8 ms·

72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study

46 points by mrzool 11mo ago

cyberjunkie 11mo ago
Better Valve/Steam than Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Epic or the rest. Gambling / trading aside, they're doing a pretty fine so far.
- mrzool 11mo ago
  No question about it! Edit: that said, the 30% fee is pretty greedy (Apple-level greedy) and they could be doing better at least in that regard.
  - carlos_rpn 11mo ago
    Anytime I see the complaint about the 30% fee, I wonder what people feel would be fair for the service, because it also includes storage, distribution for new instalations and patching for older ones, along with generating keys to be sold at other stores. Would people feel better with a lower fee, but no distribution network, for example?
    - dominicrose 11mo ago
      Maybe Steam and Apple deserved to obtain a partial monopoly but now they can just sit and relax and take 30% to copy/paste games/apps to each user that wants them. So yes, 30% is high and unjust to the games creators who are doing the 2025 work.
    - edelbitter 11mo ago
      I would love for steam to offer even the complement: Only distribution & SSO services, so I can have fast downloads and quick non-replayable-auth for games I buy/subscribe elsewhere (not subject to steam peculiarities about squeezing out maximum price for each region by purchasing power). Of course, that would need to have a wildly different fee schedule than when they carry major legal & reputational risks plus more significant customer support volume.
    - InterlooperX 11mo ago
      Agreed. The Steam platform has so much value for developers and yet they still complain about the 30%. To put into perspective, when Epic only takes 15%. They themselves admitted that is not a sustainable thing. EGS is constantly losing money. So now I invite everyone to gauge just how "big" the EGS is. How many "features" they offer etc. This platform in so much smaller than Steam and even they state that a 15% cut is not sustainable to keep the light on. Judging just how big the Steam platform is, do people honestly think Valve could be forced into reducing their cut to this proposed 15%? When this little hobbyshop that is EGS cannot make it work. Why would it work for a much much larger and therefore more expensive platform? I am furthermore given to understand when you distribute on Steam you are free to run your own store front. You are free to create your own Steam keys for your games and sell them in your shop which is supposedly have a 0% cut for Valve. Of course then you would have to run your own store with all the effort and cost that go along with it. Or you simply put it on Steam. A storefront visited by millions of paying customers. Which handles everything. From purchase/refund/CDN for Downloading and updating the game binaries/communityhub to directly engage with the customers if you wish In the end, the only way they are forced to use steam is because that is where the customers are. and since there are alternatives around, these customers could very well shop some place else. but they dont. they shop where they get the best experience. and if that is on steam, thats where they go. If "developers" were really honest they would all disclose just how much they sold on Steam vs any other digital store front in case they distribute their offerings to any store that will let them. Just because you get 4 sales on Epic vs 4 million sales on Steam does mean Steam is a monopoly. It just means Epic is a steaming pile and given the chance the customer goes to the better option.
      - kakacik 11mo ago
        30% on mobile platforms if generally frowned upon as source of massive overcharging compared to actual costs (since its a massive revenue & income stream for their owners), but somehow for Steam its fine because... they also generate keys? Or what should be the magical justfication. No its not fine, its a cash cow milking customers. Valve may be better than their competition but they are not saints (same company basically inventing addictive lootboxes mechanism, albeit not in its worst possible form), its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025. Maybe they should have tiers ie 0-10% for first 5k sales, 20% above 100k etc. There are many options to be nicer to customers & developers.
    - msabalau 11mo ago
      Steam getting a 30% cut is certainly less objectional that Apple getting 30% because they've locked other people out of selling on iPhones. On the other hand, that Steam taking as big a cut as Apple can claim because of their unfortunate practices isn't great. Generally, the smallest indie creators, who aren't really likely to benefit from organic discovery on Steam, seem to priority selling on itch, which, by default, only takes a 10%, despite doing all the work you mention. That Steam seems to have a marketplace monopoly based on network effects, and this allows them to claw money from all but the largest and smallest game developers is not something they have a strong right to claim to morally, and something society would benefit from doing away with. It appears that 72% of game devs feel that way too. So, to answer your question, for me, two thirds of Steam's revenue seem unfair.
