Valve "played capitalism so well they broke it" and now Steam can't be replaced
gamesradar.com
gamesradar.com
They remain one-stop shop for games. The gamers don't have to weigh down their systems with a bunch of different bloated game stores, each "needing" several GB of memory occupied at all times and adding minutes to machine startup.
Not to mention conflicts between a bunch of different anti-cheat and anti-piracy technologies on the same machine. And stores with bad UX (e.g. that make you suffer additional wait screens or naggings; Steam is as unobstructive as it gets).
Compare that to Netflix: at the begining, it was a "one stop shop" for movies, it had a lot of classic movies and TV for reasonable price. When the concept was proven, the production houses revoked the license for content. Competition came to the sector and each movie production house set up their own subscription based streaming service. You need to keep paying a whole bunch of services if you want to be able to keep up with all popular TV production or watch classic movies.
So, the competition would in theory be great. But even if stores didn't have subscriptions, the gamers don't want to fill their personal data, check privacy settings, configure, troubleshoot, debloat, ... a different app store for each game. When people have a slice of time to play, they don't want to deal with all of these.
I'm sure that when Valve forgets what keeps them successful and start becoming a Netflix, the Steam store will get replaced.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2026/09/22/wealth-taxes-could-k...
Moreover, you could create a multi-tier share structure where controlling ownership belongs to the founder whereas financial interest in the business belongs to the holders of other equity flavors, which is fairly common (e.g. Meta, Snap are structured this way).
Then the founder can [choose to] sell those cash-flow-stocks while holding on to the ownership stock.
It's utterly hyperbolic to suggest that a wealth tax would kill privately-controlled corporations.
You might be better off taking out a loan against the value of the business to pay the tax, if it's a one-time tax. The problem is when they come for the second wealth tax, and then the bi-annual wealth tax, and then the annual wealth tax. There is no likely scenario where it's a one-time tax.
For a company that's worth >$100mm in revenue there should be no shortage of investors willing to buy your non-voting shares.
"causing chaos, trying to get people tossed out" literally cannot affect you if they have non-voting shares.
You're also ignoring the ability of owners to issue dividends or buying back shares to cover taxes.
By your own reasoning, Netflix did not 'become a Netflix' by doing anything wrong.
Browser also severely limits the bloat, mutual compatibility and privacy issues (and also Android and iOS up to certain extent). This makes technologically much easier to have a bunch of different content stores on the same device.
EDIT: I'm keeping the sentence in original comment. Valve can mess up and become a Netflix due to its own fault, e.g. if they try to use the store to primarily finance and favor their own productions. This might come to pass if they become publically traded company, as datakan mentioned.
When steam came by the distribution services were not profitable and problematic - CDs cannot be live patched, you have to print CDs to match an unknown and variable demand.
I think if Valve crashed and burned tomorrow, it'd be nigh impossible for a Steam-replacement to come and absorb the global demand in the same way Steam currently does.
Apparently, the world is "used to" the way intellectual property works (or doesn't work, depending on your view) for TV shows and Movies, in a way that probably wouldn't fly for video games; which is to say -- in both you're going to have to compete against "free" or "on the internet" or whatnot. I suspect monopolizing video games is much harder than TV and Movies (probably because we're so beholden to arguably odd copyright ideas?")
They have pushed gaming to new levels, see proton. It's quite realistic they stay successful for the time being.
Makes you think about a works were more huge private companies exist.
Put up or shut up Epic. I'm unemployed so you can hire me to do it for you, but I'll bet you'd rather just whine about it.
If it wasn't for fortnite they'd be gone
every single call of duty game
Id software did much more, and much earlier, for linix gaming
What else did they do?
But i dont think the outcome is comarable to the TITANIC amount of investment s Valve have been doing in the last 15 years or so.
Anticheat comes with the game. That has absolutely nothing to do with Steam - you can have games on Steam with or without anticheat, you can have games on Epic with or without anticheat, you can have games sold directly with or without anticheat.
How is this not blatantly obvious to anyone who has ever played a game?
Valve also allows non exclusive distribution on PC. Games don’t have to launch on steam exclusively. Why do others not capitalize on that?
Seems like it’s mostly a “grapes are sour” argument pointing to valve and saying they’re not greedy enough to allow us to profit.
> A former Epic Games developer is calling out Steam users, saying that they wouldn't move on from Valve's store even if a better alternative emerged.
Second para:
> Kiaran Ritchie, former principal animation engineer at Epic Games kicked off discussions surrounding Steam's 30% sales cut last week (with the assertion that "you could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week"). Which in-turn led noted Steam hater Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to assert that "Valve has held gaming back for years" – because the person whose company proudly asserted it had "vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher" knows what's holding gaming back!
