75% of respondents were senior managers of C-suite level, with 77% from studios with more than 50 employees.
OP you don’t also have to lie in the headline
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Most communities don't allow you to editorialize headlines so they kinda do.
And this is one of those communities.
We post in a community.
Devs ≠ C-Suite Execs
They don't have a monopoly. Full stop. Just off the top of my head, we have Epic Games Store, GOG, and Itch.io, which may not be as popular as Steam, but are absolutely viable alternatives if Steam ever goes completely to shit.
A real monopoly is like how, in my city in the US, there is exactly ONE company you can buy electricity and gas from. It's a subsidiary of Avangrid, which is a Swedish corporation, not even on the same continent. They've been doing incredibly fucky shit with billing customers for years now and they have the mayor in their pocket, so if you want electricity, you have no choice other than to pay up. There are no alternatives unless you have the money to pay up front for a full off-grid solar install.
Avangrid is not owned by a Swedish Energy company, you probably mean Iberdrola which is Spanish.
it depends on your definition of monopoly. For example the US FTC classifies a monopoly as a company with significant and durable market power with the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
Steam would definitely meet that criteria, if you aren't on steam your game is very unlikely to go anywhere. Can it? for sure but it's significantly less likely to be successful, and steam basically sets the standard for what should be on a storefront and pricing for deals.
Being said, the act of being a monopoly in the eyes of the FTC isn't a bad thing either, as long as the position isn't being abused, which Steam currently is not.
Steam doesn't even fit the criteria of the FTC definition. It wasn't Steam that raised the price of games to $70, it was actually done by Take-Two followed by Sony, Activision and Nintendo. And it was Microslop who first tried to normalize the $80 price tag before Nintendo swooped in and made it a reality. And Steam didn't tell Team Cherry to raise the price of Hollow Knight which is why it released with a $20 price tag. In fact during it's entire "monopolistic" stage Steam has never set the price of any game except their own (which they priced a market price). Even the 30% cut wasn't pioneered by Steam, 30% was roughly what retailers used to take. Valve simply rolled with what was a reasonable cut back in the day because they were effectively replacing retailers.
As for the rest, I don't know you've been living under a rock but some the most successful games today are not on Steam. Minecraft is not on Steam, Roblox is not on Steam, Fortnite will never be on Steam, Blizzard games are not on Steam, Riot games are not on Steam. But maybe you meant indie games that haven't made a name for themselves? We don't know if those games would've been more successful had they released on Steam but Vintage Story seems to be doing just fine without being on Steam and the same could be said about Starsector. The upcoming Hytale game doesn't seem to be releasing on Steam either. Steam is not a requirement for success. And of course you can always try to partner up with Sony or Nintendo and release PS or Switch exclusives.
Steam has a market dominant position on PC because Valve understands the market they're in while their competitors in the PC space don't. However in the wider gaming space Steam is hardly a monopoly. Steam Deck has sold about 4 millions units (numbers from Feb 2025) and people talk like it's going to change the gaming landscape, meanwhile Microslop has sold almost 30 million units (numbers from the end of 2024) of Xbox series S and X and this gen of Xbox is considered a failure. The scale at which Microslop, Sony and Nintendo operate is completely different. In the wider gaming space Valve is in no position to set prices or exclude competitors because Valve has extremely low market penetration outside the PC landscape. Steam can't even influence the PC market because it's an open platform. Hypothetically if games on Steam started costing $100 then developers could just release games on their own and set their own price. Furthermore Steam is in competition on the PC marketplace but Steam is also in competition with consoles because at the end of the day people have a limited time to play games and they're going to play games on whatever platform is most comfortable to them. If Steam stops being comfortable and Sony or Nintendo pull their sticks out of their asses (I think is Microslop beyond saving) why wouldn't people slowly transition away from Steam and into console gaming the same way we're seeing a trend of console players very slowly transitioning into console + PC gamers.