    - tencentshill 11mo ago
      No other service actually saturates my download speed. That's probably an expensive luxury that could be cut. Even netflix with their CDNs in every city tries to minimize bandwith and it results in terrible video quality-if it can even deliver it at all.
  - fakedang 11mo ago
    How much do you think they should take? Steam is the most dominant because of their extremely customer friendly policies, their insane price crashes and the ease of publishing and installing games from the platform. If other platforms are able to provide all of that, with a commission below 30%, I'm sure they could easily take over. But turns out, neither Epic nor EA are interested in serving the customer.
    - gruez 11mo ago
      >Steam is the most dominant because of their ... insane price crashes Are steam deals really better than on other platforms? They might have better deals compared to brick and mortar retailers but publishers generally have price parity across various digital storefronts (eg. epic vs steam), so attributing low prices to steam doesn't really make much sense. If anything steam is actually more expensive if you factor in authorized keystores (eg. greenmangaming), which are occasionally cheaper.
      - fakedang 11mo ago
        Three words, Steam Summer Sales. I've never seen any platform go that low on price except for Humble Bundle maybe. And even then, Steam has an EXTREMELY generous refund policy compared to any other platform.
        gruez 11mo ago
        >Three words, Steam Summer Sales. IME they're matched by other platforms. If Cyberpunk is discounted for a steam summer sale, it's similarly discounted on Epic or GOG as well. It's not a Steam exclusive, and therefore can't be cited as an advantage.
    - mrzool 11mo ago
      > How much do you think they should take? A 15–20% fee would be much fairer in my opinion. They’d still be making plenty of money while letting developers keep more of what they earn through their hard work. At the very least, they should differentiate between big players and smaller indie developers.
  - happymellon 11mo ago
    > Apple-level greedy You are free to install an alternative store, that probably has all the games that you are buying from Steam. I can't do that with my iPhone. They charge it because people use it voluntarily for the better customer and user experience. If Apple didn't provide their store installed by default, allowed alternative stores without manipulating their content and yet people still used it, it would be a closer analogy.
Pooge 11mo ago
I've never understood this point. Other developers can just make their own platform or distribute games themselves individually. Nobody wants to do that for obvious reasons. There's clearly a network effect similar to Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and the likes. But apart from regulating for service interoperability, there's nothing you can do. It's like claiming that Skype had a monopoly between 2008 and 2014. Just... Install something else then? Valve is not buying other store makers nor actively sabotaging efforts to do so.
- RealStickman_ 11mo ago
  You're even allowed to sell your game cheaper on other platforms (not Steam keys, separate keys for those platforms) so by all means charge the 30% more on Steam if you need to.
  - gruez 11mo ago
    >You're even allowed to sell your game cheaper on other platforms (not Steam keys, separate keys for those platforms) so by all means charge the 30% more on Steam if you need to. How many people would even bite, given the huge premium?
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo ago
      If you don't try,you will never know.
  - ExpertAdvisor01 11mo ago
    you are not allowed to sell cd keys cheaper than on steam
    - RealStickman_ 11mo ago
      Do you have a source for that? I only know this [1] site laying out distribution of Steam keys [1] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
glimshe 11mo ago
GOG proves you can still have a solid business in the space. Steam is dominant but not necessarily a monopoly. For all of its faults, Steam is still better than most competitors.
estimator7292 11mo ago
Dominant and successful, yes. Monopoly, no. It take more than simply being the best or most successful business in a sector to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is an active choice you make as a business by intentionally engaging in anticompetitive behaviors. Valve isn't putting any pressure on anyone in this sector. There is still competition, but Valve has simply been more successful than everyone else. Mainly because the alternatives are so, so much worse like EA and co who are actively malicious and predatory. Valve hasn't done anything to pass an antitrust sniff test.
