Comment by internet101010
2 days ago
Valve already owns the market. There is nothing left to strangle. Every attempt to break through has been a failure and none of those failures can be attributed to an anti-competitive action taken by Valve. They could have engaged in rent seeking a long time ago if they wanted to. They are managing their market position well by not abusing their customers or giving customers a reason to complain to lawmakers.
Epic's storefront is trash (only recently got ability to gift keys, still can't leave reviews), Microsoft already botched Game Pass by showing their cards too early via substantial price increases, and Amazon failed so badly that nobody even knew they tried.
GOG has managed to do pretty well in their own way. Nowhere near as popular as Steam, obviously, but they hold their own, and they've managed to do it without DRM. Humble Bundle has also managed to do something as well (though admittedly that's largely through selling Steam keys).
I feel like this is a Normalcy bias though [1]. Valve hasn't abused their status yet, and maybe they never will, but all it takes is a change in management for that to come to an end. Even if there's no competition to squelch, they still might just decide they want more money and engage in rent-seeking behavior.
For example (and to be clear I am just making this up and it's not based on anything), suppose Valve were to start charging a yearly "hosting fee", where you now have to pay $50 a year to cover the cost of hosting your games, and if you don't pay this hosting fee you lose access to all your games. I have like 800 games on Steam, I've spent thousands of dollars on them throughout the years, I don't want to lose them, so I'd probably complain about it and take out my credit card and just pay it.
Stuff like this has already happened with other companies (like the Unity licensing fee fiasco a couple years ago).
I'm not saying that it will happen, but at this point Steam has so much of the market and so many people have their entire game collections on there that I don't think we should discount the possibility that it could happen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
I think an important differentiator is that of all the companies you just listed, Valve is the only private company. That seems to explain a lot of this.