You have to put magnifiers on so the only thing you see is Steam and then add blinders to narrow view of the wider gaming space down to PC to be able to make some a statement about Steam being an monopoly. And if I just look into the horizon then the earth also seems flat. Just because I ignore all other evidence and focus solely on the perception that the earth is flat, it doesn't mean the earth is flat. The same way just because you ignore everything else and perceive Steam as monopoly it doesn't mean Steam is a monopoly.
Only argument I have for the dev side is that unless you're big enough to be your own platform, if you develop a PC game and you don't offer it on Steam, you're only kneecapping its potential financial success, possibly to a critical degree.
Maybe they should come up with something better then. Steam didn't win the marketplace war by being assholes.
Listen I love Value over all, a flat org of engineers with a lot of notable contribtion to opensource and gaming on linux in general, but there price fixing agreement for devs is kind of assholy.
Apparently they need to teach more business and civics classes in STEM school because 72% of developers don't know what a monopoly is.
I don't think you know. Google was declared a legal monopoly despite the existence of Apple and Firefox and FDroid and DuckDuckGo, etc. Microsoft was declared a monopoly despite the existence of Apple, Chrome, and Firefox, etc.
They were declared monopolies because they were determined to have used anti-competitive practices to cement their market position. Valve does not.
those two things are unrelated. In the US you can be a monopoly without being the only source. You only violate anti-trust when you use that position for your own gain via anti-competitive practices. I.E the company could still be a monopoly without violating any laws, like how steam does.
A monopoly is defined as being the only seller, so I don't think you can be one without being the only seller. But our laws (are supposed to) target companies that use anti competitive practices to drive the market closer toward that being true. There's at least one suit that alleged it, but they had a difficult case to prove it. Valve doesn't deal in things like locking up exclusive titles that make it harder for others to compete.
A monopoly is defined as being the only seller
Not according to the FTC. Legal monopolies do exist and can form without anticompetitive tactics.
A literal monopoly is defined as that yea, but the definition used in legal would be a company with significant and durable market power and has the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
In the cases that were being used as an example, they were already a monopoly going into the case due to their market standing, however at the end of the case it was also determined they were in violation of anti-trust laws as well.
Do you believe Steam has the power to raise prices when those prices are set by vendors on their platform and there are at least two other major players? I suppose they have the power to try to exclude competitors, but those competitors would be buoyed very quickly by Valve attempting to do so. And even still, plenty of the biggest games in the world (Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, League of Legends) aren't on their platform already.
Without a doubt yes. They already do for the most part. Steam sales are the goal of the industry, thats why epic is having to go to the lengths that it is to try (and fail) to get customers.
steam already:
- restricts sale prices off platform
- limits what a publisher/dev can have as a discount price
- limits when a publisher/dev can change their price
- restricts access to free keys for games
- dictates the standard for revenue sharing
- forces steam to always be at least equal to the cheapest price around
- restricts putting an item on sale outside of the platform unless there is a planned sale on the steam page in the near future
Like I can say for certainty yes, due to even a handful of these restrictions, if steam decided to unilaterally apply an additional base fee of x% of the game cost (which they can do), devs would be forced to either abandon steam (again the largest PC gaming market out there) or raise every other storefront price.
There will be other options yes, but it would be like opening a lemonade stand in a dark alley vs at a busy crosswalk. Steam would need to raise the price significantly in order to convince a studio is who trying to make a profit to jump ship.
But I think that being forced to abandon Steam, which is for sure an option they all have in a world with GOG and Epic, is exactly why Valve doesn't really have that power. As soon as that guy sees the $5 lemonade, he's going to hear the other guy yelling that there's a dark alley selling it for $1 around the corner.
finetuning the lemonade stand analogy, both stands would need to be the same price, as the busy street has a sale price restriction for alternative stands. The lemonade vendor would need to decide whether it was worth losing the busy street as a whole in order to use the dark alley in order to keep the lower 1$ price
Developers and studios would need to be willing to leave steam (whos market share is estimated to be 75-80% of the PC third party gaming market) and either make their own(costs money + no userbase) or go to the next big thing which would likely be epic (who is at an appoximate 15% game share despite having a 12% cut vs 30 and releasing weekly free games)
My money is on the devs just raising their price to match steams new price and also allowing both markets to exist.
note: The percentages I gave are actually on the lower end by the way from the numbers I found. I saw some sites quoting steam to be in the 90's for market share in third party PC gaming.
