Yes it is one. But it got there naturally, so it isn't illegal.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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Monopolies are usually deemed illegal by what they do with that position and not how they got there. It’s things like leveraging your monopoly to gain undue advantage preventing competition to arise in the first place.
One should also consider if services and goods provided by a „natural” monopoly (like over a limited resource) wouldn’t be better handled by either a state monopoly or a regulated industry consortium.
I’m happy that Gabe Newell won a lottery and was awarded billions of dollars along with it, good on him since that was his second lottery win after being an OG Microsoft employee with stock options. Does it mean he has to be awarded billions of dollars forever in perpetuity? Maybe more of the 30% cut should go to the people that actually make games today?
75% of respondents were senior managers of C-suite level, with 77% from studios with more than 50 employees.
OP you don’t also have to lie in the headline
Most communities don't allow you to editorialize headlines so they kinda do.
And this is one of those communities.
We post in a community.
Lemmings rise up
Devs ≠ C-Suite Execs
They don't have a monopoly. Full stop. Just off the top of my head, we have Epic Games Store, GOG, and Itch.io, which may not be as popular as Steam, but are absolutely viable alternatives if Steam ever goes completely to shit.
A real monopoly is like how, in my city in the US, there is exactly ONE company you can buy electricity and gas from. It's a subsidiary of Avangrid, which is a Swedish corporation, not even on the same continent. They've been doing incredibly fucky shit with billing customers for years now and they have the mayor in their pocket, so if you want electricity, you have no choice other than to pay up. There are no alternatives unless you have the money to pay up front for a full off-grid solar install.
it depends on your definition of monopoly. For example the US FTC classifies a monopoly as a company with significant and durable market power with the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
Steam would definitely meet that criteria, if you aren't on steam your game is very unlikely to go anywhere. Can it? for sure but it's significantly less likely to be successful, and steam basically sets the standard for what should be on a storefront and pricing for deals.
Being said, the act of being a monopoly in the eyes of the FTC isn't a bad thing either, as long as the position isn't being abused, which Steam currently is not.
Steam doesn't even fit the criteria of the FTC definition. It wasn't Steam that raised the price of games to $70, it was actually done by Take-Two followed by Sony, Activision and Nintendo. And it was Microslop who first tried to normalize the $80 price tag before Nintendo swooped in and made it a reality. And Steam didn't tell Team Cherry to raise the price of Hollow Knight which is why it released with a $20 price tag. In fact during it's entire "monopolistic" stage Steam has never set the price of any game except their own (which they priced a market price). Even the 30% cut wasn't pioneered by Steam, 30% was roughly what retailers used to take. Valve simply rolled with what was a reasonable cut back in the day because they were effectively replacing retailers.
As for the rest, I don't know you've been living under a rock but some the most successful games today are not on Steam. Minecraft is not on Steam, Roblox is not on Steam, Fortnite will never be on Steam, Blizzard games (except Diablo IV and OW2) are not on Steam, Riot games are not on Steam. But maybe you meant indie games that haven't made a name for themselves? We don't know if those games would've been more successful had they released on Steam but Vintage Story seems to be doing just fine without being on Steam and the same could be said about Starsector. The upcoming Hytale game doesn't seem to be releasing on Steam either. Steam is not a requirement for success. And of course you can always try to partner up with Sony or Nintendo and release PS or Switch exclusives.
Steam has a market dominant position on PC because Valve understands the market they're in while their competitors in the PC space don't. However in the wider gaming space Steam is hardly a monopoly. Steam Deck has sold about 4 millions units (numbers from Feb 2025) and people talk like it's going to change the gaming landscape, meanwhile Microslop has sold almost 30 million units (numbers from the end of 2024) of Xbox series S and X and this gen of Xbox is considered a failure. The scale at which Microslop, Sony and Nintendo operate is completely different. In the wider gaming space Valve is in no position to set prices or exclude competitors because Valve has extremely low market penetration outside the PC landscape. Steam can't even influence the PC market because it's an open platform. Hypothetically if games on Steam started costing $100 then developers could just release games on their own and set their own price. Furthermore Steam is in competition on the PC marketplace and also in competition with consoles because at the end of the day people have a limited time to play games and they're going to play games on whatever platform is most comfortable to them. If Steam stops being comfortable and Sony or Nintendo pull their sticks out of their asses (I think is Microslop beyond saving) why wouldn't people slowly transition away from Steam and into console gaming the same way we're seeing a trend of console players very slowly transitioning into console + PC gamers.
You have to put magnifiers on so the only thing you see is Steam and then add blinders to narrow view of the wider gaming space down to PC to be able to make some a statement about Steam being an monopoly. And if I just look into the horizon then the earth also seems flat. Just because I ignore all other evidence and focus solely on the perception that the earth is flat, it doesn't mean the earth is flat. The same way just because you ignore everything else and perceive Steam as monopoly it doesn't mean Steam is a monopoly.
