was merely musing on how they could. Which would operate on a similar concept as Apple did: "my users will stay in my ecosystem almost regardless of what I do."
A third difference is that I've seen no signs of steam actually abusing their standing in the market. If anything they seem to be nicer than they have to be.
They absolutely keep a larger cut than others. With Epic the first million you make is free. After much deliberation, steam changed it so that their 30% cut is reduced if you make more than 10M. For a lot of indie devs, its pretty much a death sentence.
I'd love for the cut to be smaller, but it is absolutely not a "death sentence." With traditional consoles (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft consoles, and those before them), the barrier to entry is very high. If you are an indie, it is practically necessary to work with a publisher to get on those platforms. The publishers demand their own cut (in addition to Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft), and as they are running a business, they only take on games that they expect will make a profit. In that environment, weird little developers making weird little games will almost always be shut down before they can even see the light of day. I think it is a little easier in the modern day (you don't need a blessed dev kit to make a console game, for example), but I think the barrier is still not trivial.
The PC games space has always been more open. If you had a weird game you wanted to share, you could share a disc with your friends or make it available on your website. But, again, if you wanted to make some decent money, you probably needed a marketing department and to have a boxed copy on store shelves (which, again, means working with a publisher). With a few exceptions, hardly anyone would ever find your game otherwise.
With modern-day Steam, an indie dev needs only to pay $100 to put a game on Steam (and I believe that $100 is refunded if the game crosses a certain threshold of sales). Discoverability is still a challenge, but just by existing on Steam, an indie game has a chance to make a bit of money. Steam itself has some discoverability features that can boost the visibility of even quirky little titles. The indie dev needs to do their own work, of course, to get visibility, but they don't need to have major resources behind them to get that visibility. They don't necessarily even need to host a website anymore - the game has a page on the Internet through Steam after all. The indie dev can direct anyone who will listen to them to go there.
All that said, I do agree that Steam is practically a monopoly. If Steam decided they hate you for some reason, then that's it. You almost certainly do not have a viable path forward for selling your PC game simply because they have such dominance (see the recent controversy where major payment processors suddenly decided they would not facilitate the sale of lewd games, and Steam reacted by pulling any game that seemed to fall into that category. Although, even in that case, the harmful monopoly tactics are coming from different actors in a different industry). For the time being, I just think they are kind of a benevolent dictator.
That's Epic using its money from other markets for loss leader schemes in order to grab market share. It's a very classic move (same as free games), and it's always detrimental to the market and customers in the long run.
It's not a good thing, epic games is a garbage company. That they're actively losing money to prop up their store should tell you how bad of a thing it is if it ever succeeds.
High prices are a sign of their competitors failing to compete. Are they using their standing to make competing with them harder, somehow? For example, they dont do Amazon style prohibitions of selling the product cheaper elsewhere.
Indie games pay for discoverabiliy (don't know if that's a word). To be clear, I mostly use GoG when I can, unless it's a multiplayer game with bad lobby/MP support (Firaxis/paradox basically)
Indie game development largely owes its existence to Steam. I know I would spend a lot less on indie games if I had to buy them from their own websites or, god forbid, through an awful laggy "app store" run by Ubisoft or Microsoft.
If competitors offer passable services for selling indie game developers, then indie game developers would be able to earn more money (due to competition).
This is why developers are hopeful for alternative services.
Your misunderstanding what monopoly means and represents.
Monopoly just comes down to marketshare, but it’s perfectly legal in the US to be a monopoly instead it limits what you’re allowed to do. For example a regular company can give a discount if you agree to only sell their goods, obviously that becomes problematic if the company has monopoly power so they are no longer allowed to have such agreements. The boundaries around what is a market trip people up, but it’s around what customers view as substitutes goods. If you don’t have a car then an EV can be a viable substitute, however if you have a gas car then you have some wiggle room on octane ratings etc but an electric car chargers isn’t viable substitute.
“In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises.[2] Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry (or market).[2]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
I'm still finishing my first read, but I really recommend Cory Doctorow's latest book [1] "Enshittification:Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It" which covers the subject of tech monopolies and much more.
Reading it I learned about the term "monopsony" which is "a market in which goods or services are offered by several sellers but there is only one buyer" which is usually conflated with monopoly.
This is really the key here. Many people are commenting their experience as a games buyers, but this article is about the developers. Monopsonies are usually linked to lower wages in labor markets. In this case lower profits for developers from selling their games.
Other developers can just make their own platform or distribute games themselves individually. Nobody wants to do that for obvious reasons.
There's clearly a network effect similar to Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and the likes. But apart from regulating for service interoperability, there's nothing you can do.
