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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 want five game managers.
Maybe a sixth to manage those.
Competition in the PC market is a good thing. Otherwise it's just another locked down console.
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.
I’m not saying competition is bad, but as a consumer, managing a pile of clients sucks.
I'll say it: competition can be bad sometimes. If Valve ever starts to conduct business unethically, the solution will be government regulation, not competition.
More detail below, but while this is not... wrong and government intervention is needed, it is clearly not deployed effectively in this space (presumably governments would catch up with Meta, Apple and Google first).
A more competitive landscape could solve that issue before it got to that. Especially if the big blocker is fanboyism.
Competition has failed. Repeatedly. The history of the post-industrial world is full of examples. There used to be a ton of competitive general stores in America before the Walton family destroyed them all. Competition is the most common way monopolies are created.
The problems the regulatory capture and the government's lack of teeth. Which are issues for sure, but not ones solved by increasing competition.
That's a weirdly lopsided argument. You seem to be saying that competition has failed and will yield a monopoly and the answer is regulation, which will fix the problem the second it gets over having failed at the exact same task.
Again, you're not wrong, you need to course-correct the market through regulatory oversight. But that oversight is meant to both guarantee quality standards and re-enable competition in places where it has dried out.
For the purposes of the conversation we're having, the regulation solution here is to fine or break up Steam so that other players can compete with them, ultimately. Well, and potentially to see if they should cut it out with the CounterStrike loot boxes and whatnot, but that's not what we're debating here.
So I'm not sure what your point is. Sure, eventually in a world where Steam is the only player in PC game distribution someone should step in and fix that problem. But before we get to that, as a user, I am not going to be here cheerleading for Steam to secure its monopoly first.
I think that's our fundamental misunderstanding here, because that's not the regulatory solution I had in mind. I would look to other heavily regulated (or even nationalized) monopolies. Forcing Valve to split Steam up into either competing horizontal segments or disparate vertical segments would only make the service worse for the consumer AND the publishers (maybe you could make stronger arguments for some segments than others maybe hardware and game development could be split off from the store with little impact, but I don't see the benefit there).
If you break the store up into competing units... Then what? Eventually one beats out the others and we are right back to where we started. Or worse, an equilibrium is reached between a small handful creating an oligopoly, like we see in so many other industries today.
Instead, I would leave Steam mostly as a single entity, subject to regulation about how it conducts business. From pricing to what it does with user data, to making sure that quasi competitors like Amazon, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo are all able to have fair access to distribute their games on the platform too. Create a regulatory board in charge of effectively managing the monopoly.
This whole "just add more competition" has led to a dystopian capitalist hellscape. It doesn't work for more than a couple decades before the government needs to step in anyways.
What regulation determines how a videogame storefront operates?
I mean, I'm all for managed markets, but that's absurd. In no world is there a nationalized videogame outlet, in no world is there fine grain regulation telling Steam what percentage of a cut they can take. That not a realistic outcome. If you were putting things on a gradient of necessity for a nationally managed monopoly "videogame digital distribution" would be at the very bottom of that list.
What is a realistic outcome is having some number of competitors providing competing feature sets to users and deals to game makers. Regulation needs to be in place for data management, for safety, for customer rights. But for everything else that's nowhere near a reasonable option.
It's not that bad. There are solutions to consolidate your game libraries, but frankly I have too many games for them to be practical (I do pay for Launchbox and then don't use it).
Still, even if you primarily use Steam those alternatives are pretty functional to consolidate your other libraries, which does take the edge off quite a bit. That's kind of the default for Linux gamers, where Steam+Heroic/Lutris is the de facto standard, and it works just fine without preventing Epic or GOG from being viable options.
Or just let people download installers like GOG does, that way you don't need to make and maintain a game manager (which GOG does anyway, for some reason).
I want and use Galaxy on Windows, and support for things like achievements, chat and cloud saves are a big deal. But this is also true. You can use stuff like Launchbox or Heroic on Linux to do the same thing even without a specific API if you allow third party installer DRM-free downloads.
I really hate it when I launch a game from Steam and another launcher pops up (looking at you, Funcom)
Funcom, Ubisoft, EA, SquEnix...
Yeah, people say this. And sometimes they say this even if the "other launcher" just pops up for a second, does a thing and automatically goes away, because that's how Ubisoft's one has worked for a while and people still complain about it A LOT.
I don't get it.
The other launcher prevents me from playing games.
I bought Titanfall 2 on Origin shortly after release. A couple years later, it was very cheap on Steam with DLC included, so I bought it again.