I don't see it, especially since Steam got to where it is now by stealing customers who rejected that same price hike on consoles. Everyone learned that Steam sales offer deeper discounts than digital purchases on consoles' walled gardens and that online is free. If customers are savvy enough to do that, they're savvy enough to find other storefronts in a world where Steam sucks. As I see it, anyway. I think I'd have to see the world change in a substantial way to believe otherwise.
I definitely see your concept as plausible. However I think that amount they raise it by would need to be pretty substantial for it to be worth the risk of the studio/developer bailing on steam as a whole.
What does the existence of Apple and Firefox have to do with the google search monopoly ruling. Do either of those companies operate a search engine?
I guess I found the 72%.
You really don't know? Apple sells competing hardware and software to Android. Firefox is a competing software to Chrome.
If you want to focus exclusively on search engines that will only weaken your argument, as I can name a dozen others off the top of my head.
No. The monopoly ruling that you are referring to IS focused exclusively on search engines. Maybe don't use evidence that you don't know fuckall about?
The monopoly ruling that you are referring to IS focused exclusively on search engines.
Excellent, let's review an incomprehensive list of competing search engines:
- Brave
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo (previously mentioned and you ignored)
- Yandex
- Kagi
- Yahoo
- Baidu
- Ecosia
- Qwant
- AOL
In short, Google has WAY more competition in the search engine industry than Steam has in the PC game purchase industry. So maybe learn WTF you're talking about before being a dick.
Jesus dude, you should really stick to things you know literally ANYTHING about. Half the search engines you listed are literally using the same engine. I guess Google should have hired you as their attorney.
- It doesn't matter. They're still competition. Google does not make any money if you use DDG.
- And what about the other half?
Are you actually going to engage with the point or continue lobbing personal insults and deflecting?
You still haven't explained how the existence of Apple and Firefox mean Google should have prevailed in the lawsuit. Why don't we start there or are you just interested in dancing around how ignorant you are?
Insults and deflection it is. Everyone can see through your arrogant nonsense. Goodbye.
Yes, I deflected to asking you to start making sense. Sorry for that.
Steam is certainly in a dominant market position. They had a large first mover advantage and have also done a lot of work to make and keep gamers happy with the platform. That said, I can understand companies being upset at the 30% Steam tax on sales. It's a pretty large cut and other stores (e.g. Epic) have tried to compete based on that cost. The problem being that many games have massive Steam libraries and want to keep everything on one place and they aren't really affected by the cost to the devs; so, without a significant reason to change, they won't. It also doesn't help that some competitors (e.g Epic) have been user hostile in the past and so don't have a high level of trust. Steam has also built a lot of goodwill with power users for their work on Proton.
While I do think there needs to be healthy competition for storefronts, as long as Steam resists the temptation to enshitify their dominant market position, I don't see them losing market share in any meaningful way. Perhaps it would be better if Steam were spun off from Valve, putting them Valve on equal footing with other devs. But, video games aren't really fungible. It's not like I'm going to say, "oh darn, Kingdom Come is too expensive, I guess I'll buy Half Life instead". They are just fundamentally different games and if I want to play the first one, I'm not able to get that by buying the second. So, the price of one of them isn't really a factor in pushing me towards the other. Though, Valve might use Steam to push one game over the other, and that could be something that is a problem.
I don't think the presence of the library on Steam is doing that much work here. Epic's been giving games away for free for five years to alleviate that issue, but it doesn't work. And ultimately, you have to ask: what's in it for me to buy a game from Epic when I get better features on Steam? On GOG, I have an answer to that question, but on Epic, I don't.