this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Debunking the grey market beyond Steam (www.gamesindustry.biz)
submitted 1 day ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to c/games@sh.itjust.works
136 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago

Alan Wake 2 wasn’t profitable until EGS exclusivity expired

Well yeah, because EGS sucks.

If you look at Steam's competitors, none of them are really developing their feature set. So even if customers were dissatisfied w/ Steam, who is actively trying to earn their business?

aren’t you worried that having one good option is being one good option away from having no good options?

Sure, I'd love it if another platform stepped up to actually compete w/ Steam.

My expectations are fairly low: it needs to work well on Linux. Heroic largely resolves that for EGS and GOG, but I'm not particularly interested in supporting a platform that only works because some community project has done the work for them. So if GOG supported Galaxy on Linux as a first class citizen, I'd probably still use Heroic, but I'd buy a lot more games from them. But as it stands, GOG is one update away from blocking access to my games through a launcher, and dealing w/ WINE/Proton directly is a pain. EGS is so far away from what I care about that I don't think they could ever earn my business, but who knows, maybe they'll surprise me.

But the fact that we're even having this discussion is a testament to Steam's success. Heroic probably wouldn't be a thing w/o Valve's investment into Proton/WINE, so GOG/EGS wouldn't even be a consideration for me at all. But since that work was done, I now have more options. I've played some GOG and EGS games through Heroic, so it's not even theoretical, they are realistic alternatives.

It's important to note that at every turn, Valve has earned my trust. When games are pulled from their store, owners of those games still have access (e.g. I bought Rocket League on Steam, and when they went EGS exclusive, I still had the old version of the game). They have a solid refund policy, and they have gone out of their way to make things more pleasant for their customers. Even if they didn't have a dominant market position, I'd probably still choose them just based on the user experience. So yeah, not having a realistic alternative isn't great, but I don't think it's because of anything nefarious Valve has done, but instead lack of interest by their competitors.