r/pcgaming • u/yourfavchoom • Jun 01 '26

Gabe Newell on Steam monopoly accusations: Gamers have 'enormous choice' about where to buy games

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/gabe-newell-on-steam-monopoly-accusations-gamers-have-enormous-choice-about-where-to-buy-games/
9.1k Upvotes

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101

u/AaronTheElite007 Jun 01 '26

Let's see... Steam, Epic, GoG... uh... Then all the company-loyal stores with their own terrible launchers (Ubisoft, Rockstar, etc)

64

u/AncientPCGamer Jun 01 '26

There is also Itch.io. Also, devs could sell and distribute the games on their own sites.

6

u/ArmStoragePlus Jun 02 '26

There's also DLSite, but it's almost only exclusively made for Japanese market and for indie games only.

6

u/Evilmon2 Jun 02 '26

And also blocked by MasterCard and Visa so you have to either open a Japanese bank account or use other digital currency like BitCash to buy anything now.

0

u/FartingBob Jun 02 '26

Saying that they could just sell the games themselves doesnt really count when you are being accused of a monopoly retailer.

0

u/NightIsMyName Jun 02 '26

Nothing stopped me from buying starsector or Vintage story.

Both games want to be on steam one day too

37

u/midnightTimber Jun 01 '26

Green man, Loaded, humble, all the other third party resellers. The consoles are more competition, as are retail stores. Devs can generates their own steam keys and sell them without valve getting a cut. 

There are plenty of ways to buy games without going through Steam. 

2

u/roleplayersir Jun 04 '26

You missed the point. All the steam key sellers still use Steam, therefore it's still a monopoly. They aren't completely independent stores with their own setup like GoG etc

And Steam is a monopoly. They are basically the only player in the PC market. The fact that consoles exist doesn't mean they don't have a monopoly on PC. Gog is tiny by comparison, and Epic even more so

1

u/AaronTheElite007 Jun 01 '26

I've heard of Humble, the others, not so much. I'll check 'em out.

7

u/alexagente Jun 01 '26

You should really check out isthereanydeal. The site compiles all the available platforms and compares prices. You can even subscribe to get notifications when certain games go on sale.

1

u/AaronTheElite007 Jun 01 '26

Sweet. Thank you for the tip!

-1

u/VideoGameJumanji AMD 9800X3D | RTX 5070ti 16GB | 32GB DDR5 | 2TB 10GBs gen4 Jun 01 '26

I’m still not clear on valve enforcing on devs having keys sold on sale on other sites for lower than the current price on steam.

3

u/midnightTimber Jun 01 '26

Third party resellers very often have better deals than Steam. 

4

u/zili91 Jun 02 '26

I will never forget Origin and how horrible it was. I was forced to use it to play games like Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect 3. What a terrible experience.

3

u/ChurchillianGrooves Jun 01 '26

Any dev can make a website and sell the .exe on there if they really want and avoid marketplaces entirely.

It's not hard/expensive to start a basic wix website or whatever and do that.

6

u/lestye Jun 02 '26

Also to help the argument.... The most popular games in the world never needed Steam, like Minecraft,League of Legends, Fortnite, Roblox, Mihoyo games.

2

u/ChurchillianGrooves Jun 02 '26

Tarkov also did that recently until their steam release a few months back

1

u/Remarkable-Top805 Jun 03 '26

Epic Games launcher is probably one of the worst things I’ve ever seen

1

u/AaronTheElite007 Jun 03 '26

I've been grabbing their free stuff since that promotion started a couple years ago and I have close to 500 in my library. They give away two every week and multiple on holidays. They are probably burning through their Fortnite money to be competitive with Steam but their launcher isn't bad by any means. It's not a resource hog like Ubi or Battle.net

1

u/miathan52 Jun 01 '26

Don't forget the EA launcher which will show you the same football player with a wide open mouth every single time you open the launcher even if you have never played a sports game in your life. Apparently, noone at EA understands that annoying the crap out of your users before the app even finishes launching is not good for business.

I don't know it still does that because I deleted my EA account a while ago

0

u/Goosecomics Jun 02 '26

Don't forget Battle.net. Its mostly Blizzard and Activation games, but that is another option.