EDIT: mentioned exceptions to the Blizzard example and cleared up some wording.
Blizzard games are not on Steam
Doesn't negate your point, but Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 are.
I completely forgot those games were on Steam. They're in my ignore list so I never see them on the store page.
Avangrid is not owned by a Swedish Energy company, you probably mean Iberdrola which is Spanish.
Only argument I have for the dev side is that unless you're big enough to be your own platform, if you develop a PC game and you don't offer it on Steam, you're only kneecapping its potential financial success, possibly to a critical degree.
Maybe they should come up with something better then. Steam didn't win the marketplace war by being assholes.
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I mean it's more of a accidental monopoly(Because everyone else is shit), but I still am counting on them eventually turning to shit and making sure I only buy games from them now if I can run that game without steam.
Can we please stop reposting this exact same misleading article from 2025?
Apparently they need to teach more business and civics classes in STEM school because 72% of developers don't know what a monopoly is.
I don't think you know. Google was declared a legal monopoly despite the existence of Apple and Firefox and FDroid and DuckDuckGo, etc. Microsoft was declared a monopoly despite the existence of Apple, Chrome, and Firefox, etc.
They were declared monopolies because they were determined to have used anti-competitive practices to cement their market position. Valve does not.
those two things are unrelated. In the US you can be a monopoly without being the only source. You only violate anti-trust when you use that position for your own gain via anti-competitive practices. I.E the company could still be a monopoly without violating any laws, like how steam does.
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What does the existence of Apple and Firefox have to do with the google search monopoly ruling. Do either of those companies operate a search engine?
I guess I found the 72%.
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Yeah sure, but so what? Their platform is awesome.
They do, but only because most platforms suck ass. Logging into Origin or Microsoft stores is miserable, and social integration is rare, or broken AF. If everything was cross platform, cross play, and universal social profiles and security, I'm fine with multiple platforms.
Halo infinite is technically cross platform between steam and MS, but the integration sucks for managing friends on steam.
There seems to be a decent group on fediverse that just want steam gone.
Steam is certainly in a dominant market position. They had a large first mover advantage and have also done a lot of work to make and keep gamers happy with the platform. That said, I can understand companies being upset at the 30% Steam tax on sales. It's a pretty large cut and other stores (e.g. Epic) have tried to compete based on that cost. The problem being that many games have massive Steam libraries and want to keep everything on one place and they aren't really affected by the cost to the devs; so, without a significant reason to change, they won't. It also doesn't help that some competitors (e.g Epic) have been user hostile in the past and so don't have a high level of trust. Steam has also built a lot of goodwill with power users for their work on Proton.
While I do think there needs to be healthy competition for storefronts, as long as Steam resists the temptation to enshitify their dominant market position, I don't see them losing market share in any meaningful way. Perhaps it would be better if Steam were spun off from Valve, putting them Valve on equal footing with other devs. But, video games aren't really fungible. It's not like I'm going to say, "oh darn, Kingdom Come is too expensive, I guess I'll buy Half Life instead". They are just fundamentally different games and if I want to play the first one, I'm not able to get that by buying the second. So, the price of one of them isn't really a factor in pushing me towards the other. Though, Valve might use Steam to push one game over the other, and that could be something that is a problem.
I don't think the presence of the library on Steam is doing that much work here. Epic's been giving games away for free for five years to alleviate that issue, but it doesn't work. And ultimately, you have to ask: what's in it for me to buy a game from Epic when I get better features on Steam? On GOG, I have an answer to that question, but on Epic, I don't.
Steam has been enshittified already. Here is my tracking log and every entry from Steam is at 9:05pm, the one before that... 9:05pm. It just sits there and logs all your shit over and over. Annoying as fuck. It could easily save that locally and only archive every few minutes.
Can we play Steam games without using their stupid launcher? I hate it. It's got more trackers than Google and burns my laptop battery to death on just Belatro.
God I fucking hate that launcher. Honestly, fuck all launchers unless you're playing multiplayer. Can some one tell me how to get around this without pirating?
Yes? You have been able to basically since day 1 of steam. Games fall into two camps either it's DRM enforced by the developer and your stuck with the client. And then there's everything else.
For everything else you can use the appid to disable the client check, or just remove the single dll that hooks the steam services. Aka the overlay and cloud.
99% of games on steam outside of major triple A games on steam are entirely drm free. They literally just use a single dll for the steam stuff.
Iv bene making zips of steam games iv bought for over a decade now and they still just work years later.
And for games with mandatory drm they would have drm on gog too if they sold them there. But since they require drm gog won't allow them.
Valve just doesn't actually give a single fuck about drm one way or the other. It's there if the dev wants it but doesn't require it at all.
Even the whole offline check in thing is technically optional. Since that just doesn't happen if you just remove the single dll file.
GoG
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