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Amazon's previous VP of Prime Gaming said they "tried everything" to disrupt Steam
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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I know that today in most English-speaking countries, competition is worshipped as an all-powerful god that solves every problem. But the reality is that competition is often detrimental to a lot of stakeholders in an industry. Competition optimizes for specific parameters in a downward spiral- that's why every streaming service sucks, and is worse than Netflix was 10 years ago.
What would you hope to get out of a Steam competitor? I will guess that you are talking about price pressure. But Steam does not set the prices- publishers do. That's why the same game is $69.99 whether you get it on Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox store, Epic Games Store, or buying physical copies from Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, or wherever else. In that way you could argue Steam already has tons of effective competition putting pressure on prices, just outside of the specific PC digital storefront space.
So maybe if Valve had more competition, Steam might be forced to reduce their fees to publishers, but there's no reason to believe that cost savings would be passed on to consumers.
If anything, having competition just repeats the fixed costs, or in other words reduces the population of users that fixed costs are spread over, driving up the total and per-unit costs of the whole system.
Now I certainly am not saying anything so dumb as "In GabeN we trust" or "I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term". But the solution is regulation, not competition.
The other notable place monopolies fail is servicing less profitable populations. Valve has so far done the opposite. Epic has outright refused to support Linux, while Valve has made their own free gaming Linux distro, with tons of work put into Proton for free to ensure compatibility. VR is a tiny niche, but Valve still put out one of the best VR systems kn the market. The "handheld" PC market was incredibly niche, but Valve released the Steam Deck and I would guess sold an order of magnitude or two more units than anything before or since in that space. I don't really see any underserved niches asking for a competitor.
The problem with a lack of competition is you end up in a "my way or the highway" scenario, both for the customers and suppliers, with the distributor having, functionally, complete control over who gets to sell what to who, and who gets to buy what. So you really are saying "In GabeN we trust" and "I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term" as you have no other option.
I'd say you're partially correct when you say regulation is the amswer, but with only a single entity, or even just a small number, in the field regulatory capture becomes a real risk. This can be overcone either by a legeslative with principals and a backbone (good luck, especially considering that needs to be maintained in perpetuity) or by having enough entities with different goals that no one of them can't dominate.
Ultimately you need a combination of robust regulation and enough competition that there is presure for them to play fair.
I'm not a native English speaker.
Steam does set the prices, in that they use their dominant position to force the best price always being on Steam, whether it's 5 bucks or 100. This is pretty well established in recent lawsuits, whether US courts end up deciding that Steam is doing so legally or not.
In any case, I don't care about price pressure. Games are way too cheap as it is (partially thanks to Steam leaning hard on seasonal sales developers and publishers can't afford to ignore, incidentally).
The stuff that does bother me is Steam telling developers and publishers what to do, what the consequences of not doing it will be and how much of their money they will take afterwards with no recourse. I've seen them do this with my faceholes.
So yes, Steam has a dominant position that harms competition and yes, they do leverage it to do harm. Not to end users, where they're still competing with consoles and effectively with Microsoft, but certainly on the developer marketplace where content creators can't afford to not be in the platform.
Steam uses a Uberified UGC gig economy system on PC game devs where it sets the rules because there's no alternative. And that's bad. More competition makes that less sustainable. And that's good.
That's a poor take, steam doesn't set the prices. They take a cut, sure, but so does every store. The dev/publisher sets the price.
Games aren't too cheap, again the publishers set the price and I'm sure there's plenty of research that goes into that.
Im not sure what you think steam are telling publishers to do? The only rules I'm familiar with are the consumer protection rules, and the not selling a steam key cheaper than they're selling the game on steam.
I'm not sure what part of what you've mentioned is therefore a harm to the publishers? Where publishers sell their games for maximum sales is going to be based on where the users are. If another company wanted to change this then they need to focus on what makes the consumer go there. Epics idea to lock publishers into their store with big wads of cash is what is actually harmful to the pc market (and didn't work anyway).
As others have pointed out, competition here is usually dictated by shareholders which means the end user is exploited for maximum profit. One of the reason steam is so successful is that they don't have this problem.
No, Steam will outright tell you they'll delist you (or at least keep you from placement) if you offer a sale on a different store and don't match it on Steam. Emails saying as much outright were released on the last round of antitrust lawsuits for this exact reason.
Games are too cheap. There is, in fact, plenty of research to show that.
Steam is telling devs of all sizes to do a bunch of things. When it's something they like to advertise it typically gets coverage, like tweaks to Early Access info or other consumer-friendly stuff. When it's more controversial less so, like telling indie devs to invest on localizing to Chinese to go with Valve's China expansion plans or risk worse store placement.
I never once mentioned Epic. I am flabbergasted by how this Cult of the Gaben devolved into a weird console wars rehash between Epic and Steam. They're both big corporations, neither is your friend, both have valid strategies to get your business. Stop it.
Competition would have a hard time being dictated by shareholders given that at least two of the top contenders in the space are privately owned. Because, since that's your focus, yes, Epic is privately owned as well. Incidentally, GOG is one that is publicly owned and they are arguably the most pro-consumer player in this market.
I am not surprised at Steam having maneuvered its PR to position this way, but it's always a bit shocking how well they did it without a ton of traditional marketing involved. I don't think they're a bad service or a particularly terrible company, but much like Nintendo the are a major tech corporation that works like a major tech corporation and you forget that at your peril, especially as a developer.
They are certainly a good argument for how public ownership doesn't maximize value, because Steam is ridiculously undervalued by typical business analysts and they have maintained that status quo for many years and turned it into a sizeable yacht fleet. If anyhthing, Amazon guy's surprise surprises me.
Source? All I can find is lawsuits about the 30% cut, none about forcing the same price on steam as elsewhere.
Normally I tell people to do their own googling, but man, this is woefully underreported. For some reason when this came out the press latched on to some of the emails containing Valve employees trolling Tim Sweeney behind the scenes and that leak about how many employees they had and they barely mentioned this.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F778bbf05-f937-4f50-a8a5-90de4185172e_1000x677.jpeg
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view
I don't know if there's some reason for it, but I saw it get reported in real time when it came out and the sources that remain online seem to be legit. It's not particularly surprising, either. Valve is not shy about giving developers marching orders in general.
Thank you. I did search myself but like I said, different lawsuits kept popping up.