It's like claiming that Skype had a monopoly between 2008 and 2014. Just... Install something else then?
Valve is not buying other store makers nor actively sabotaging efforts to do so.
> Valve is not buying other store makers nor actively sabotaging efforts to do so.
This is really key, when you see Epic bribing devs to get exclusivity, giving away games for free, they do this and still not succeed because they are actively hostile to their users.
Where is my Big Picture mode?
Where is my support of Linux?
They've been at it for years and yet still don't actually want to provide a service that is desirable to use.
>because they are actively hostile to their users.
>Where is my Big Picture mode?
>Where is my support of Linux?
Calling the lack of linux and TV support "hostile" is bit of a stretch. The two combined probably makes up 5% of the user base at most, and there are probably workarounds (eg. using wine or the regular interface)
I'm literally waiting for Satisfactory to go on Steam sale so I can buy it again and not have to deal with the Epic launcher for one game I bought on sale when the store launched. :)
You're even allowed to sell your game cheaper on other platforms (not Steam keys, separate keys for those platforms) so by all means charge the 30% more on Steam if you need to.
>You're even allowed to sell your game cheaper on other platforms (not Steam keys, separate keys for those platforms) so by all means charge the 30% more on Steam if you need to.
How many people would even bite, given the huge premium?
> Other developers can just make their own platform or distribute games themselves individually. Nobody wants to do that for obvious reasons
Where "nobody" is specifically "no users". Lots of publishers tried doing exactly that, and most eventually gave up because users don't want to deal with extra launchers or platforms. Offering games on your own distribution channel is fine, but not being on Steam is going to hurt your sales a lot. Epic is really the only still-running attempt (except for GOG)
It take more than simply being the best or most successful business in a sector to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is an active choice you make as a business by intentionally engaging in anticompetitive behaviors.
Valve isn't putting any pressure on anyone in this sector. There is still competition, but Valve has simply been more successful than everyone else. Mainly because the alternatives are so, so much worse like EA and co who are actively malicious and predatory.
Valve hasn't done anything to pass an antitrust sniff test.
"Companies providing at least one of the ten core platform services enumerated in the DMA are presumed to be gatekeepers if they meet the criteria listed below. These core platform services are: online intermediation services such as app stores, online search engines, social networking services, certain messaging services, video sharing platform services, virtual assistants, web browsers, cloud computing services, operating systems, online marketplaces, and advertising services. One company can be designated as gatekeeper for several core platform services."
"There are three main quantitative criteria that create the presumption that a company is a gatekeeper as defined in the DMA: (i) when the company achieves a certain annual turnover in the European Economic Area and it provides a core platform service in at least three EU Member States;(ii) when the company provides a core platform service to more than 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the EU and to more than 10,000 yearly active business users established in the EU; and (iii) when the company met the second criterion during the last three years.
The DMA defines a series of specific obligations that gatekeepers will need to respect, including prohibiting them from engaging in certain behaviours in a list of do's and don'ts."
The arguments there match the Steam platform in my opinion, but it is likely Steam already fulfills the existing obligations of the act. Seems a fairly good approach to things, if you are a dominant player you get burdened with extra rules and scrutiny.
>It take more than simply being the best or most successful business in a sector to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is an active choice you make as a business by intentionally engaging in anticompetitive behaviors.
By that logic are Amazon and Whatsapp also not "monopolies"? Are they simply just the best e-commerce company and chat app respectively? What competitive behaviors are they employing against their competitors?
Amazon may be dominant in a couple markets but it is far from a monopoly in them. For online retail you have Walmart, Target, eBay, Newegg, and 100s of other well known retailers with third-party sellers trying to compete. On the data center side you have large players such as Microsoft Azure and Google GCP, and small ones like Digital Ocean, Hertzner, OVH, Vultr, and many others.
>Amazon sold products at a loss for years in order to capture market share
Selling at a loss on a cost of goods sold basis, or the entire business as a whole? I'm aware of the latter but not the former. The latter also isn't obvious "abuse", because it would include all sorts of market entrants, including eg. intel trying to enter the GPU space and making a loss because of R&D.
I do mostly agree with you that Steam is better as a storefront than all other ones out there, but in my opinion the Battle.net launcher is still my favorite game launcher edging out Steam because of how snappy it is.
Steam just sometimes feels really slow when launching for the first time or when switching tabs/pages (I do also have it just sometimes be just a black windows, but I haven't figured out the cause yet but it is the only window that does it, so...). In comparison B.net just feels decently snappy.
They are both effectively using CEF for their launcher, but since Steam starts so slow for me I always keep it in the background and its WebHelper taking up 414MB (rn, but its always in that ballpark) is not helping its case.