- Agingcoder 11mo ago
  Yes - I tried the other platforms. Much to my surprise (and granted, I have the means to do so) I will favor steam whenever possible, it’s just significantly better.
  - NekkoDroid 11mo ago
    I do mostly agree with you that Steam is better as a storefront than all other ones out there, but in my opinion the Battle.net launcher is still my favorite game launcher edging out Steam because of how snappy it is. Steam just sometimes feels really slow when launching for the first time or when switching tabs/pages (I do also have it just sometimes be just a black windows, but I haven't figured out the cause yet but it is the only window that does it, so...). In comparison B.net just feels decently snappy. They are both effectively using CEF for their launcher, but since Steam starts so slow for me I always keep it in the background and its WebHelper taking up 414MB (rn, but its always in that ballpark) is not helping its case.
  - ThrowawayR2 11mo ago
    People favored Google as much as possible in the '00s and then they turned evil. For games, I favor Good Old Games rather than Steam as much as possible and go out of my way to wait for releases on their platform. Whatever becomes of them, at least I'll have my downloaded DRM-free version of my purchases.
    - 11mo ago
svpk 11mo ago
Key distinctions between Steam and similar contenders in other spaces (google play store, the apple app store) are that: 1. Steam isn't bundled with the OS, it must be installed. 2. Steam isn't a gatekeeper to installing software (as the app store is and in a somewhat different way as google has proposed doing with their plans to require app signing). At least the US, and I assume most legal schemes, require an attempt to monopolize, simply being the best player in town isn't enough. Perhaps if the steam deck, etc. achieved a high level of market dominance you could argue that bundling steam was anticompetitive, but I don't see it yet.
- teroshan 11mo ago
  I'm still finishing my first read, but I really recommend Cory Doctorow's latest book [1] "Enshittification:Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It" which covers the subject of tech monopolies and much more. Reading it I learned about the term "monopsony" which is "a market in which goods or services are offered by several sellers but there is only one buyer" which is usually conflated with monopoly. [1] https://www.versobooks.com/products/3341-enshittification https://www.versobooks.com/products/3341-enshittification
  - plumthreads 11mo ago
    This is really the key here. Many people are commenting their experience as a games buyers, but this article is about the developers. Monopsonies are usually linked to lower wages in labor markets. In this case lower profits for developers from selling their games.
- yxhuvud 11mo ago
  A third difference is that I've seen no signs of steam actually abusing their standing in the market. If anything they seem to be nicer than they have to be.
  - mzhaase 11mo ago
    They absolutely keep a larger cut than others. With Epic the first million you make is free. After much deliberation, steam changed it so that their 30% cut is reduced if you make more than 10M. For a lot of indie devs, its pretty much a death sentence.
systematizeD 11mo ago
I was curious who exactly would commission and/or publish said study - turns out it’s a grey market key reseller yeah no shit their clients are concerned that Steam is the only storefront that people trust
nyadesu 11mo ago
It doesn't feel that way to me, I know I could probably buy a game through another digital distribution service, maybe for a bit cheaper, but it's just not worth the hassle of installing another program, signing up, and configuring things
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
everdrive 11mo ago
And PC gaming would be much, much worse without Steam. It would go to some publicly traded company. They would gain a monopoly anyhow, and then slowly start making every single part of the service worse and worse to increase shareholder profits.
UI_at_80x24 11mo ago
I've been a "PC Gamer" for 31+ years. The 'value-add' that steam brings to the table is INCREDIBLE. Thanks to Proton/Linux efforts. (1) my games are installable AND playable on _every_ device I use. (2) I don't have to fight with wine/crossover/etc to get things to work. (3) It's not hostile to the end user (yet). I have bought more games since the Steamdeck came out then in the 40'some years before that. Yes I know that I don't have to use steam, but they make it EASIER. I am looking forward to Deckard for all of the above reasons and their history with the Index. Steam makes installing software EASIER then the alternative (regardless of the OS). Auto-patching/updates of installed games. If I was more social I'd probably use those features more. If they ever charge a monthly fee, I'll stop using it.