I can't start the Steam version, because the EA App tells me I didn't buy the DLC.
I can't be the first person with this issue, but EA doesn't care. Their launcher prevents me from playing the games I bought because they don't care.
Works for me in that exact same scenario.
But in any case, that's a bug. I've encountered games that have gamebreaking bugs, second launcher or not, and with both EA and Steam. They both will give you a refund automatically, at the very least. That's neither here nor there.
Yes, it's a bug. You can find many reports on the internet, it's existed for years and EA doesn't care.
Oh, awesome, so I just have to accept that the second launcher prevents me from playing the game? I have to buy the DLC for a higher price in the EA store if I want to play them?
Awesome, who doesn't want such a great second launcher! Please give me one in front of all my games, I'd hate being able to use Steam as my primary launcher!
Well, no, you found a bug in a poorly maintained game. You don't have to accept anything, but if the customer support for both of the affected companies won't help you fix it then the recourse is to get a refund.
But that is true regardless of whether the bug is on Steam, whatever EA is calling their authorization system these days or the game itself. It's not a problem with the concept of a game featuring its own login flow, it's a problem with the concept of not maintaining games properly. There are plenty of games in that same situation with no second launcher in them.
No, the bug is not in Titanfall 2, it's in the EA app. Titanfall 2 doesn't start, the EA app blocks it before that. It's only the second launcher that's problematic.
You're just wrong here, because the problem is the second authentication flow which apparently isn't implemented correctly.
Not that it would be any better if you're correct, as it's still EA selling a game that's broken due to their second launcher, but that's not the case here.
No, I understood that.
What I'm saying is a bug is a bug is a bug. It doesn't matter which part is borked if it doesn't let you play the game. The problem isn't that the game has a launcher, the problem is the launcher is broken. If the broken part was the main menu you'd be just as boned.
And yes, they should fix it. And if they don't you should get a refund.
None of which has any bearing on the conversation we're actually having here. Because you're not blocked by having a launcher, you're blocked by having a broken one.
Yes, a bug is a bug is a bug. EA doesn't care about this bug and hasn't fixed it in years. I would not be encountering this bug if they didn't insist on a second launcher.
Yet the main menu works fine, and it's only the second launcher that's boning me. It's well known that the more code you have, the higher the chances of a bug.
Which would leave me the option to buy the DLC for a higher price from EA, or not play at all. Amazing, this second launcher is really helping me!
But I haven't encountered such issues with Steam. It's the opposite, Steam is actively helping me to make games more playable. Other launchers are making them less playable, because the companies don't care.
My issue is the second launcher, not any random bug.
I mean, I have. Spider-Man 2 crashes on boot for me. No second launcher there. Ironically this is the game where they took out the obligation to sign in to PSN. Go figure.
I mean, sure, they could take out all the features that are crashing, but my problem isn't with the rendering features, my problem is my game doesn't work.
You are conflating having a bug in the launcher with the launcher being the problem. This just doesn't follow. What is a problem is having a gamebreaking bug in a game that you're selling to the public.
I'm not gonna repeat myself any further. You get my point, you're fixating on this to make a fanboyish argument for Steam, I get it. No need to keep going around this loop.
The second launcher is my problem, because I don't get any choice whether I use it, and EA obviously doesn't care whether it works.
Keep licking those boots, surely it will pay off one day :)
That is a weird last line in a conversation entirely predicated on whether we each think that Valve having a monopoly is a good thing.
Because it shouldn't be necessary.
"Shouldn't"?
To do what?
I mean, I guess it depends on whether you assume the game "should" only exist within Steam. But, you know, at that point why not buy a PlayStation?
You can sell a game on multiple storefronts/launchers without forcing the steam version to first launch a different app
That depends on what you're doing. A separate login is useful for stuff like cross-platform support. But also, if your game is some sort of MMO or live game you may need some sort of account management if you want to sell it stand-alone.
These days some people just plug into the storefront's login system, but I also don't begrudge the ones that don't, mildly inconvenient as it can be. Especially not the ones that own their own storefront and are only on Steam because you can't not be on Steam.
Which, again, I find to be a bad thing.
In my experience the launcher hate is less about the MMOs that actually are doing something relevant like updating and more the ubisofts and 2ks that are putting in a second layer of drm that can break and usually exists to hoover more data than they could otherwise.
Hey, I'm not going to stand here and defend everybody's implementation. But I will say that the hate is not related to the implementation because, again, a bunch of these are entirely unintrusive (I know Ubisoft's is just a pop up now and I think EA will do the same, but don't quote me on that) and people rage about it anyway.
It's become a console wars meme thing.