Third para:
> Ritchie elaborated on their opinions on the 30% cut in a separate post, with the post saying that while developers are paying 30% in order to access Steam infrastructure, "in reality it is purely to get access to the massive Steam userbase." He adds "PC developers have no option but to distribute through Steam or lose the vast majority of sales."
Curious, where does it answer my question in the first paragraph? Could you elaborate?
They've undoubtedly locked us all in, but they've shown themselves to be trustworthy and reliable.
Except that the experience just sucked. It was mediocre. My biggest gripe is that launching games was really slow, the store was kind of painful in lots of little ways and it was sort of annoying to deal with them in general.
Maybe they fixed those issues but it was too late to retain me. I literally repurchased the games I was still playing on steam which didn't have those issues.
At some point, in the early days, Steam was a bit rough. I remember a summer where occasionally steam would stop launching and you had to reinstall it (back when it was a blocky dark green app). But Steam got over those teething pains and has been really high quality since.
Itch.io is great, I don't use their launcher (just haven't tried it) but I use them and enjoy them. Their checkout experience is fairly sane. It's not as if I refuse to use other platforms.
But Epic just lowkey was not a great platform.
Is that true? And if it is true, why is that?
Pointing to free games on Epic and non usage tells you that people don’t want Epic. Doesn’t tell you why. Nor does it tell you whether people continue to stick with Valve. And that is the point in my original comment.
If Valve isn’t good, you can’t just say people won’t go for another better option “just because”.
One doesn't "switch" clients like they do operating systems.
You can install more than one at once. They're not mutually exclusive.
I want a million dollars and a DGX Spark. That's not a point, that's just a personal desire or opinion, which isn't an argument.
I already explained how this is false as my point: "I want X" is not an argument. Your desire is not an argument.
Valid points include things like "I think that users should be able to pick the client that they run a game from." That is an argument.
So, again: what is your argument that you are making?
If 50% of the games I want to play in the future decided to move to a different store front and launcher that was incompatible with Steam that would honestly be a worst-case scenario.
Because they already have 100+ games in Steam because of the early head start.
> If Valve isn’t good, you can’t just say people won’t go for another better option “just because”.
Never said that, I said people don't want the hassle of running 2 game launcher apps with fragmented libraries.
Part of that switching cost is your purchased game library only works with the platforms you purchased it from. A fact that currently greatly benefits mostly Steam on desktop platforms.
So I do expect that a court case in the future will be Epic Games suing Steam in order to have "game portability" between game platforms.
I mean, I really appreciate how Steam Big Picture gives me a console like experience on my PC and how the Steam Deck works like a PS Vita or a Nintendo Switch. But really if I had to click on a desktop icon to play a game or find it the same way I find other applications on Windows, Mac or Linux, I'd just do it.
So I guess you could make a better launcher but there's only so much upside!
I'd say though it's a very San Francisco mindset to be obsessed with things like launchers: like wanting to have some space you can colonize to interpret everyone's experience. Next thing you know it is stuffed with ads and "discovery" in the store would be all about paid discovery, users would be trained that it's a terrible idea to go browsing for things in the store, like it is on Apple, etc.
I like this quote:
Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at research and analyst
firm Newzoo told GamesRadar+ that "As long as Valve is independent and not a
publicly traded company," it looks impossible for Steam to be overthrown as the
de-facto PC gaming marketplace.
Preferably using shortcuts that launch game executables directly, not through a launcher (or, worse, two or more launchers in sequence, as is the case with, e.g., EA games launched through Steam and games with their own launchers offering equal access to the game itself and other options you’re likely to use once or twice, if ever).
But in the absence of this, leaving one bloated storefront launcher running in the background is better than leaving two or more bloated storefront launchers open in the background, and Steam’s is the best of a bad lot.
Valve have the market share because they were good enough, early enough. Half Life 2's launch onboarded hundreds of thousands of users, with many getting the game for free with component and PC bundle-deals. The number of games doubled for the next few years while the traditional development model (fixing bugs before shipping) died. The DIY updaters died with a solid online distribution. The sales went up. The costs bottomed out.
Tim Sweeney could have done all this at Epic in 2004 too. He's said he thought everyone thought it was malware, completely blind to what people thought of in/pre-game updaters and all the other redist crap that shipped with his own games.
Valve's only moat is the software industry being unwilling to count a license on one platform as a license on another. If we started requiring license migrations between accounts, guys like Epic would stand a chance of actually taking some long-term business.
