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Maybe I'm not as aware of all the details as others, but it seems to me that Valve has maintained their position by creating an incredible platform and collection of products (Steam itself, Steam Link, the Steam Controller, etc.), not by engaging in anti-consumer practices. For instance, SteamVR has full support for the Rift. The Chaperone features will even work with the Rift.

More than that, though, I see very few examples of people being upset about the existence of the Oculus Store. People are upset about hardware exclusivity. Hence...

> Further, Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do?

I'd expect them to act in such a way as to maximize software sales, which means avoiding hardware exclusivity at all costs.

Again, I and most others don't really have a problem with Oculus creating their own store. Sure, it's a bit annoying, but we understand they can't really survive by letting Valve profit off software sales of games they've funded. None of this justifies hardware exclusivity though.

This leaves open the question of why they are in fact pursuing hardware exclusivity. I don't have a good answer to that and I'm not sure anyone outside of Oculus does. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that they must have thought that their content was just flat-out better than anything available for the Vive so that it was strong enough to drive both software and hardware sales. Unfortunately, I suspect they were wrong. Their approach backfired and developer support is centering around the Vive now.

I think it's far more likely that they've maintained their position through first-mover advantage than anything else. Steam is a website wrapped in an application that was built before building applications out of websites was cool, and it shows -- what you get is an outdated version of WebKit and a video player that somehow manages to be worse than the one Polygon uses, and Steam doesn't even have "monetization" as an excuse there. They've largely abandoned curation, Early Access and Greenlight are a steady stream of horror stories... there's a large list of things wrong with Steam that nobody at Valve seems to even care about fixing.

I don't agree. I think the first-mover advantage gave them a big leg up, but people wouldn't have kept using the platform for 12 years if they were relying entirely on that. Competitors like Origin might have had a fighting chance if Valve hadn't constantly been creating a superior suite of products.

You mention issues with Early Access and Greenlight, but these seem like trivial problems when compared to how solid the platform is overall. Steam as a platform is just far and away superior to any other choice in the gaming space. I can play any PC game at my desk or in my living room. The interface scales great to a TV screen. The Steam Controller is innovative and incredibly customizable, and it's supported by virtually any game in Steam. SteamVR is very fully developed itself and supports both the Rift and the Vive; it even goes so far as to support Chaperone with the Rift despite the Rift not having any room-scale-tracked controllers yet. It has honestly grown into one of the best software ecosystems I've ever seen by offering functionality that competitors can't even dream of.

I think you're talking about a lot of features here that don't even amount to a percentage point of Steam users. Go look at the Steam Hardware and Software Survey results. SteamOS doesn't even show up in the top five Linux distros that Valve reports. There may be Windows users who are using the Big Picture Mode, but I'd guess not a whole lot of them. There may be Windows users who are using the Steam Controller, but I'd guess it's smaller than the ones using Big Picture Mode. Those are not the reasons Steam is beating Origin.

Just to be clear, SteamOS is not needed for Steam Link and I've never used it. Steam Link just streams content from your PC.

Valve doesn't publish figures on the number of Steam Links sold. But just look at the Steam Hardware Survey[1]. Valve recommends a quad-core PC to be used as the host[2]. But half of Windows users have two CPUs or fewer. The number jumps up to 64% when you look at OS X users. Meanwhile, the top 10 graphics cards are pretty well split betweel the latest NVIDIA cards and a bunch of Intel on-motherboard cards. I don't think the sort of enthusiast that buys a Steam Link is anywhere close to the bulk of Steam's audience; there are a lot of people who are playing games on laptops, not gaming laptops but just laptops.

1) http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/ 2) https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3629-RIA...

I still find it very implausible that first mover advantage alone made Valve into a sustainable multibillion dollar company for so long with very little lock-in and very few anticonsumer practices. They have consistently outmaneuvered all their competitors for over a decade on multiple fronts. Their foray into hardware is just the most recent example. I think pointing to an outdated version of WebKit contained in the app is really grasping at straws for trying to find a way to make it look bad.

