“Customers have enormous choice” about where they purchase their games, Newell testified, including “whether they buy the game on an Xbox, whether they buy it on Steam, whether they buy it on Epic Games Store or whether they buy it directly from software developers.”

Last I checked, Steam only sells PC games, it does not sell Xbox games. No one cares about Epic cause it sucks. I don’t know how many devs directly sell their games to the public. Itch.Io is extremely niche. That leaves GOG which does not have anywhere the market share that Steam has.

At the same time, Steam is, if not a monopoly, awfully close to one: It is so deeply entrenched that Epic Games has spent years literally giving away its games, and has barely made a dent—in fact, New Blood boss Dave Oshry said earlier this year that Epic freebies were great for sales on Steam. The Epic launcher is admittedly not an optimal experience, but a big challenge Epic Games faces is simply that an awful lot of gamers don’t seem to want an effective Steam competitor: Steam rules the roost, and they like it that way. A big majority of game developers, meanwhile, reckons that Steam really does hold a monopoly on the PC games market.

From the Bloomberg article:

Gabe Newell, the co-founder and president of the gaming company Valve Corp., spent a morning in November 2023 with a handful of lawyers at the Arctic Club Hotel in downtown Seattle, talking in circles. Newell’s company runs Steam, the dominant online store for PC games, and was facing a lawsuit filed by a set of independent game developers who claimed that Steam operated an illegal monopoly in the $40 billion industry. Because developers relied so heavily on Steam, the suit argued, Valve has been able to stymie competition and charge “supracompetitive” fees.

The suit, which is ongoing, centers on what the developers alleged was a tacit company policy designed to punish them for offering discounts at competing online stores. But instead of defending the purported rule, Newell just denied it existed. “Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms,” he said, according to a previously unreported transcript of his deposition. Presented with internal communications in which Valve employees appeared to be enforcing the rule, Newell repeated his denial, at times verbatim, again and again. When an attorney pressed him on how Valve would react if a developer did charge less money for a game on a competing store, Newell demurred. “I’m confused by your question,” he said, before later adding, “Many of our partners and many of our customers are quite happy with the service that we’re providing.”

But not all of Valve’s partners are thrilled with its influence over the market. In addition to the indie developers claiming to be burdened, court filings in the antitrust case contain email correspondence in which leaders from large corporations including Ubisoft Entertainment SA and Warner Bros. appear to be scrambling to do anything they can to avoid running afoul of Valve. The fear among some developers is that doing so can lead to penalties or even expulsion from Steam — a potentially devastating outcome for their game sales.

The US lawsuit Newell was deposed in, which has been certified as a class action, alleges that it “is not economically feasible” for game makers to leave Steam in favor of a rival store and that they are effectively “forced to comply” with Valve’s rules and high fees. A UK case echoes those claims, alleging Valve is “locking in” its users to Steam and earning “excessive” commissions.