People favored Google as much as possible in the '00s and then they turned evil.
For games, I favor Good Old Games rather than Steam as much as possible and go out of my way to wait for releases on their platform. Whatever becomes of them, at least I'll have my downloaded DRM-free version of my purchases.
GOG proves you can still have a solid business in the space. Steam is dominant but not necessarily a monopoly. For all of its faults, Steam is still better than most competitors.
And PC gaming would be much, much worse without Steam. It would go to some publicly traded company. They would gain a monopoly anyhow, and then slowly start making every single part of the service worse and worse to increase shareholder profits.
Anytime I see the complaint about the 30% fee, I wonder what people feel would be fair for the service, because it also includes storage, distribution for new instalations and patching for older ones, along with generating keys to be sold at other stores.
Would people feel better with a lower fee, but no distribution network, for example?
Agreed. The Steam platform has so much value for developers and yet they still complain about the 30%.
To put into perspective, when Epic only takes 15%. They themselves admitted that is not a sustainable thing. EGS is constantly losing money.
So now I invite everyone to gauge just how "big" the EGS is. How many "features" they offer etc. This platform in so much smaller than Steam and even they state that a 15% cut is not sustainable to keep the light on.
Judging just how big the Steam platform is, do people honestly think Valve could be forced into reducing their cut to this proposed 15%? When this little hobbyshop that is EGS cannot make it work. Why would it work for a much much larger and therefore more expensive platform?
I am furthermore given to understand when you distribute on Steam you are free to run your own store front. You are free to create your own Steam keys for your games and sell them in your shop which is supposedly have a 0% cut for Valve.
Of course then you would have to run your own store with all the effort and cost that go along with it.
Or you simply put it on Steam. A storefront visited by millions of paying customers. Which handles everything. From purchase/refund/CDN for Downloading and updating the game binaries/communityhub to directly engage with the customers if you wish
In the end, the only way they are forced to use steam is because that is where the customers are. and since there are alternatives around, these customers could very well shop some place else. but they dont. they shop where they get the best experience. and if that is on steam, thats where they go.
If "developers" were really honest they would all disclose just how much they sold on Steam vs any other digital store front in case they distribute their offerings to any store that will let them.
Just because you get 4 sales on Epic vs 4 million sales on Steam does mean Steam is a monopoly. It just means Epic is a steaming pile and given the chance the customer goes to the better option.
30% on mobile platforms if generally frowned upon as source of massive overcharging compared to actual costs (since its a massive revenue & income stream for their owners), but somehow for Steam its fine because... they also generate keys? Or what should be the magical justfication.
No its not fine, its a cash cow milking customers. Valve may be better than their competition but they are not saints (same company basically inventing addictive lootboxes mechanism, albeit not in its worst possible form), its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.
Maybe they should have tiers ie 0-10% for first 5k sales, 20% above 100k etc. There are many options to be nicer to customers & developers.
It isn't overcharging on Mobile either IMO but the difference is pretty obvious: there is only one way to get your app onto an iPhone or an Android and that's through those stores.
PCs are an open platform. It is very different.
>its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.
And you base this on what? Nothing. It is a privately held company and you don't have access to its books.
Steam getting a 30% cut is certainly less objectional that Apple getting 30% because they've locked other people out of selling on iPhones.
On the other hand, that Steam taking as big a cut as Apple can claim because of their unfortunate practices isn't great.
Generally, the smallest indie creators, who aren't really likely to benefit from organic discovery on Steam, seem to priority selling on itch, which, by default, only takes a 10%, despite doing all the work you mention.
That Steam seems to have a marketplace monopoly based on network effects, and this allows them to claw money from all but the largest and smallest game developers is not something they have a strong right to claim to morally, and something society would benefit from doing away with. It appears that 72% of game devs feel that way too.
So, to answer your question, for me, two thirds of Steam's revenue seem unfair.
Maybe Steam and Apple deserved to obtain a partial monopoly but now they can just sit and relax and take 30% to copy/paste games/apps to each user that wants them.
So yes, 30% is high and unjust to the games creators who are doing the 2025 work.
No other service actually saturates my download speed. That's probably an expensive luxury that could be cut. Even netflix with their CDNs in every city tries to minimize bandwith and it results in terrible video quality-if it can even deliver it at all.
I would love for steam to offer even the complement:
Only distribution & SSO services, so I can have fast downloads and quick non-replayable-auth for games I buy/subscribe elsewhere (not subject to steam peculiarities about squeezing out maximum price for each region by purchasing power).
Of course, that would need to have a wildly different fee schedule than when they carry major legal & reputational risks plus more significant customer support volume.
