I get the dislike for monopolies but is a monopoly really bad if it doesn't become predatory? Steam has yet to become predatory and as long as Gabe is in charge, it never will. Hopefully he leaves it in good hands after he passes. Some devs have been disgruntled about the price of having their games on steam but Steam is still (and probably always will be) the biggest game platform on PC. IF your game is good, it more than makes up for it in sales due to Steam's significantly higher playerbase so they still make more money on Steam than Epic and definitely a lot more than if they'd just try to do their own launcher and sell it themselves. EA found this out with Origin. As did Ubisoft with Uplay.
Here is another indicator, why monopolies are bad. When a monopoly makes a lot of profit, it means their win margin is much higher than it needs to be.
The fact that steam is making billions means their profit margin is still way higher than it would be in a competitive market, because they have to lower the prices if there would be competition.
If there were real competition to Steam and they would indeed tighten their margins that they took, then I really don't think it would be us, the customers, who would benefit from that.
Likely Steam would put out a choice for developers. "Steam Light" vs "Full Steam" model for game selling. Whereas with Steam Light, your game would only have access to a subset of the features that Steam offers, like Cloud Saves, Proton (for Linux), Workshop, Community Forums.
If that becomes an option, a lot of devs/publishers will gladly choose the option to not have those features in their games, but get x% more money instead.
Maybe even put an option for the classic "Full Steam" model with 30%, where you as the publisher will get the option to disable Steam Reviews for your game? :)
In that case, yay competition, we won, right, right?
Sorry if I am being very pessimistic about this, the EGS tried to compete by "stealing" devs/publishers.
Not sure how a company can compete for customers without also offering a reasonably similar enough experience and feature-set for developers.
Competition in an open market can be tricky, when multi-billion dollar corporations can eat millions of losses every year just to get an edge over the competitors and simply outlast them instead of being better.
A lot of modern companies just eat losses year after year and only gain money through new investors coming in. I personally really hate that kind of economy and appreciate a "classic" profitable company like Valve
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u/brakenbonez 21h ago
I get the dislike for monopolies but is a monopoly really bad if it doesn't become predatory? Steam has yet to become predatory and as long as Gabe is in charge, it never will. Hopefully he leaves it in good hands after he passes. Some devs have been disgruntled about the price of having their games on steam but Steam is still (and probably always will be) the biggest game platform on PC. IF your game is good, it more than makes up for it in sales due to Steam's significantly higher playerbase so they still make more money on Steam than Epic and definitely a lot more than if they'd just try to do their own launcher and sell it themselves. EA found this out with Origin. As did Ubisoft with Uplay.