46 points by mrzool 11mo ago

Better Valve/Steam than Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Epic or the rest. Gambling / trading aside, they're doing a pretty fine so far.

mrzool 11mo ago
No question about it! Edit: that said, the 30% fee is pretty greedy (Apple-level greedy) and they could be doing better at least in that regard.
- carlos_rpn 11mo ago
  Anytime I see the complaint about the 30% fee, I wonder what people feel would be fair for the service, because it also includes storage, distribution for new instalations and patching for older ones, along with generating keys to be sold at other stores. Would people feel better with a lower fee, but no distribution network, for example?
  - dominicrose 11mo ago
    Maybe Steam and Apple deserved to obtain a partial monopoly but now they can just sit and relax and take 30% to copy/paste games/apps to each user that wants them. So yes, 30% is high and unjust to the games creators who are doing the 2025 work.
  - edelbitter 11mo ago
    I would love for steam to offer even the complement: Only distribution & SSO services, so I can have fast downloads and quick non-replayable-auth for games I buy/subscribe elsewhere (not subject to steam peculiarities about squeezing out maximum price for each region by purchasing power). Of course, that would need to have a wildly different fee schedule than when they carry major legal & reputational risks plus more significant customer support volume.
  - InterlooperX 11mo ago
    Agreed. The Steam platform has so much value for developers and yet they still complain about the 30%. To put into perspective, when Epic only takes 15%. They themselves admitted that is not a sustainable thing. EGS is constantly losing money. So now I invite everyone to gauge just how "big" the EGS is. How many "features" they offer etc. This platform in so much smaller than Steam and even they state that a 15% cut is not sustainable to keep the light on. Judging just how big the Steam platform is, do people honestly think Valve could be forced into reducing their cut to this proposed 15%? When this little hobbyshop that is EGS cannot make it work. Why would it work for a much much larger and therefore more expensive platform? I am furthermore given to understand when you distribute on Steam you are free to run your own store front. You are free to create your own Steam keys for your games and sell them in your shop which is supposedly have a 0% cut for Valve. Of course then you would have to run your own store with all the effort and cost that go along with it. Or you simply put it on Steam. A storefront visited by millions of paying customers. Which handles everything. From purchase/refund/CDN for Downloading and updating the game binaries/communityhub to directly engage with the customers if you wish In the end, the only way they are forced to use steam is because that is where the customers are. and since there are alternatives around, these customers could very well shop some place else. but they dont. they shop where they get the best experience. and if that is on steam, thats where they go. If "developers" were really honest they would all disclose just how much they sold on Steam vs any other digital store front in case they distribute their offerings to any store that will let them. Just because you get 4 sales on Epic vs 4 million sales on Steam does mean Steam is a monopoly. It just means Epic is a steaming pile and given the chance the customer goes to the better option.
    - kakacik 11mo ago
      30% on mobile platforms if generally frowned upon as source of massive overcharging compared to actual costs (since its a massive revenue & income stream for their owners), but somehow for Steam its fine because... they also generate keys? Or what should be the magical justfication. No its not fine, its a cash cow milking customers. Valve may be better than their competition but they are not saints (same company basically inventing addictive lootboxes mechanism, albeit not in its worst possible form), its a for-profit company that has tons of profit. I am not saying 15% is OK or X% is OK, but 30% is too much in 2025. Maybe they should have tiers ie 0-10% for first 5k sales, 20% above 100k etc. There are many options to be nicer to customers & developers.
  - msabalau 11mo ago
    Steam getting a 30% cut is certainly less objectional that Apple getting 30% because they've locked other people out of selling on iPhones. On the other hand, that Steam taking as big a cut as Apple can claim because of their unfortunate practices isn't great. Generally, the smallest indie creators, who aren't really likely to benefit from organic discovery on Steam, seem to priority selling on itch, which, by default, only takes a 10%, despite doing all the work you mention. That Steam seems to have a marketplace monopoly based on network effects, and this allows them to claw money from all but the largest and smallest game developers is not something they have a strong right to claim to morally, and something society would benefit from doing away with. It appears that 72% of game devs feel that way too. So, to answer your question, for me, two thirds of Steam's revenue seem unfair.
  - tencentshill 11mo ago
    No other service actually saturates my download speed. That's probably an expensive luxury that could be cut. Even netflix with their CDNs in every city tries to minimize bandwith and it results in terrible video quality-if it can even deliver it at all.
- fakedang 11mo ago
  How much do you think they should take? Steam is the most dominant because of their extremely customer friendly policies, their insane price crashes and the ease of publishing and installing games from the platform. If other platforms are able to provide all of that, with a commission below 30%, I'm sure they could easily take over. But turns out, neither Epic nor EA are interested in serving the customer.
  - gruez 11mo ago
    >Steam is the most dominant because of their ... insane price crashes Are steam deals really better than on other platforms? They might have better deals compared to brick and mortar retailers but publishers generally have price parity across various digital storefronts (eg. epic vs steam), so attributing low prices to steam doesn't really make much sense. If anything steam is actually more expensive if you factor in authorized keystores (eg. greenmangaming), which are occasionally cheaper.
    - fakedang 11mo ago
      Three words, Steam Summer Sales. I've never seen any platform go that low on price except for Humble Bundle maybe. And even then, Steam has an EXTREMELY generous refund policy compared to any other platform.
      - gruez 11mo ago
        >Three words, Steam Summer Sales. IME they're matched by other platforms. If Cyberpunk is discounted for a steam summer sale, it's similarly discounted on Epic or GOG as well. It's not a Steam exclusive, and therefore can't be cited as an advantage.
  - mrzool 11mo ago
    > How much do you think they should take? A 15–20% fee would be much fairer in my opinion. They’d still be making plenty of money while letting developers keep more of what they earn through their hard work. At the very least, they should differentiate between big players and smaller indie developers.
- happymellon 11mo ago
  > Apple-level greedy You are free to install an alternative store, that probably has all the games that you are buying from Steam. I can't do that with my iPhone. They charge it because people use it voluntarily for the better customer and user experience. If Apple didn't provide their store installed by default, allowed alternative stores without manipulating their content and yet people still used it, it would be a closer analogy.