You are free to install an alternative store, that probably has all the games that you are buying from Steam.
I can't do that with my iPhone.
They charge it because people use it voluntarily for the better customer and user experience. If Apple didn't provide their store installed by default, allowed alternative stores without manipulating their content and yet people still used it, it would be a closer analogy.
Steam is the most dominant because of their extremely customer friendly policies, their insane price crashes and the ease of publishing and installing games from the platform. If other platforms are able to provide all of that, with a commission below 30%, I'm sure they could easily take over.
But turns out, neither Epic nor EA are interested in serving the customer.
A 15–20% fee would be much fairer in my opinion. They’d still be making plenty of money while letting developers keep more of what they earn through their hard work. At the very least, they should differentiate between big players and smaller indie developers.
>Steam is the most dominant because of their ... insane price crashes
Are steam deals really better than on other platforms? They might have better deals compared to brick and mortar retailers but publishers generally have price parity across various digital storefronts (eg. epic vs steam), so attributing low prices to steam doesn't really make much sense. If anything steam is actually more expensive if you factor in authorized keystores (eg. greenmangaming), which are occasionally cheaper.
It doesn't feel that way to me, I know I could probably buy a game through another digital distribution service, maybe for a bit cheaper, but it's just not worth the hassle of installing another program, signing up, and configuring things
Key distinctions between Steam and similar contenders in other spaces (google play store, the apple app store) are that:
1. Steam isn't bundled with the OS, it must be installed.
2. Steam isn't a gatekeeper to installing software (as the app store is and in a somewhat different way as google has proposed doing with their plans to require app signing).
At least the US, and I assume most legal schemes, require an attempt to monopolize, simply being the best player in town isn't enough. Perhaps if the steam deck, etc. achieved a high level of market dominance you could argue that bundling steam was anticompetitive, but I don't see it yet.
Valve has market power though, which is a key part of a monopoly.
If tomorrow Steam decided to charge 30% extra to developers with the stipulation that sticker price must equal that of outside Steam, developers wouldn't have much of a choice but to eat the cost, because PC gamers are extremely reluctant to leave their Steam library and features.
A good example of market power is Apple vs Spotify. When Apple launched Apple Music, they changed Music.app into Apple Music on every iDevice in the world, with a handy subscription pop-up the first time you launched it.
This was massively anti-competitive overreach despite Apple not technically being a monopolist. You can easily install Spotify, and Spotify was much bigger. Without making this move, Apple Music would have crashed and burned, but Apple basically forced themselves into the market, using their marketshare and user migration reluctance as a crowbar.
The fair competition thing to would have been to show a pop-up on first Apple Music app launch, asking "hey, would you like to try one of these streaming services?", and show Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and Deezer in a random order. Just like Microsoft and their browser pop-up.
Then again, aside from a decade of stagnation (2010-2020 Steam saw very few updates, until Valve started working on the Deck), Valve hasn't really abused their position. Gabe Newell famously said that piracy isn't a pricing problem, it's a service problem, and Valve is a private company, so as long as he is at the helm I assume Valve is going to continue delivering good service. After that.. who knows.
The even more anti-competitive thing Apple does vs Spotify and all competitors is avoiding app store fees, while forcing all competitors to pay them.
To have the same profit, Spotify has to charge $13/mo when apple music charges $10/mo with all else being the same.
That's very obviously the App Store monopoly being used to give Apple Music a massive unfair advantage that is practically impossible to break through.
Steam does not have anything like that, if someone else decides to make "Epic Game Launcher" tomorrow for PC, that new company doesn't need to distribute it on the "Steam App Store" and pay valve 30% of all sales.
> To have the same profit, Spotify has to charge $13/mo when apple music charges $10/mo
Last I checked as long as an App Store is not handling subscriptions Apple doesn’t take a cut. Did that change?
Yes, subscribing outside the app does avoid the cut. Which is why you can't subscribe to spotify in the iOS app, you have to open a browser: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/cant-subscribe-to-pre...
Until this year, Spotify couldn't even tell you in the iOS app that you could pay for premium: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-05-01/following-landmark-c...
This meant in apple music, the user could open the app and it would work including paid features.
In spotify, you could open the app and it would tell you "You can't subscribe here, sorry" and couldn't even link you to a webpage you could subscribe at.
I'm certain a non-zero number of users couldn't understand what to do with that apple-approved error and gave up.
Maybe there's a reason that apple lost in court for that one.
> subscribing outside the app does avoid the cut. > Maybe there’s a reason Apple lost in court for that one.
The App Store as a sales channel isn’t a monopoly. The App Store as an installation method is.
It’s an interesting separation, but Apple really didn’t want to make that clear to customers which is probably why they lost.