If I had to choose solely on features, I would definitely choose Steam.
(To be clear, I understand migrating licenses generates cost for the assuming platform - but if I did want to migrate away from Steam, that means I'd probably make more new sales on the new platform too)
I don't think that's necessarily true. If there was a launcher that was at least as good as steam in every aspect, and also had access to more games it would stand a chance of competing. Especially if its store also had lower prices.
Agreed, I also would care about a Steam replacement if it were better. Metrics I care about and my perception:
- Hasn't rug-pulled my games or publishers in a significant way.
- Has contributed back to the community in a number of ways.
- Spent the last 20 years being (mostly) solid and reliable.
I'm sure that's true, but Steam did reduce their take for games making over certain thresholds: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/03/valve-changes-revenue-shar...
Presumably, that was a response to other storefronts/launchers appearing, which means the competition did force them to change behavior. Companies don't give up revenue without cause.
Here's a few things Steam does: - Digital store - Cloud features for saving, achievements etc.. - Multiplayer and social tools. Discussions, guides etc.. - User workshop for mods, which is just amazing for the games that support it fully - Streaming and remote play - Library sharing with the family - Offline access - Mobile access - Steamworks for developers - Proton for Linux, just fantastic, and how I use the ecosystem today
There are probably more things I have missed, but I don't know of any other platform that does the above?
If Tim and his team spent as much time on making their platform better than on whinging they might have something to compete with. He could have had another draw card with UT4 but he killed that, for his cash cow Fortnite. He put all his eggs in one basket and realises he doesn't have enough for an omelette now.
I would love another competitor and I think that is GOG, if they can keep up the momentum and stick to their difference, encouraging studios to release DRM free games. I use both platforms and I am happy with both.
They are probably right though, why would I move to another platform, when my whole library is already with Steam. I am not going to waste that money to use another platform, and I don't need or want the fragmentation that currently exists for streaming content. There is probably room for another successfull platform, Steam really does need proper competition to keep them on their toes.
dunno how to bullet list...
My Steam account is old enough to drink. I've had it for some two-thirds of my life, not even adult life but life entirely. All of my games are already there. It's like if a friend invited you to come play video games in 1989 but he doesn't have the cool NES games you want to play, they're all back at my place. What, we're gonna play Clu Clu Land all day? Give me a break.
Even if I was to switch to Epic, outside of the supposed altruism of "We take less of a cut from developers!" what is the benefit for me as a gamer, or as a consumer? The Epic Games Store has very few games I can't get elsewhere, even on console, and the experience compared to Steam is just lackluster. It just is. Valve has had a lot of time to iterate on it, and Steam was absolutely despised for the first several years of its life, but the experience of using the two platforms could not be more different. Beyond that, if I do switch, I still need to have Steam installed because all like seven million of my games are already on Steam, and they can't be moved.
And of course as a primary 4X multiplayer gamer, the "join game" button on steam profile is something every platform should look to implement (once they have a correct mod workshop equivalent).
Steam just functions amazingly well with modern software release and use cadence.
I don't know much about the person who said this, but it strikes me as missing the point of what we do when we build products: you could vibe code Steam the program in a week, sure. You can't vibe code the trust Steam has in a week, nor can you vibe code the two-sided ecosystem they've built in a week.
Did they do something to Fortnite that I don't know about? I thought the only thing Fortnite did was allow pay-to-win in their community games (just like Roblox), otherwise the main game is still cosmetic only like Valve's games.
Epic even removed lootboxes from Rocket League after purchasing the developer.
Yes, probably. I bought Fortnite for $40~ when it was a completely different game; a cooperative player vs. environment building game with wave attacks. This game was entirely about microtransactions and gambling. After every round/storm passage you'd be sent to an unskippable screen with it.
Then Epic saw how well PUBG was doing with the Epic engine and turned Fortnite into a PUBG clone. In this new PUBG clone called Fortnite the gambling and microtransactions were just as bad as in the original Fortnite. Over time as the new PUBG clone called 'Fortnite' became a world sensation it both faced more scrutiny and had other monetization options with IP licensing. They massively dialed back the gambling/microtransactions but still face many court cases about it today.
You probably have only played the modern versions after they were changed it to avoid further consequences for their actions. Valve never went nearly as far and so it's lesser gambling system still exists to this day.
The metrics to win over Steam gamers aren't hard - and it could be done with another well-funded and like-minded CEO. The problem is that the metrics that Steam wins with are for users, not board members, not C-suite, not investors, not shareholders. Valve is no saint, but they are pretty damned close to as close as a capitalist can get.
