Despite facing increased competition in the space, not least from the Epic Games Store, Valve’s platform is synonymous with PC gaming. The service is estimated to have made $10.8 billion in revenue during 2024, a new record for the Half-Life giant. Since it entered the PC distribution space back in 2018, the rival Epic Games Store has been making headway – and $1.09 billion last year – but Steam is still undeniably dominant within the space.
Valve earns a large part of its money from taking a 20-30% cut of sales revenue from developers and publishers. Despite other storefronts opening with lower overheads, Steam has stuck with taking this slice of sales revenue, and in doing so, it has been argued that Valve is unfairly taking a decent chunk of the profits of developers and publishers.
This might change, depending on how an ongoing class-action lawsuit initiated by Wolfire Games goes, but for the time being, Valve is making money hand over fist selling games on Steam. The platform boasts over 132 million users, so it’s perfectly reasonable that developers and publishers feel they have to use Steam – and give away a slice of their revenue – in order to reach the largest audience possible.
The reason Steam is #1 is because they were first to the market and everyone’s so invested into it.
That’s why today’s business model is „dump VC money until you’re ubiquitous, once monopolised drive the prices up”. We see that with things like Just Eat / Glovo, Steam or YouTube.
Nah mate, Steam is just the best game platform on PC. A game has access to so many features like cloud saves, community, workshop, matchmaking when it comes out on Steam, while the users have access to user reviews, curators, guides, sales, bundles etc etc. Epic doesn’t have most of those features. And yes, a game dev can go out of their way to create those features for their game, on Steam they don’t have to. Epic had all the time in the world to implement even half of them, but they still haven’t. GOG is an alternative because it offers something Steam won’t, and it’s been going great for them. Epic is just a bootleg version of Steam. Their only claim to fame is their free game giveaways, but even then you’re stuck playing the game without the features Steam users have.
I dunno about those lame features, I use Steam because AAA mostly gets exclusively released there on PC. It kinda sucks.
That’s most likely just cause they enjoy the auto downloader, patch tools and anticheat software that they can bundle in.
GOG has installers for AAA games like Witcher and Baldurs Gate 3 because the developers were better about giving the option. Heck lots of AAA games on epic. We don’t complain about PlayStation and Nintendo exclusives. Blame the developers for liking the easy features to only be on Steam. Ask them to change not Valve.
Epic pays handsome sums for exclusives, can’t blame the devs for taking it. They go to Valve to not miss out on the gigantic market share cause it’s a monopoly. And I do complain about Nintendo and PlayStation exclusives ;)
But they could release their own installer like CD project Red and other studios do. They don’t want to miss out on the ease of the installer that enables a larger market share. That’s not a monopoly. Literally.
No. The vast majority of potential customer will only buy if it’s on Steam. This is not about features, it’s about market access.
Right but that’s an ease of purchase thing. They could buy elsewhere. The option exists, there is no lack of viable options and people still take it. Not by definition a monopoly.
So you are angry that people are lazy and don’t shop around too much. Your issue is with the consumer so you want someone to step in and force them different because you don’t like their actions?
If a monopoly exists because the competition is incompetent it is still a monopoly. If someone offers a teleport service and it is the only one on the market because no one else can figure out how to do it, it is still a monopoly. I don’t want anyone to step in, I want customers/users to not defend the monopoly like it’s their favourite football club, to think about what can happen if they rely on the services of a monopoly too much and yes, to „shop around more“.
It’s easy to do that when you employ couple of hundred people while taking 30% cut of 90% of PC game sales.
Steam should be broken up as a monopoly that it is. Decouple infrastructure from the store, allow others to pay fair price for access to it and game prices would go down in an instant. That’s how telecom monopolies were broken up where I live with wonderful results. Console makers should allow alternative stores too now that they don’t subsidise hardware.
Question from the back?
How would Valve be broken up?
Would it be game developer and store front separated?
How would that aid or assist in the purchasers?
Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling
Valve gets split into Valve backend (most rudimentary but common stuff so that owned games across storefronts in that backend carry over) and Valve store/developer/publisher. Other stores get access to backend, regulator stays at Valve backend to check if they don’t give preferential treatment to Valve store. Same rules for everyone. Then stores can decide how they utilise that infra, what features they provide and consumers make a decision on cost and benefits of those stores. You can make some transfer fee if needed because downloads are a variable cost.
Oh so like how I can buy my steam keys on fanatical but still download and play them via the steam backend while using a different frontend like LaunchBox?