"Monopoly" is a distraction. The issue is abuse of market power. Having market power is fine. You can't punish people for being successful.
Steam doesn't abuse being successful to lock out competitors. You can sell products sold through Steam via other platforms too. You can sell outside of Steam and give your customers Steam keys for the game. You can install Steam on different platforms alongside other stores and programs.
Nothing Steam does makes it harder for consumers to buy games from Valve's competitors. That's what matters, not whether Steam is very successful.
To be clear, I don't think Valve has abused their position at all. I was merely musing on how they could. Which would operate on a similar concept as Apple did: "my users will stay in my ecosystem almost regardless of what I do."
A third difference is that I've seen no signs of steam actually abusing their standing in the market. If anything they seem to be nicer than they have to be.
They absolutely keep a larger cut than others. With Epic the first million you make is free. After much deliberation, steam changed it so that their 30% cut is reduced if you make more than 10M. For a lot of indie devs, its pretty much a death sentence.
I'd love for the cut to be smaller, but it is absolutely not a "death sentence." With traditional consoles (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft consoles, and those before them), the barrier to entry is very high. If you are an indie, it is practically necessary to work with a publisher to get on those platforms. The publishers demand their own cut (in addition to Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft), and as they are running a business, they only take on games that they expect will make a profit. In that environment, weird little developers making weird little games will almost always be shut down before they can even see the light of day. I think it is a little easier in the modern day (you don't need a blessed dev kit to make a console game, for example), but I think the barrier is still not trivial.
The PC games space has always been more open. If you had a weird game you wanted to share, you could share a disc with your friends or make it available on your website. But, again, if you wanted to make some decent money, you probably needed a marketing department and to have a boxed copy on store shelves (which, again, means working with a publisher). With a few exceptions, hardly anyone would ever find your game otherwise.
With modern-day Steam, an indie dev needs only to pay $100 to put a game on Steam (and I believe that $100 is refunded if the game crosses a certain threshold of sales). Discoverability is still a challenge, but just by existing on Steam, an indie game has a chance to make a bit of money. Steam itself has some discoverability features that can boost the visibility of even quirky little titles. The indie dev needs to do their own work, of course, to get visibility, but they don't need to have major resources behind them to get that visibility. They don't necessarily even need to host a website anymore - the game has a page on the Internet through Steam after all. The indie dev can direct anyone who will listen to them to go there.
All that said, I do agree that Steam is practically a monopoly. If Steam decided they hate you for some reason, then that's it. You almost certainly do not have a viable path forward for selling your PC game simply because they have such dominance (see the recent controversy where major payment processors suddenly decided they would not facilitate the sale of lewd games, and Steam reacted by pulling any game that seemed to fall into that category. Although, even in that case, the harmful monopoly tactics are coming from different actors in a different industry). For the time being, I just think they are kind of a benevolent dictator.
> With Epic the first million you make is free.
That's Epic using its money from other markets for loss leader schemes in order to grab market share. It's a very classic move (same as free games), and it's always detrimental to the market and customers in the long run.
It's not a good thing, epic games is a garbage company. That they're actively losing money to prop up their store should tell you how bad of a thing it is if it ever succeeds.
High prices are a sign of their competitors failing to compete. Are they using their standing to make competing with them harder, somehow? For example, they dont do Amazon style prohibitions of selling the product cheaper elsewhere.
Indie games pay for discoverabiliy (don't know if that's a word). To be clear, I mostly use GoG when I can, unless it's a multiplayer game with bad lobby/MP support (Firaxis/paradox basically)
In what way do indie devs pay for discoverability? There's a $100 fee to be listed on Steam. Is there something else you are thinking of?
Indie game development largely owes its existence to Steam. I know I would spend a lot less on indie games if I had to buy them from their own websites or, god forbid, through an awful laggy "app store" run by Ubisoft or Microsoft.
If competitors offer passable services for selling indie game developers, then indie game developers would be able to earn more money (due to competition).
This is why developers are hopeful for alternative services.
There are competitors like itch.io, which are specifically targeted towards indies
Itch.io is great
Your misunderstanding what monopoly means and represents.
Monopoly just comes down to marketshare, but it’s perfectly legal in the US to be a monopoly instead it limits what you’re allowed to do. For example a regular company can give a discount if you agree to only sell their goods, obviously that becomes problematic if the company has monopoly power so they are no longer allowed to have such agreements. The boundaries around what is a market trip people up, but it’s around what customers view as substitutes goods. If you don’t have a car then an EV can be a viable substitute, however if you have a gas car then you have some wiggle room on octane ratings etc but an electric car chargers isn’t viable substitute.
