Raw wealth doesn’t matter as much as market capture. Valve makes more money per employee than almost any company in history. They don’t need Microsoft’s billions because they already own the toll booth for the entire PC industry. When you control the only road everyone has to drive on, you don’t need to be the biggest car company.
Not to mention those companies have divided priorities. Valve’s main income is Steam, they have a vested interest in keeping their product dominant. Microsoft and Epic simply don’t, because their stores are only side projects that incentivise their main income sources. But that’s not to say I want to substitute Steam with some other corpo giant’s latest money grab either.
The bigger question is why more consumer-friendly stores like GOG that sell DRM-free games can’t compete with Steam. High profile games have no incentive to release DRM-free versions of their titles on GOG because the bigger store where they make more money encourages DRM. And these locked-in publisher relationships built on DRM allows Valve to outcompete more consumer-friendly stores through sales and user experience.
Valve gets a lot of clout in the Linux sphere because their adoption of open-source platforms is better than their competitors, and we have the mindset of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, but this is also what we were saying about Google and Android 15 years ago and we can see how that is shaping up. Something something “you either die a hero…”
GOG can’t compete because their current strategy is blue ocean compared to Valve - they sell indie and older classic games at reasonable rates with the good hook of DRM-free downloads. Other than that, they don’t really have any way to really challenge Steam, and in my personal opinion that’s fine. Steam does have relatively lenient DRM policies (the real problem is companies that add additional stuff like Denuvo onto their game), but obviously can’t emulate GOG’s policies without alienating a ton of devs, and GOG can’t copy Steam’s policies or the same would happen with their existing users.
(Also to clarify, Steam does not require any DRM for any game listed on the Steam Store. Check any Toby Fox game.)
Steam peaks at ~40-45 million concurrent users so far. The Switch sold over 150 million units. Of course, there’s no way to know what the peak concurrent switch users were, or the total count of unique steam users from 2017-2025, but I still think these numbers are good indicators that Steam is NOT the gigantic monopoly that the vocal minority of haters think they are.
Epic and Microsoft have way more money than Valve does.
Raw wealth doesn’t matter as much as market capture. Valve makes more money per employee than almost any company in history. They don’t need Microsoft’s billions because they already own the toll booth for the entire PC industry. When you control the only road everyone has to drive on, you don’t need to be the biggest car company.
Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-makes-almost-usd50-million-per-employee-raking-in-more-cash-per-person-than-google-amazon-or-microsoft-gaming-giants-350-employees-on-track-to-generate-usd17-billion-this-year
Not to mention those companies have divided priorities. Valve’s main income is Steam, they have a vested interest in keeping their product dominant. Microsoft and Epic simply don’t, because their stores are only side projects that incentivise their main income sources. But that’s not to say I want to substitute Steam with some other corpo giant’s latest money grab either.
The bigger question is why more consumer-friendly stores like GOG that sell DRM-free games can’t compete with Steam. High profile games have no incentive to release DRM-free versions of their titles on GOG because the bigger store where they make more money encourages DRM. And these locked-in publisher relationships built on DRM allows Valve to outcompete more consumer-friendly stores through sales and user experience.
Valve gets a lot of clout in the Linux sphere because their adoption of open-source platforms is better than their competitors, and we have the mindset of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, but this is also what we were saying about Google and Android 15 years ago and we can see how that is shaping up. Something something “you either die a hero…”
GOG can’t compete because their current strategy is blue ocean compared to Valve - they sell indie and older classic games at reasonable rates with the good hook of DRM-free downloads. Other than that, they don’t really have any way to really challenge Steam, and in my personal opinion that’s fine. Steam does have relatively lenient DRM policies (the real problem is companies that add additional stuff like Denuvo onto their game), but obviously can’t emulate GOG’s policies without alienating a ton of devs, and GOG can’t copy Steam’s policies or the same would happen with their existing users.
(Also to clarify, Steam does not require any DRM for any game listed on the Steam Store. Check any Toby Fox game.)
GoG can’t compete because they won’t. They haven’t had a functional Linux client in what, a decade?
And Google, Amazon, Apple.
Steam peaks at ~40-45 million concurrent users so far. The Switch sold over 150 million units. Of course, there’s no way to know what the peak concurrent switch users were, or the total count of unique steam users from 2017-2025, but I still think these numbers are good indicators that Steam is NOT the gigantic monopoly that the vocal minority of haters think they are.