And Steam could take a 30% fee on transactions while using their service?
Something like that?
No. GOG, EGS, Humble and anyone else who wants to join in and offer a store that connects to Valve backend. That store calls backend to check who owns what, pays them for downloads (base/updates/dlc) and that’s it. It would make Steam monopoly crumble in an instant, prices go down because stores compete on things that matter to consumers. Stores need to compete for developers too. Win win win.
Wait but you can link Humble to steam and it checks what games you already own.
GOG wants you to just have the local game files and an installer so they don’t need this and don’t need Valve’s backend. Why pay valve for each download when you can host it yourself and not worry about the fee? Itch seems to agree with that.
And then wouldn’t everyone still be using Valve as a backend and they would have a monopoly on the infrastructure of all game downloads then? And could charge high rates to download?
Humble still has to charge you entire Valve’s cut this way. 30% is way more than the real infra cost.
Valve backend is effectively a public utility in this scenario. This thing has been proven to work and bring prices down fast. Actual free market.
Sorry, they didn’t gobble up existing infrastructure. Comparing them to telcos is just a bad argument.
Why? They lucked their way to owning the infrastructure and got paid handsomely for that already. What are the negative aspects of breaking up Steam that way? I can’t think of any. I provided plenty of benefits both to consumers and developers.
No valve means no steam controller, no proton compatibility layer (don’t tell me to use wine I was there already) no steam deck, no freedom to game on any PC OS I want.
You know nothing, Jon Snow.
You know that Proton is just streamlined and better funded Wine, a project with decades of history by now? If you’re looking for someone to thank for funding it, it’s CodeWeavers.
How’s your freedom to resell your games? Console gamers still have boxes and second hand market. Valve killed that on PC. Gamers ate Microsoft for attempting that, Valve somehow got away with it. At the time people said „but the prices are better” but how good are discounts these days?
Next thing you’ll tell me Android is good for Linux. How’s that working out for everyone?
Ok be honest you’re trolling right?
Oh come on, comparing Steam to telecoms is a bit of a leap. Nobody needs access to video games on a day-to-day basis. Video games are a luxury item at the end of the day.
Their breaking up also assumes that hosting video games for downloads is a thing only Steam can do. Steam hosting the game files and Steam as a service for the customer have little to no relation to each other. Steam, or anyone else for that matter, could just as easily use AWS. Breaking up Steam into many, smaller Steams might lead to lower prices, or devs will choose one, that one will become the dominant one, and we’re back to square one.
The best way to drive prices down is competition. It’s economics 101. Do not blame Steam for being successful, blame their competition (Epic in this case) for being inept. Epic was the VC baby everybody was banking on going toe-to-toe with Steam, but they couldn’t even get basic shit like a cart or a wishlist working for far too long.
Steam’s 30% cut is a different problem altogether. Yeah, it’s probably excessive, and would ideally be tiered by sales. However, all the games (that I have seen) that released on Epic first, with their paid exclusivity, eventually came out on Steam. So what does that tell us about how impactful that 30% cut is. Steam’s pre-existing userbase is a factor. Userbase they have, and maintain, due to their wide array of features. And, all those features Steam provides aren’t free to maintain. They host the game on their own servers, they host all the user generated content on their servers, Steamworks matchmaking is ran by Steam. Game devs aren’t just getting their game sold through Steam, Steam does much much more than that.
And this is how people will explain why upcoming technofeudalism is a good thing. Our new masters have earned it :)
Lots of new EU regulations specifically target scenarios like this because that’s in the interest of consumers. Governments should work for the people, not winners with the most money.
[edit] You’d think you’d get more people against big tech on Lemmy lol.
Maybe it’s just a bad take. Just a hurdurr big tech bad sticker on an argument doesn’t win it for you if your argument is crap.
A monopoly isn‘t good if the product is good. It‘s still bad.
Now we’re just making things up to justify a bad take?
What‘s made up?
Steam has so many more features than any other platform.
First to market or not, that’s why steam is number one.
None of its competitors offer the community, market, discussion boards, rating system, friend system functionality and overall reliability that steam does.
It has competition, just not on PC.
Epic is atrociously bad. From hampering system performance to a total lack of any of the above features, using epic sucks.
The Xbox app is somehow seemongly always broken despite literally being developed by the platform holders and with a shit load of cash behind it.
