it’s pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more
(1) Many PC gamers simply wait for games to go on sale. Epic buying exclusive agreements isn’t as dominating of a strategy as they think it is; even if it’s expensive.
(2) Steam is the incumbent. You have to be better in order to be worth it to switch. As you mentioned, Epic is lacking in features
(3) Valve has not treated the desktop market the way Apple as treated the app store. Look at how far Epic has taken Apple to court; compared to their biggest rival, Valve
(4) Valve has put in alot of work in other layers; such as making open hardware and contributing to AMD GPU drivers on Linux. They work on the whole platform, even parts they do not directly make money off. This is called investment.
(5) What exactly would you break Steam into being? One app for reviews, another for buying, and another for launching games? Break the development studio into a different company? Even if Epic is throwing around money made from its game engine and games?
That’s the thing though, with their market share an hypothetical competitor could be better and people still wouldn’t switch, Steam is where their games are, it’s where their friends play, building everything from scratch elsewhere wouldn’t be worth the trouble even if the alternative was better.
Store, development, forums, trading platform, launcher, online gaming services, hardware, streaming integrated into the platform, DRM… Valve has their hands all over the place and there’s a single person at the top of that. Wanna wait until they start becoming bad before considering that maybe it’s not a good thing that they have a hold on 70% of the market? Hell, just the fact that Newell could decide that they’re closing their doors tomorrow and no one has access to their games anymore should be fucking worrying to everyone.
At what seams would you break Steam at? In this day and age those are just app store features. Is there anything you listed Sony, Microsoft or Apple don’t have?
I do understand having a Steam library would make it harder to switch but most of us have a few GOG games and collect Epic free games as well (though, I haven’t even looked at the free Epic games since Christmas).
People even download a launcher like Hero Launcher on the Steamdeck to run games from other stores. We have the freedom to use Steam in tagent with other stores and we do. You can buy a game off GOG and add it to Steam to launch it.
Steam is simply the better product, hands down.
Edit: To prove that I see your point but just don’t agree with it: Here is a quote from an ArsTechnica article about a judge viewing Steam as a monopoly.
Despite those changes, Judge Coughenour once again dismissed Wolfire’s argument that Valve had engaged in “illegal tying” between the Steam platform (which provides game library management, social networking, achievement tracking, Steam Workshop mods, etc.) and the Steam game store (i.e., the part that sells the games). Those two sides of Steam form a single market, the judge wrote, because “commercial viability for a platform is possible only when it generates revenue from a linked game store.” What’s more, the suit has not shown there is any sufficient market demand “for fully functional gaming platforms distinct from game stores.”
Does this judge expect me to buy a game from Epic which is missing features and then pay Valve a fee to contact the developer through Steam? Will Epic cheapen their price by 30% so I can “enable Steam features.” This would be unprecedented. I cannot go to Amazon to return/complain about a product I bought from Walmart.
