Steam is unique in this I'm sure, unlike most other private businesses which are way too ethical to do something like "protecting their market share"
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Thank god for the Russians. Extremely easy to circumnavigate that shit.
Gamers would still defend Steam monopoly
A more free marketplace wouldn't be an improvement, it would just make gaming look exactly as dismal as other tech industries. Out loud they might give bad rationalizations, but on some level they understand that under the current economic system the steam monopoly is as good as it can get for them.
Fighting to defend steam's monopoly in spite of it spitting in the face of free market values is a big step up from defaulting to an anti-monopoly stance. They're not dreaming big yet, but that's someone who can be radicalized.
What monopoly? Monopoly on selling games on Linux maybe.
In the second instance, Warner Bros. found itself in a similar situation. In 2017, as the publisher was preparing to launch Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the company was allegedly informed by Valve that pre-orders for the game had been removed from Steam. Valve's reasoning was that the price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.” David Haddad, president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, allegedly tried to resolve the situation directly with Valve so as not to face its ire.
I am honestly struggling to see the issue with this one. Seems to me that Valve wanted the pre-order price to be lowered on their on platform to reflect how it was elsewhere. To me that looks pro-consumer, but perhaps I’m looking at it from the wrong angle? But both examples given just seem (to me) to be them trying to get the same price or product for their platform’s consumers as other platforms and not them driving up the price on other platforms. If someone has a better angle with which to view this, please share it.
This is clearly an abuse of dominant position. If other platforms are willing to take 20% or 10%, but they still have to offer the same price that steam, they can't compete on the lower price front, rising prices for consumers.
What's the outcome of platforms competing on price? You get a bunch of stores with unsustainable business models and can say goodbye to your games library after a couple of years.
Better prices for consumers? Press Steam to lower their commission rate?
How do you know if the 30% is the bare minimum? Epic might not be doing well, but that's from incredibly crappy management.
Price matching is fairly industry standard. And if another storefront takes less of a cut then you'd still make more on the other storefront than steam.
So is it really the price they are trying to sell or the bulkanization of the industry so everyone has 10 different storefronts with 20 different launchers on their machines in order to skip the 3rd party consumer data? Well well that might be the crux of the entire thing right there now that I think of it. 
steamfront
You can hate Valve/Steam all you want of course but I would ask you all to remember that Steam is one of the only platforms that has completely rejected the introduction of AI slop in its entire UX (so far). No slop button, no chatbot dialogue that you can't switch off, none of that. In my daily computer experrience, that's pretty magical.
Steam and Hexbear are the only sites that don't have that crap (off the top of my head), and I respect ol' Gabe for that. Would have been sooo easy to announce some AI crap bolted onto the UI but they didn't.
This isn't relevant. You can love a company for the good they did and point out the bullshit.
I'm usually on Valve's side and think the "haters" are obnoxious, but this is the same shit they do. ("oh yeah, Epic may be horribly anticonsumer in most ways, but 12% cut guys! Valve with 30% is bad!")
I get all my games on steam sales and if the price never goes down to my liking I sail the high seas