You couldn't get a competitor financed.
not to mention the money (hundreds of millions) spent on securing exclusive launches.
No free market invisible hand here.
I don't want a Steam replacement. I just want it to go away.
Gamespy was better.
The fact is that, right now, there are multiple digital storefronts that directly compete with Steam, including offering some of the exact same games, and you can create accounts, install, and use multiple stores simultaneously.
Yet consumers choose to use Steam even when the game is available on other storefronts.
This is the most "free market" mechanism possible, and it shows extremely clearly that Steam is the best option available.
I am extremely glad that your highly irrational desire to make one of the best platforms in existence (among a wasteland of highly abusive ones) go away will not be realized anytime soon.
In most cases consumers do not choose to use Steam. They are obliged to use Steam because they can't get the game without it. Here[0] is where you can learn about vendor lock-in.
I repeat, I have experienced video gaming without and with Steam. The former is superior. Steam is no better than the alternative "launchers", it just happens to have the strongest vendor lock-in.
I'm glad you're (extremely) glad. Perhaps if you were to call me irrational at greater length (without bothering to show as much) it would make you all the more glad. It doesn't cost anything so don't hold back. At least we can agree that Steam will not vanish soon enough.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in#Lock-in_types
By your logic, every company that still exists today does so because it started off well (including those that were only founded recently), and every company that does not exist today does not exist because it didn't start off well (including old companies that existed for many decades or even centuries).
This is, of course, utterly delusional. A company continuing to exist and be liked requires ongoing effort and investment, and it's extremely obvious to anyone who non-casually plays (or develops) games that Valve is absolutely making that investment and doing very well along basically every axis (including user satisfaction).
So, yes, Steam's success is merit-based.
> They are obliged to use Steam because they can't get the game without it.
This is not Steam's fault. This is the publishers' and developers' fault, because Steam doesn't do exclusivity agreements, unlike other platforms like the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store. So - are you proposing that we write a law compelling publishers to release on multiple platforms? If not - then this isn't something that involves Steam, any more than a soda company choosing to only sell in particular stores (without an exclusivity agreement) is the fault of those stores.
> In most cases consumers do not choose to use Steam.
There's more than ample evidence that, when a game is present on multiple platforms (assuming identical pricing etc), users choose to use Steam over other platforms because it's simply better.
So, to summarize - when there's no choice, it's not Steam's fault, and when there is choice, users prefer Steam. Your point is null.
> I repeat, I have experienced video gaming without and with Steam. The former is superior.
Literally hundreds of thousands (if not tens of millions) of people would disagree with you. I, too, have played games with and without Steam, and Steam is far better.
> Steam is no better than the alternative "launchers"
This is more-or-less factually false. There are no launchers that provide more than a fraction of this set of features that Valve does:
Local currencies, regional pricing/payment methods, gift cards, Steam Wallet, game gifting, product keys, wallet/credit system (Steam wallet), bundles, DLC, complex storefront (topics/labels, discovery queue, wishlist, sale notifications), user reviews, game refunds, CDN, a really good download/update system, player metrics, shader pre-caching, shared runtime management, cloud saves, game management across multiple drives, LAN downloads/updates, beta/release/build management, DRM and anticheat, game collections, developer updates, forums, Big Picture/Steam Deck UI, Proton, Steam Input, a complex social system (friends, text chat, voice chat, add codes, profiles), social integration with games, account 2FA, and many, many, many more things.
> it just happens to have the strongest vendor lock-in.
Again, factually false. Steam, unlike some of its competitors, doesn't do exclusivity agreements, nor is there anything preventing you from running multiple launchers at once.
> Perhaps if you were to call me irrational at greater length (without bothering to show as much)
As I already wrote - perhaps you missed it:
> highly irrational desire to make one of the best platforms in existence (among a wasteland of highly abusive ones) go away will not be realized anytime soon.
The vast majority of people who play video games agree that Steam is the best platform available. Your desire to destroy something that society has collectively deemed "good" is, plainly, either irrational or straight-up malicious. I'm assuming the former out of charity.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in#Lock-in_types
That section is almost entirely without citations. It's an opinion blog of Wikipedia editors. It means nothing.
> Your desire to destroy something
I did not express a desire to destroy Steam. I only said I want it to go away. Furthermore, since nothing lasts forever, I will be (extremely) glad to see it go; the more so given its use was forced on me in the first place to continue using software I already purchased. As is also true of most of Steam's users at its inception.
This is rhetoric designed to conceal the fact that you simply don't have any good arguments. I debunked every single one you made.