“In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises.[2] Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry (or market).[2]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
I'm still finishing my first read, but I really recommend Cory Doctorow's latest book [1] "Enshittification:Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It" which covers the subject of tech monopolies and much more.
Reading it I learned about the term "monopsony" which is "a market in which goods or services are offered by several sellers but there is only one buyer" which is usually conflated with monopoly.
[1] https://www.versobooks.com/products/3341-enshittification
This is really the key here. Many people are commenting their experience as a games buyers, but this article is about the developers. Monopsonies are usually linked to lower wages in labor markets. In this case lower profits for developers from selling their games.
Valve even allows you to install whatever you want on the Steam Deck. Even Windows!
Yes, thanks to Heroic Launcher I can even play my games from Gog and Epic on it.
I've never understood this point.
Other developers can just make their own platform or distribute games themselves individually. Nobody wants to do that for obvious reasons.
There's clearly a network effect similar to Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and the likes. But apart from regulating for service interoperability, there's nothing you can do.
It's like claiming that Skype had a monopoly between 2008 and 2014. Just... Install something else then?
Valve is not buying other store makers nor actively sabotaging efforts to do so.
> Valve is not buying other store makers nor actively sabotaging efforts to do so.
This is really key, when you see Epic bribing devs to get exclusivity, giving away games for free, they do this and still not succeed because they are actively hostile to their users.
Where is my Big Picture mode?
Where is my support of Linux?
They've been at it for years and yet still don't actually want to provide a service that is desirable to use.
I'd be happy if Epic Store wouldn't log me out on every attempt to play anything there.
>because they are actively hostile to their users.
>Where is my Big Picture mode?
>Where is my support of Linux?
Calling the lack of linux and TV support "hostile" is bit of a stretch. The two combined probably makes up 5% of the user base at most, and there are probably workarounds (eg. using wine or the regular interface)
I didn't.
I asked where are these basic features. Two separate parts to my comment.
The user hostile comes from Tim Sweeneys Twitter account where he openly mocks users who ask questions.
>The user hostile comes from Tim Sweeneys Twitter account where he openly mocks users who ask questions.
link?
I'm literally waiting for Satisfactory to go on Steam sale so I can buy it again and not have to deal with the Epic launcher for one game I bought on sale when the store launched. :)
You're even allowed to sell your game cheaper on other platforms (not Steam keys, separate keys for those platforms) so by all means charge the 30% more on Steam if you need to.
>You're even allowed to sell your game cheaper on other platforms (not Steam keys, separate keys for those platforms) so by all means charge the 30% more on Steam if you need to.
How many people would even bite, given the huge premium?
you are not allowed to sell cd keys cheaper than on steam
Do you have a source for that? I only know this [1] site laying out distribution of Steam keys
[1] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
> Other developers can just make their own platform or distribute games themselves individually. Nobody wants to do that for obvious reasons
Where "nobody" is specifically "no users". Lots of publishers tried doing exactly that, and most eventually gave up because users don't want to deal with extra launchers or platforms. Offering games on your own distribution channel is fine, but not being on Steam is going to hurt your sales a lot. Epic is really the only still-running attempt (except for GOG)
Dominant and successful, yes. Monopoly, no.
It take more than simply being the best or most successful business in a sector to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is an active choice you make as a business by intentionally engaging in anticompetitive behaviors.
Valve isn't putting any pressure on anyone in this sector. There is still competition, but Valve has simply been more successful than everyone else. Mainly because the alternatives are so, so much worse like EA and co who are actively malicious and predatory.
Valve hasn't done anything to pass an antitrust sniff test.
The EU has this concept of gate-keeper platforms which seems more appropriate
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
"Companies providing at least one of the ten core platform services enumerated in the DMA are presumed to be gatekeepers if they meet the criteria listed below. These core platform services are: online intermediation services such as app stores, online search engines, social networking services, certain messaging services, video sharing platform services, virtual assistants, web browsers, cloud computing services, operating systems, online marketplaces, and advertising services. One company can be designated as gatekeeper for several core platform services."
"There are three main quantitative criteria that create the presumption that a company is a gatekeeper as defined in the DMA: (i) when the company achieves a certain annual turnover in the European Economic Area and it provides a core platform service in at least three EU Member States;(ii) when the company provides a core platform service to more than 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the EU and to more than 10,000 yearly active business users established in the EU; and (iii) when the company met the second criterion during the last three years.
The DMA defines a series of specific obligations that gatekeepers will need to respect, including prohibiting them from engaging in certain behaviours in a list of do's and don'ts."
The arguments there match the Steam platform in my opinion, but it is likely Steam already fulfills the existing obligations of the act. Seems a fairly good approach to things, if you are a dominant player you get burdened with extra rules and scrutiny.
