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Amazon's previous VP of Prime Gaming said they "tried everything" to disrupt Steam
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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I want five game managers.
Maybe a sixth to manage those.
Competition in the PC market is a good thing. Otherwise it's just another locked down console.
I know that today in most English-speaking countries, competition is worshipped as an all-powerful god that solves every problem. But the reality is that competition is often detrimental to a lot of stakeholders in an industry. Competition optimizes for specific parameters in a downward spiral- that's why every streaming service sucks, and is worse than Netflix was 10 years ago.
What would you hope to get out of a Steam competitor? I will guess that you are talking about price pressure. But Steam does not set the prices- publishers do. That's why the same game is $69.99 whether you get it on Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox store, Epic Games Store, or buying physical copies from Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, or wherever else. In that way you could argue Steam already has tons of effective competition putting pressure on prices, just outside of the specific PC digital storefront space.
So maybe if Valve had more competition, Steam might be forced to reduce their fees to publishers, but there's no reason to believe that cost savings would be passed on to consumers.
If anything, having competition just repeats the fixed costs, or in other words reduces the population of users that fixed costs are spread over, driving up the total and per-unit costs of the whole system.
Now I certainly am not saying anything so dumb as "In GabeN we trust" or "I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term". But the solution is regulation, not competition.
The other notable place monopolies fail is servicing less profitable populations. Valve has so far done the opposite. Epic has outright refused to support Linux, while Valve has made their own free gaming Linux distro, with tons of work put into Proton for free to ensure compatibility. VR is a tiny niche, but Valve still put out one of the best VR systems kn the market. The "handheld" PC market was incredibly niche, but Valve released the Steam Deck and I would guess sold an order of magnitude or two more units than anything before or since in that space. I don't really see any underserved niches asking for a competitor.
I'm not a native English speaker.
Steam does set the prices, in that they use their dominant position to force the best price always being on Steam, whether it's 5 bucks or 100. This is pretty well established in recent lawsuits, whether US courts end up deciding that Steam is doing so legally or not.
In any case, I don't care about price pressure. Games are way too cheap as it is (partially thanks to Steam leaning hard on seasonal sales developers and publishers can't afford to ignore, incidentally).
The stuff that does bother me is Steam telling developers and publishers what to do, what the consequences of not doing it will be and how much of their money they will take afterwards with no recourse. I've seen them do this with my faceholes.
So yes, Steam has a dominant position that harms competition and yes, they do leverage it to do harm. Not to end users, where they're still competing with consoles and effectively with Microsoft, but certainly on the developer marketplace where content creators can't afford to not be in the platform.
Steam uses a Uberified UGC gig economy system on PC game devs where it sets the rules because there's no alternative. And that's bad. More competition makes that less sustainable. And that's good.
Source? All I can find is lawsuits about the 30% cut, none about forcing the same price on steam as elsewhere.
Normally I tell people to do their own googling, but man, this is woefully underreported. For some reason when this came out the press latched on to some of the emails containing Valve employees trolling Tim Sweeney behind the scenes and that leak about how many employees they had and they barely mentioned this.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F778bbf05-f937-4f50-a8a5-90de4185172e_1000x677.jpeg
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view
I don't know if there's some reason for it, but I saw it get reported in real time when it came out and the sources that remain online seem to be legit. It's not particularly surprising, either. Valve is not shy about giving developers marching orders in general.
Thank you. I did search myself but like I said, different lawsuits kept popping up.