I don’t love the idea of a steam monopoly but you gotta also give them their flowers, it’s a fantastic storefront, arguably the best when considering all gaming platforms that exist even outside of PC.
It is where it is because it was the first.
If tomorrow someone made a better Steam you’d still buy everything there because that’s where all your games are. Be honest with yourself.
If tomorrow someone made a better Steam, how many years would you have to wait to be reasonably secure that it’s not fueled by venture capital and serving as a loss leader foot-in-the-door scheme? It’s not impossible that Steam itself would enshittify and open an IPO, but the fact that the option’s been on the table for decades and Valve hasn’t taken it is better evidence than any other platform could muster. Valve has proven that it’s profitable and that it doesn’t need to care about YoY growth. Let’s overestimate their operations costs (CDN, R&D, employee salaries, hardware production, licensing, etc etc) at 5 billion a year. If they made ten billion in revenue last year and only make seven billion this year, Valve is fine. Think about that. Think about what a sixty percent drop in profits would do to literally any shareholder-backed company. It’d be apocalyptic.
That’s the main reason I’ll use Steam happily but never install another storefront on my PC. I’ll buy games on GOG or Itch as DRM-free installers, and store the installers locally, and I’ll buy and play games that distribute without a storefront launcher, but the only “storefront platform” anyone’s gonna get me to install in the next decade is Steam. If “better Steam” happens, it needs to demonstrate immunity to being bought out by Microsoft/Elon Musk for eighty morbillion dollars. And that can’t be demonstrated in a day.
That’s without any mention of actual “features” like reviews or remote play or proton or steam input or anything that actually makes Steam as a program good/bad. It’s all about the company’s refusal to go shareholder-driven. If Gabe sells Valve or his successors do, I’m off the ship and scraping the DRM off of my library. What I won’t do if that happens is go to someone else’s shareholder-value-generating storefront.
Gabe Newell is a man who, for the past decade at least, has had a big red button on his desk. This button, if pressed, will deposit eleven or twelve figures directly into his wallet to distribute however he likes, at the cost of letting some company gain control of how Valve operates. Make all his employees multimillionaires! Race Musk and Bezos for biggest number! Buy a small country! Whatever! Gabe Newell has not pressed this button, and has signaled that after his retirement or death that no successor to the company is going to be allowed to press it either. If Newell’s managed not to press it for this long, I’ll “trust” him as far as it goes. His successor hasn’t earned that trust yet, so is only coasting on “trusting Newell to pick the right guy” which isn’t guaranteed - a lot of guys would sacrifice a lot to press that button.
Valve will never IPO, why would they? They own a money printing machine that doesn’t need any more capital. They will print money until the heat death of the universe if we let it. Moreover, since they’re not a public company they don’t have to share their financials and if they did that people would be likely to sing a different tune.
I’ve never seen a conceivable scenario where anything else can happen unless Valve does something mental on purpose.
Some people here raised they concern that they don’t value Valve input to merit 30% cut and would take lower price if it meant it didn’t have features they don’t use. What’s happening now means there’s no real free market or competition.
Valve will never IPO, yes! I don’t care why. That automatically makes it better than any other launcher/storefront platform that’ll exist in my lifetime, barring one that commits to staying private, succeeds as a private company, and is content with “staying profitable” for x years. Platforms that IPO universally get worse and worse as they wring every drop of shareholder value from their users to feed the infinite growth machine. Platforms that have shareholders (which includes Epic and CDPR’s GOG) have a primary motive of “being more profitable than last year”. If, let’s say, Epic made ten billion dollars in profit last year but also made ten billion dollars in profit in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, it’d be a failed company.
I’ll happily take the only company in the PC gaming space that’s content with one money printer over every other option that’s always thinking about how to make a second one, or reduce the ink costs, or blah blah blah. It’s just a happy coincidence that in the PC gaming space (unlike pretty much every other space), the shareholder-free thing is also the most popular, and best thing. I’d use the worse less-popular thing if that thing were the only thing free from growth capitalism.
If a game dev doesn’t value their presence on the Steam store higher than the cost of Steam’s service, they don’t list on Steam. Simple as. It’s just that a lot of dev studios consider “visible on the Steam store” to be very valuable indeed. That’s what they’re paying for, not the stuff about Steam that benefits the user (client features like Input, Workshop, Cloud, Community, etc).
No, it is where it is because Valve decided it wanted to invest in it outside of it being a launcher/updater for Valve games.