I hate steam and I rarely use its features outside its store and the friends list. Yet steam remains my primary digital distributor exactly because they got there first.

Later it has basically become impossible to avoid steam, if you want access to every game at least. X-com for instance required steam. Steam is also where all my friends have their profiles.

Even if steam didn't have a monopoly on certain games they still own the access to your library and won't allow you to take it with you.

If you ask me valve is right up there with the worst of them as far as exploiting their monopoly goes.

What has Valve done that's so bad in terms of "exploiting their monopology"? I honestly don't know what you're referring to. They do not even request store exclusivity from developers. If a developer or publisher decided to require Steam, that was their decision, not Valve's.

I guess you could point to Steam's DRM, but it's always had that, long before it was the de facto standard platform and before any monopoly existed.

It is grossly deceptive to say that Steam has a monopoly on games distribution when a vast number of the games on Steam are also distributed by other channels. I can't name any "Steam exclusives," which is more than I can say for Origin etc.

Frankly it's absurd to psychoanalyze Steam, saying that it wants to do what other companies are doing, and not to recognize that if it wanted to do those things it could easily do so.

I have to strongly agree here. Valve is really very nice about this.

From the Steamworks FAQ

>8. Do you require exclusivity for titles you sell on Steam?

>We think you should get your game in front of as many people as you can, therefore we do not require exclusivity on titles.

It's not a de jure monopoly, it's a de facto monopoly. When a gamer thinks "I wanna buy this game", 90% of them go immediately to Steam.

It's a monopoly in the sense that it's practically financial suicide for a games developer to NOT sell their game through Steam. Whether or not they really "have to" is besides the point if the reality is they'll not make a positive return on their game if they skip out on selling on Steam.

A few big publishers like EA avoid this by creating their own alternative stores and just hoping gamers will deal with it and install Origin, but most games studios have no choice but to accept that they're going to lose 30% because the reality is gamers expect to be able to buy any game on Steam.

It's pretty much the same situation that book publishers find themselves in with Amazon. Valve just hasn't shown its scumbag side yet.

> It is grossly deceptive to say that Steam has a monopoly on games distribution when a vast number of the games on Steam are also distributed by other channels.

This is just from observation without statistics, but I feel once people have a decent number of games on Steam (e.g. from lots of cheap purchases from sales) and no other store, they'd rather stick with Steam instead of installing another store app. Even if another store was a little better, the idea of having to install another app and have games split between two interfaces is a big deterrent.

True, but this would change in an instant if anti-consumer practices were used by Valve.

To play devil's advocate. How do I play Dota2 without steam? No - not even multiplayer matchmaking but just offline with bots.

Almost all Valve titles are Steam exclusive.

> Oculus doesn't make any money on hardware right now, what can a person expect them to do? Just operate without any intention of ever making a profit?

This is confusing. If it's true that they make no money on hardware, then you'd expect them to be ecstatic that people want to buy their games (giving them money) without taking their hmd (which supposedly doesn't).

They aren't producing the content themselves. They have a few titles that they are funding, but mostly they are working as a distributor through Oculus Home. Most titles are 3rd party. They are trying to start the same business that Valve already has in Steam.

But Valve does so by providing a good platform. You have Origin, which is used mostly because of exclusive titles; most people I know would love to ditch origin for Steam.

Value also doesn't have the same approach as Occulus; where Occulus tries to be the iOS Appstore (others not allowed), Valve never had that approach.

I would love to ditch both Origin and Valve for GoG which feels like everything I want out of digital distribution for games. GoG also has a more usable desktop app than Steam which suffers from a very overstuffed UI (not unlike iTunes).

Although Steam unquestionably dominates AAA game distribution, GoG's selection is great for the kinds of games I'm most interested in these days.

Its not like you can get Half Life or DOTA2 outside Steam either (well, Half Life 2 is on the Play store. I guess everyone at some point bows to Ma Google). Every Valve game since HL2 has been Steam exclusive, and uses it for DRM. Since Valve self publishes their own games, can you really blame EA for wanting to do the same with their own DRM system?