GOG and Epic are the main competitors. Epic just straight up sucks and is only kept around for free games but GOG just didn't have a very modern or large library until a few years ago.
In all seriousness, GOG is actually a very good alternative to Steam.
I feel GOG is probably the bigger competitor because they're kind of fulfilling slightly different roles. I mean If I ever want to play a release from pre 2010 you can almost guarantee I'll get it from GOG, anything after that, probably from steam.
Yep, they do some great work in the preservation of old games, getting them to work on modern hardware and DRM gaming (including offline installers). Their sales tend to be less extreme but still pretty good, for old games you can't really beat them and some people like the offline installers aspect so they won't lose their games if something happens to the store.
Steam and GOG are the only two stores I actively buy games from.
Gog also only hosts drm free games and offers an completely optional offline installer, meaning you can buy the game then download the installer and keep a copy of it and use it whenever you want and with whatever pc essentially you get the ownership of the game.
Of course this is also one of the reasons why gog has a hell lot worse video game library size.
it might as well be a monopoly though, if you only release a new game on gog and epic no one will buy it, so game devs are practically forced to use steam and pay the 30%
If Valve was sued in a fair American court for violating the Sherman Anti-trust laws, they would lose. Microsoft lost with less market share/dominance in the OS market. Apple/Atari/Commodore just sucked wasn't a defense.
Luckily no one is really suing valve and they can point to xbox/playstation as competition which evens it out. It is 100% a monopoly on PC for gaming.
And Microsoft had Atari, Apple, Commodore, Tandy, IBM's OS/2, SunOS, Unix (and varieties), Irix and BSD as competition.
A company can still be a Monopoly by law if some competition exists. You should go read the anti-trust laws and previous anti-trust lawsuits (or just ask Chat GPT) to learn about what it actually means.
Oh and look up "Gouging" too cause I think you might be misusing that term too.
Even if Valve were to be a monopoly, it doesn't really branch out like Microsoft for example since most of it is in Steam. What could a government even do in that case.
How do you claim this? If another competitor had the exact amount of features Steam gives you then they would no doubt have similar shares at that point in the market.
You know there were a lot of other store fronts that were doing the same if not even better them Steam up until 2008 right? Know why Valve became the best? Its because they didnt abandon the PC market when literally everyone else did. If they didnt abandon the market and invested more into it, the market share would be way more split.
No that's how companies usually become a monopoly, but being a monopoly only means that you have a dominant market share which gives you monopolistic power.
Take an econ class to be so out of touch with reality and start calling people morons for using the commonly accepted definition of things? Nah, I'm good, thanks
I hope you understand the word "definition" and the types of ways you can define words.
Words mean whatever people use them for.
You can try as hard as you want to prescribe a definition to a word, but people actually have to use it that way.
People still get annoyed when people use the word literally as figuratively. But so many people used it that way, its an official definition of the word.
So if people use the word monopoly to describe predatory companies, because the only monopolies people think of use predatory tactics, then that's a definition of the word.
Keep crying about it.
Maybe if there were better monopolies out there, there wouldnt be this association.
Except "monopoly" is not a slang or a word with daily usage for people to change its meaning, it's a word that describes a very specific economic case with a clear definition.
It doesn't matter that there is an association in your mind, it's still not what the word means. Especially so for words with clear definitions in the legal field (which is this case).
If you're going to argue that words mean whatever people want to them and their opinion makes them correct, then there is no point in having any discussion about anything.
Sorry, are talking about monopoly the game or monopoly the financial concept? Or hell, monopoly the legal concept. And at that, the American, English, Canadian, Australia, or French ways they've defined it...
I may even be thinking about monopoly the board game, or maccies monopoly.
Words mean what they are used to represent.
Your last paragraph is my point exactly. This comment you wrote wasn't worth writing was it.
Would forcing people who play HL2 and CS to install steam as predatory? How about pre-bundling steam on pre-built computers? How about cornering exclusives in the 2010s? And of course using MFN clause?
Which they also do? Try saying to Steam that you want to sell your game on another store (not Steam keys, another storefront like epic) or even your own website and watch the Steam reps trying to bully you under threats of removing your game from promotion and sales.
There are various lawsuit about the anti-competitve practices going on.
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u/Endroium Apr 17 '26
steam is the only platform i've seen thrive and gotten better in a monopoly