And it’s not really the first. The first was probably Battle.net by Blizzard, which initially was a way to connect players (chat and join games) back in the mid-90s. It wasn’t a game sales/distribution service for many years, but it got there w/ the release of the dedicated desktop app in 2013 and had some of the core features that makes Steam special (chat and match making). In fact, I had the desktop app before I had a Steam account, which I created in ~2013 when Steam came to Linux (I switched to Linux in ~2009, and had played games on Windows for years before that). Blizzard was never interested in becoming a game distribution network, so Battle.net remained largely exclusive to Blizzard titles.
I wouldn’t have bothered w/ Steam if it didn’t provide value. I was fine managing games individually, and I bought many games from Humble Bundle and directly from devs for years before Steam became a thing. I only started preferring Steam when it provided features I couldn’t get elsewhere. These days, it provides so much value since I’m a Linux user, that I honestly don’t consider alternatives, because everything else is painful. Heroic launcher closes that gap substantially, so I’m actually considering buying more from GOG (outside of a handful of old games I can’t find elsewhere).
If another launcher provided better value vs Steam, I’d switch in a heartbeat. I use both Steam and Heroic, and I still prefer Steam because it has great features like controller mapping. But if, say, GOG supported the features I care about on the platform I use, I’d probably switch to GOG because I also care about DRM-free games. But they don’t, so I largely stick to Steam.
So Battle.net started selling third party games when? Man, think your argument through before committing to paragraphs.
Valve supports Linux just to safeguard their monopoly. They killed native ports because they pushed Proton so hard. Alyx supported Linux natively even but check now.
All of this is pointless for most of the consumers. You’re making an argument that because they care for this niche it’s worth paying 30% cut. Most people would be fine with something to download and update their games with.
It was proposed, but Blizzard rejected it:
Battle.net basically approached the same problem as Steam but from the multiplayer side, whereas Steam approached from the distribution side.
I wouldn’t put it like that. They support Linux to safeguard against Microsoft pushing their monopoly, and they did seem to be gearing up to do just that. Epic had similar concerns, hence the lawsuits against Google and Apple.
How is Linux support pointless? Having more options to play your games is a good thing! I don’t think Heroic would’ve had as much of an impact w/o Valve’s investment into Proton/WINE, and that gives customers a choice on which platform to buy and play their games on. It also allowed for the Steam OS market, and competitors are absolutely welcome to create their own spin with their own store, they just don’t for whatever reason.
Downloading and updating games, for me, is actually the least important part of what Steam offers. I care far more about Linux support (I was a Linux user before I was a Steam user), Steam Input (Steam Deck, and I prefer controller on PC), and consolidating sales to one store. Whether I need to launch it separately or whatever isn’t a big deal.
So because Battle.net failed to predict market correctly 100% of PC gamers are stuck with Steam until the end of the world. That doesn’t change the fact that Valve lucked into the position they are in and was paid billions for this already.
PC gamers aren’t “stuck with Steam,” they very much have options. And Steam is likely way better than whatever Battle.net would’ve become, so I’m quite happy with how things turned out.
And yeah, Valve was quite lucky in nailing the timing, however, that was also a very conscious choice since they filled a need they saw. Valve is perhaps the best company you could ask for to have such a dominant position, pretty much any other company would’ve resulted in a way worse situation for gamers.
PC gamers are stuck because Steam is a self-perpetuating monopoly. If your entire library is on Steam, and Steam has almost all of the games you’ll just keep on buying there for convenience (and that’s what happens, analysts estimate 90% market share). Alan Wake 2 wasn’t profitable until EGS exclusivity expired because gamers opted to wait rather than buy this gem of a game on a different platform (that gives away games like candy).
Even if you think that Valve are just the best, aren’t you worried that having one good option is being one good option away from having no good options?
Translation: agree with me or you are wrong.
Earth is round.
Off topic
Valve good, belong to tribe now, gib upvotes.
And you think others can’t argue when you lower yourself to the floor in order be angry without purpose. Smearing yourself in mud to show us just makes you a mess.
I started to use user tags to make communication more efficient, I can adjust communication to members of the Valve tribe.
Me tag you in computer. Me know you Valve simp. Me pretend me Valve tribe. You know.
Brother I already buy things on GoG lol.
Steam is great and all but ownership is far more important to me personally
Great! Not everything’s available there unfortunately. Some games release on Steam only even. So you probably are affected either way.
90% of people buy on Steam. And they do that because their entire libraries are on Steam.