this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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A monopoly is a monopoly. Just because Steam is a good store today doesn’t mean they deserve to hold a monopoly over the pc gaming market. So what happens when Valve has crushed every competitor? Gamers and devs have nowhere to go if Steam turns to shit. Eventually there will be a change of guards at Valve’s C-suite when Gaben retires or is dead. There is a good chance that those new execs will hollow out Steam and extract all the value out of it for their own benefit by screwing over the customers and developers. And they can get away with that if there is no competition. Competition is what keeps Valve in check.
But they haven't crushed any other competitor through any mechanism but having a dramatically better product.
They don't force you to be exclusive to be on steam. They don't force you to implement any of their Steam stuff. They are very permissive unless you do shit that potentially exposes them to liability down the road, like the NFT nonsense.
And they let you generate keys for literally free to sell on other stores.
All their stuff companies use is because it's things customers value.
When they started, they did used to force you to use products edit: aside from their own games(fair cop), some 3rd party games like Lost Planet also required it.
Certain games, and not just valve games, you'd buy in a store and the disc would force you to install and create a steam account to play the single player offline game.
They're a distribution mechanism. If you buy a Steam game you need Steam. Allowing developers to require Steam to play their game is not anticompetitive or in any way unethical.
They didn't force any developer who wanted to sell games on Steam to only sell games on Steam. That's what would be anticompetitive and abusing their market position. Games choosing to only distribute through Steam because there's no other storefront that wouldn't be a worse value if it was free isn't Steam doing something wrong.
My point is that they did initially to force usage. I'll edit the post with the game name when I get home.
Edit: Lost Planet. It had a disc but required you to sign up for and use steam to play it.
Looks like it was a console exclusive before it released on Steam, if you're talking about Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (which is the only one I can find by that name).
Do you have more information about the release? Or perhaps it's a different game?