I think what you’re saying is that they are a natural monopoly, which isn’t nefarious or illegal. But is still a monopoly.
Steam is not a natural monopoly.
Amazingly Windows even has a store built in. Yet the Windows store is so bad it’s losing despite its considerable advantage as a default.
Reminds me of Edge & Chrome.
Edge market share has grown a lot in the past few years.
>It take more than simply being the best or most successful business in a sector to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is an active choice you make as a business by intentionally engaging in anticompetitive behaviors.
By that logic are Amazon and Whatsapp also not "monopolies"? Are they simply just the best e-commerce company and chat app respectively? What competitive behaviors are they employing against their competitors?
Amazon may be dominant in a couple markets but it is far from a monopoly in them. For online retail you have Walmart, Target, eBay, Newegg, and 100s of other well known retailers with third-party sellers trying to compete. On the data center side you have large players such as Microsoft Azure and Google GCP, and small ones like Digital Ocean, Hertzner, OVH, Vultr, and many others.
Amazon sold products at a loss for years in order to capture market share, then raised prices. That is blatant abuse of market power
>Amazon sold products at a loss for years in order to capture market share
Selling at a loss on a cost of goods sold basis, or the entire business as a whole? I'm aware of the latter but not the former. The latter also isn't obvious "abuse", because it would include all sorts of market entrants, including eg. intel trying to enter the GPU space and making a loss because of R&D.
Yes - I tried the other platforms.
Much to my surprise (and granted, I have the means to do so) I will favor steam whenever possible, it’s just significantly better.
I do mostly agree with you that Steam is better as a storefront than all other ones out there, but in my opinion the Battle.net launcher is still my favorite game launcher edging out Steam because of how snappy it is.
Steam just sometimes feels really slow when launching for the first time or when switching tabs/pages (I do also have it just sometimes be just a black windows, but I haven't figured out the cause yet but it is the only window that does it, so...). In comparison B.net just feels decently snappy.
They are both effectively using CEF for their launcher, but since Steam starts so slow for me I always keep it in the background and its WebHelper taking up 414MB (rn, but its always in that ballpark) is not helping its case.
People favored Google as much as possible in the '00s and then they turned evil.
For games, I favor Good Old Games rather than Steam as much as possible and go out of my way to wait for releases on their platform. Whatever becomes of them, at least I'll have my downloaded DRM-free version of my purchases.
GOG proves you can still have a solid business in the space. Steam is dominant but not necessarily a monopoly. For all of its faults, Steam is still better than most competitors.
And PC gaming would be much, much worse without Steam. It would go to some publicly traded company. They would gain a monopoly anyhow, and then slowly start making every single part of the service worse and worse to increase shareholder profits.
I've been a "PC Gamer" for 31+ years. The 'value-add' that steam brings to the table is INCREDIBLE. Thanks to Proton/Linux efforts.
(1) my games are installable AND playable on _every_ device I use.
(2) I don't have to fight with wine/crossover/etc to get things to work.
(3) It's not hostile to the end user (yet).
I have bought more games since the Steamdeck came out then in the 40'some years before that.
Yes I know that I don't have to use steam, but they make it EASIER.
I am looking forward to Deckard for all of the above reasons and their history with the Index.
Steam makes installing software EASIER then the alternative (regardless of the OS). Auto-patching/updates of installed games.
If I was more social I'd probably use those features more. If they ever charge a monthly fee, I'll stop using it.
Better Valve/Steam than Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Epic or the rest.
Gambling / trading aside, they're doing a pretty fine so far.
No question about it!
Edit: that said, the 30% fee is pretty greedy (Apple-level greedy) and they could be doing better at least in that regard.
Anytime I see the complaint about the 30% fee, I wonder what people feel would be fair for the service, because it also includes storage, distribution for new instalations and patching for older ones, along with generating keys to be sold at other stores.
Would people feel better with a lower fee, but no distribution network, for example?
Agreed. The Steam platform has so much value for developers and yet they still complain about the 30%.
To put into perspective, when Epic only takes 15%. They themselves admitted that is not a sustainable thing. EGS is constantly losing money. So now I invite everyone to gauge just how "big" the EGS is. How many "features" they offer etc. This platform in so much smaller than Steam and even they state that a 15% cut is not sustainable to keep the light on.
Judging just how big the Steam platform is, do people honestly think Valve could be forced into reducing their cut to this proposed 15%? When this little hobbyshop that is EGS cannot make it work. Why would it work for a much much larger and therefore more expensive platform?