Pooge 11mo ago

I've never understood this point. Other developers can just make their own platform or distribute games themselves individually. Nobody wants to do that for obvious reasons. There's clearly a network effect similar to Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and the likes. But apart from regulating for service interoperability, there's nothing you can do. It's like claiming that Skype had a monopoly between 2008 and 2014. Just... Install something else then? Valve is not buying other store makers nor actively sabotaging efforts to do so.

RealStickman_ 11mo ago
You're even allowed to sell your game cheaper on other platforms (not Steam keys, separate keys for those platforms) so by all means charge the 30% more on Steam if you need to.
- gruez 11mo ago
  >You're even allowed to sell your game cheaper on other platforms (not Steam keys, separate keys for those platforms) so by all means charge the 30% more on Steam if you need to. How many people would even bite, given the huge premium?
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo ago
    If you don't try,you will never know.
- ExpertAdvisor01 11mo ago
  you are not allowed to sell cd keys cheaper than on steam
  - RealStickman_ 11mo ago
    Do you have a source for that? I only know this [1] site laying out distribution of Steam keys [1] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

glimshe 11mo ago

GOG proves you can still have a solid business in the space. Steam is dominant but not necessarily a monopoly. For all of its faults, Steam is still better than most competitors.

estimator7292 11mo ago

Dominant and successful, yes. Monopoly, no. It take more than simply being the best or most successful business in a sector to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is an active choice you make as a business by intentionally engaging in anticompetitive behaviors. Valve isn't putting any pressure on anyone in this sector. There is still competition, but Valve has simply been more successful than everyone else. Mainly because the alternatives are so, so much worse like EA and co who are actively malicious and predatory. Valve hasn't done anything to pass an antitrust sniff test.

