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Steam is a platform that happens to also have a storefront. Other companies are building storefronts and hoping that's enough.
If you can't provide fast downloads, cloud saves synced across devices, achievements, mod support, friends lists, and multiplayer support, it's not a real option. Being cheaper or having some exclusives aren't attractive. Gog already has the drm free angle to be a legitimate competitor.
Being consistently cheaper would actually be attractive to many people. The thing is, none of these competitors can even muster that. Steam consistently has better sales, more often. And it's pretty funny seeing Amazon of all things not able to match or beat that. They are known for undercutting the competition, even at their own expense, just to get customers; It's literally how they got to be as big as they are.
Epic kinda tried that by giving away tons of free games in the Epic Games Store. It didn't work.
If I want Steam games cheaper, I go buy a Steam key for that game from a separate retailer and activate it on Steam. Save like 50-70% irrespective of Steam sales. It's remarkable that Steam allows us to even do that in the first place.
Epic also generated a lot of bad blood by scooping up Kickstarter projects and ordering the devs to cancel the Steam releases, releases that had already been paid for by backers. A bunch of potential customers refused to buy from Epic on principle after that.
The timed exclusivity deals are what did it for me
Bringing that bullshit to the PC gaming market guaranteed I'll never spend a penny on their storefront.
If the carrot they're leading with is limiting choice, I'm not going to hang around waiting to find out what the stick might be if they get successful
Epic is doing me a favor, I get to keep my money while I play my backlog, then I buy the game on Steam / GOG for cheaper later on.
I'm one of them. For all their trash talk about Steam being a monopoly, Epic Games sure pulled some hypocritical, anticompetitive shit in their attempt to replace one monopoly with an objectively worse, consumer-hostile one.
Yeah that one rubbed me particularly wrong. Valve can be a bit hit and miss sometimes, but they've not actively monopolized games from other devs.
I'm still gaining more and more games in my epic library I'll never use but love wasting Tim Sweeneys money. Lmao
Valve wins by doing nothing... it's a tale as old as time.
Steam's market share is a huge factor in why their competition never succeeds, but it's hardly the only reason. Steam is a whole platform, not just a launcher or storefront. And they're also cognizant that the consumers are not just a revenue source to be milked, but actually long-term customers whose loyalty is important.
It really shouldn't be a surprise that when you enter an established market, you're not going to accomplish shit by providing a lesser service while simultaneously treating the consumer worse.
MBAs walk into this arena thinking they've got their quarterly agile reports synergized outside the box to the max.
Somehow none of them have learned the concept of long term customers
Gaben and Steam: does nothing, wins
It always baffles me when I see an established company fail to understand long-term customers and still expect any kind of meaningful growth.
It's because the stock market doesn't care about anything except the next quarter. Valve can think long term because they're privately owned.
The loyalty thing is what kept me.
I was wary of another gaming platform, there were so many and they all seemed the same, I never liked one over the other - they were just means to an end.
A few years back I really wanted to play RDR2 with my friends. It was expensive and I never pre-order, but as soon as it came out on (a small) sale I bought it for all 4 of us.
It was a lot of money for me, but I really wanted the story to play with everyone.
All was well at first, until we had each completed the tutorial and met up in open world. That's when we learned that the game was based on GTA and the devs do not care about hackers.
We had one fucking with us for over an hour, teleporting us into the air and dropping us, setting us randomly on fire, spawning space ships and so on.
I begged in voice for them to just leave us be, to no avail.
We are all older, we rarely have time to play together. I was crushed.
I was an hour over the return time on Steam, one of the other friends took a bit longer exploring and was even more than that.
I contacted steam anyway and tried to get a refund, and they granted it for all of us.
Later I learned this was a thing in RDR2 and there was now the ability to create private lobbies, but I just can't make myself try it and give Rockstar any money.
Steam however, won a lifelong fan. They didn't have to honour the refund, and they don't have to provide personal support that offers more than just the canned responses, but they do.
I hope Gabe lives forever, or finds another like him to carry the torch after he's gone.
The biggest advantage Steam has over other platforms:
Amazon could probably compete with them if they really wanted to, but that would involve a large, long-term, consumer-centric investment, which probably isn't a good use of their money.
#3 is the key I think. Valve's business model is figuring out what their customers want and then providing it to them. Amazon's model is to capture enough market share so they can start the enshitification process.
Yes but also #3 is closely tied to #1.
I saw this posted a couple days ago which pretty succinctly summarizes the current state of the market.
Commented this a year ago, and its just as relevant today.
While this is funny, it is not true: Valve has contributed tremendously to the Linux environment (Mesa above all, and Proton) and based their own console on top of it, making it possible to play almost every game you own, both from their store and from elsewhere.
People at Valve have been cooking every day. Never sitting idle.
This without considering the countless features Steam already sports: friends, achievements, cloud saves, a curated front page.
In a parallel universe where epic came out with the Deck instead of Valve, things are probably quite different. But no, Valve announces steam deck and the first thing epic does is drop their already small support for Linux.
Its called "not having shareholders to maximise profits for". Everything turns to shit once they go public.
In the great us downfall of 2026, valve might just be the only big company left standing.
To be honest I really do prefer buying games on GOG. One day steam will go shit and we will be stuck with huge game libraries locked there. The day GOG goes dark I’ll still have all the offline installers of everything I bought.
Piracy is our friend. If Steam ever goes to shit, gamers would go back to piracy.
Steam also never took it's eye off the piracy ball. Offer up a service better than free piracy.
Just pulling from my memory:
Because you're smart and you are archiving everything. Most people don't even know they can download the installers, they just install Gog Galaxy.
Tim Sweeney shit on Linux gamers enough that I refused to ever give Epic a penny
steam pros: a store that always has a sale or big holiday sale right around the corner, a social network, a library for game info and game modding, and a trophy case etc.
what was amazon offering? full priced games, no sales that beat steams (a free game offer now and then only if you give them $140 a year and forget about it), and shitty cloud streaming of few games? so they tried nothing actually meaningful, were all out of ideas, but shocked they lost
oh and also on a platform notorious for making e-books unable to work on pcs, forcing their proprietary hardware for a PDF. and now they're actually going in and changing/censoring whats written in books without authors consent.
Granted I'm not a gamer, but I don't think I've ever even heard of prime gaming. I've heard of steam though.
So after investing millions in this, this is incredible insight that the VP has gained:
- Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code
I really recommend reading his LinkedIn post, just to understand how these people think, and how fucking incompetent people at the top raking in millions are. It's surprisingly honest for a LI post (although that bar is very low), probably because the guy is now retired and doesn't give a shit anymore.
I honestly never even processed that Prime Gaming was a thing and that it was trying to compete with Steam. I just knew they purchased Twitch and thought they'd probably abandon it into a shitty, old and slow site like they did with IMDB and Goodreads.
Easy: Amazon just gotta invent new problems for gamers! And then sell the solution.
The only launcher I use the same amount if not more is gog.com. Give me those good old games.
That's not how Capitalism works!
/s
The larger company simply needs to create/invent problems that the smaller company cannot solve, and then sell a solution.
And buy them out at some point too. Very important step.
Then there's me on Gog buying DRM free games that I can download and keep at my leisure.