I am furthermore given to understand when you distribute on Steam you are free to run your own store front. You are free to create your own Steam keys for your games and sell them in your shop which is supposedly have a 0% cut for Valve. Of course then you would have to run your own store with all the effort and cost that go along with it. Or you simply put it on Steam. A storefront visited by millions of paying customers. Which handles everything. From purchase/refund/CDN for Downloading and updating the game binaries/communityhub to directly engage with the customers if you wish
In the end, the only way they are forced to use steam is because that is where the customers are. and since there are alternatives around, these customers could very well shop some place else. but they dont. they shop where they get the best experience. and if that is on steam, thats where they go.
If "developers" were really honest they would all disclose just how much they sold on Steam vs any other digital store front in case they distribute their offerings to any store that will let them. Just because you get 4 sales on Epic vs 4 million sales on Steam does mean Steam is a monopoly. It just means Epic is a steaming pile and given the chance the customer goes to the better option.
30% on mobile platforms if generally frowned upon as source of massive overcharging compared to actual costs (since its a massive revenue & income stream for their owners), but somehow for Steam its fine because... they also generate keys? Or what should be the magical justfication.
No its not fine, its a cash cow milking customers. Valve may be better than their competition but they are not saints (same company basically inventing addictive lootboxes mechanism, albeit not in its worst possible form), its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.
Maybe they should have tiers ie 0-10% for first 5k sales, 20% above 100k etc. There are many options to be nicer to customers & developers.
It isn't overcharging on Mobile either IMO but the difference is pretty obvious: there is only one way to get your app onto an iPhone or an Android and that's through those stores.
PCs are an open platform. It is very different.
>its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025.
And you base this on what? Nothing. It is a privately held company and you don't have access to its books.
Steam getting a 30% cut is certainly less objectional that Apple getting 30% because they've locked other people out of selling on iPhones.
On the other hand, that Steam taking as big a cut as Apple can claim because of their unfortunate practices isn't great.
Generally, the smallest indie creators, who aren't really likely to benefit from organic discovery on Steam, seem to priority selling on itch, which, by default, only takes a 10%, despite doing all the work you mention.
That Steam seems to have a marketplace monopoly based on network effects, and this allows them to claw money from all but the largest and smallest game developers is not something they have a strong right to claim to morally, and something society would benefit from doing away with. It appears that 72% of game devs feel that way too.
So, to answer your question, for me, two thirds of Steam's revenue seem unfair.
Maybe Steam and Apple deserved to obtain a partial monopoly but now they can just sit and relax and take 30% to copy/paste games/apps to each user that wants them.
So yes, 30% is high and unjust to the games creators who are doing the 2025 work.
No other service actually saturates my download speed. That's probably an expensive luxury that could be cut. Even netflix with their CDNs in every city tries to minimize bandwith and it results in terrible video quality-if it can even deliver it at all.
I would love for steam to offer even the complement: Only distribution & SSO services, so I can have fast downloads and quick non-replayable-auth for games I buy/subscribe elsewhere (not subject to steam peculiarities about squeezing out maximum price for each region by purchasing power).
Of course, that would need to have a wildly different fee schedule than when they carry major legal & reputational risks plus more significant customer support volume.
> Apple-level greedy
You are free to install an alternative store, that probably has all the games that you are buying from Steam.
I can't do that with my iPhone.
They charge it because people use it voluntarily for the better customer and user experience. If Apple didn't provide their store installed by default, allowed alternative stores without manipulating their content and yet people still used it, it would be a closer analogy.
How much do you think they should take?
Steam is the most dominant because of their extremely customer friendly policies, their insane price crashes and the ease of publishing and installing games from the platform. If other platforms are able to provide all of that, with a commission below 30%, I'm sure they could easily take over.
But turns out, neither Epic nor EA are interested in serving the customer.
> How much do you think they should take?
A 15–20% fee would be much fairer in my opinion. They’d still be making plenty of money while letting developers keep more of what they earn through their hard work. At the very least, they should differentiate between big players and smaller indie developers.
>Steam is the most dominant because of their ... insane price crashes
Are steam deals really better than on other platforms? They might have better deals compared to brick and mortar retailers but publishers generally have price parity across various digital storefronts (eg. epic vs steam), so attributing low prices to steam doesn't really make much sense. If anything steam is actually more expensive if you factor in authorized keystores (eg. greenmangaming), which are occasionally cheaper.
It doesn't feel that way to me, I know I could probably buy a game through another digital distribution service, maybe for a bit cheaper, but it's just not worth the hassle of installing another program, signing up, and configuring things
I was curious who exactly would commission and/or publish said study - turns out it’s a grey market key reseller
yeah no shit their clients are concerned that Steam is the only storefront that people trust