Agingcoder 11mo ago
Yes - I tried the other platforms. Much to my surprise (and granted, I have the means to do so) I will favor steam whenever possible, it’s just significantly better.
- NekkoDroid 11mo ago
  I do mostly agree with you that Steam is better as a storefront than all other ones out there, but in my opinion the Battle.net launcher is still my favorite game launcher edging out Steam because of how snappy it is. Steam just sometimes feels really slow when launching for the first time or when switching tabs/pages (I do also have it just sometimes be just a black windows, but I haven't figured out the cause yet but it is the only window that does it, so...). In comparison B.net just feels decently snappy. They are both effectively using CEF for their launcher, but since Steam starts so slow for me I always keep it in the background and its WebHelper taking up 414MB (rn, but its always in that ballpark) is not helping its case.
- ThrowawayR2 11mo ago
  People favored Google as much as possible in the '00s and then they turned evil. For games, I favor Good Old Games rather than Steam as much as possible and go out of my way to wait for releases on their platform. Whatever becomes of them, at least I'll have my downloaded DRM-free version of my purchases.
  - 11mo ago

svpk 11mo ago

Key distinctions between Steam and similar contenders in other spaces (google play store, the apple app store) are that: 1. Steam isn't bundled with the OS, it must be installed. 2. Steam isn't a gatekeeper to installing software (as the app store is and in a somewhat different way as google has proposed doing with their plans to require app signing). At least the US, and I assume most legal schemes, require an attempt to monopolize, simply being the best player in town isn't enough. Perhaps if the steam deck, etc. achieved a high level of market dominance you could argue that bundling steam was anticompetitive, but I don't see it yet.

teroshan 11mo ago
I'm still finishing my first read, but I really recommend Cory Doctorow's latest book [1] "Enshittification:Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It" which covers the subject of tech monopolies and much more. Reading it I learned about the term "monopsony" which is "a market in which goods or services are offered by several sellers but there is only one buyer" which is usually conflated with monopoly. [1] https://www.versobooks.com/products/3341-enshittification https://www.versobooks.com/products/3341-enshittification
- plumthreads 11mo ago
  This is really the key here. Many people are commenting their experience as a games buyers, but this article is about the developers. Monopsonies are usually linked to lower wages in labor markets. In this case lower profits for developers from selling their games.
yxhuvud 11mo ago
A third difference is that I've seen no signs of steam actually abusing their standing in the market. If anything they seem to be nicer than they have to be.
- mzhaase 11mo ago
  They absolutely keep a larger cut than others. With Epic the first million you make is free. After much deliberation, steam changed it so that their 30% cut is reduced if you make more than 10M. For a lot of indie devs, its pretty much a death sentence.

systematizeD 11mo ago

I was curious who exactly would commission and/or publish said study - turns out it’s a grey market key reseller yeah no shit their clients are concerned that Steam is the only storefront that people trust

nyadesu 11mo ago

It doesn't feel that way to me, I know I could probably buy a game through another digital distribution service, maybe for a bit cheaper, but it's just not worth the hassle of installing another program, signing up, and configuring things

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

everdrive 11mo ago

And PC gaming would be much, much worse without Steam. It would go to some publicly traded company. They would gain a monopoly anyhow, and then slowly start making every single part of the service worse and worse to increase shareholder profits.

UI_at_80x24 11mo ago

I've been a "PC Gamer" for 31+ years. The 'value-add' that steam brings to the table is INCREDIBLE. Thanks to Proton/Linux efforts. (1) my games are installable AND playable on _every_ device I use. (2) I don't have to fight with wine/crossover/etc to get things to work. (3) It's not hostile to the end user (yet). I have bought more games since the Steamdeck came out then in the 40'some years before that. Yes I know that I don't have to use steam, but they make it EASIER. I am looking forward to Deckard for all of the above reasons and their history with the Index. Steam makes installing software EASIER then the alternative (regardless of the OS). Auto-patching/updates of installed games. If I was more social I'd probably use those features more. If they ever charge a monthly fee, I'll stop using it.