> I did not express a desire to destroy Steam. I only said I want it to go away.
Pure pedantry, because the point is exactly the same - it doesn't matter if you want to destroy something that the vast majority of your society justifiably considers to be good, or if you merely want it to go away - you're either irrational or malicious.
> given its use was forced on me in the first place to continue using software I already purchased
Exactly which games did you buy before Steam existed, that you then had to install Steam in order to continue playing them?
Previously I used Steam. I have ~700 games in my library. I now purchase from my phone.
That being said. This is a Microsoft forced solution. I refuse to use Win11 or online Windows anything.
Epic, which used to receive my business, changed the privacy rules to access my purchases and was blacklisted on my network as a result. Sunk cost be damned.
Anything can be replaced. Epic went out of their way to be blacklisted and Steam did not.
Other competitors have made attempts, but they were so poor quality and terribly made, it was no wonder they bowed out.
Want to complete? Compete.
Epic is evil. They're at the bleeding edge of in-game gambling with microtransactions. And they actively compete with their customers. Epic has even used their position with the Epic engine to clone a business customer's game and release it for free in their walled garden. As a gamer Epic stole the game Rocket League from me after I purchased the native linux version from the company Psyonix. Then Epic bought Psyonix and said there'd be no changes to Rocket League. 6 months later and no linux or mac clients people bought could play the game. Epic just buys game companies and puts their games behind it's app store and/or gives them away for free to try to lock people into their app store. They're abusive and exploitive and they constantly lie and make things worse for every game they buy.
People don't like that kind of behavior from Epic so they chose not to use their products and app store. This is just crybullying from Epic.
Not to mention the absurd chance that anyone who does successfully innovate on a payment model is paying royalties to Steam. I <3 Steam with all my heart and can't get enough Deadlock, but let's not pretend they aren't making money hand-over-fist too
I think Roblox, Minecraft, WoW, LoL, and Fortnite all prove it's fully possible to operate outside that closed platform and see success, as well.
Only up to a certain point. Valve still doesn’t recognise inheritance and people dying as a very real thing.
They expect families to just throw away dad’s login details because he died.
I understand that this is most likely the licensing legalese they have in place that forces it this way, but it really is time that someone in the EU took Valve to court to test this.
I just think they're currently top of the class, all things considered
launching the installer/game is probably one of the least impactful components of steam, and certainly not why it got popular
As a small game developer, the steamworks SDK takes care of so many things I no longer have to care about. I don't have to run NAT punching infrastructure, I don't have to run a presence server and matchmaking services, handle user PII, cloud saves, workshop mod hosting (which can get very large with texturing and media), etc etc. It has an attractive value as a game developer too, not just as an end-user.
Well, it's clear now that you've neither used Steam nor developed a game yourself (or, you have, but you're engaging in propaganda), because the value that Steam provides for someone either playing or developing/selling games is insane.
Local currencies, regional pricing/payment methods, gift cards, Steam Wallet, game gifting, product keys, wallet/credit system (Steam wallet), bundles, DLC, complex storefront (topics/labels, discovery queue, wishlist, sale notifications), user reviews, game refunds, CDN, a really good download/update system, player metrics, shader pre-caching, shared runtime management, cloud saves, game management across multiple drives, LAN downloads/updates, beta/release/build management, DRM and anticheat, game collections, developer updates, forums, Big Picture/Steam Deck UI, Proton, Steam Input, a complex social system (friends, text chat, voice chat, add codes, profiles), social integration with games, account 2FA, and many, many, many more things. (go and ask a LLM and I'm sure it'll be more than happy to give you a far longer list :)
They also run a huge child gambling ring. A big NFT market. Popularized lootboxes , microtransactions and paid battlepasses.
It's also committing whataboutism.
The funny thing is even with those fallacies, it's still wrong.
> They also run a huge child gambling ring
Where are they specifically targeting children? Citation needed.
> A big NFT market
Where's this "Valve NFT" you're describing? I've never seen it.
> microtransactions and paid battlepasses
I have no issues with either of those.
Two bad things (lootboxes and refunds needing legislation, that are far exceeded by most of their competitors) out of the dozens of good things they've done.
There is clearly user experience reason why Steam gained and hold so much ground. Things really were not better without it.
GOG is doing fine. itch.io is good enough.
Epic is just crap and it shows.
I wouldn't recommend you install Epic, though. Steam and GOG and Itch are happy to coexist - Epic eagerly weaponizes exclusivity agreements and sinks millions of dollars into anti-competitive practices.
> Sweeney has himself said that Epic is catering to Publishers and not consumers/gamers.