Steam is an excellent, monopolistic gaming platform that highlights what’s wrong with modern tech

If you’re a PC gamer, chances are you use Steam. It’s the biggest gaming platform on PC, with an estimated 75% market share in 2013. It’s only grown since then, and I’m sure its market share hasn’t particularly shifted by much either. I’d argue that Steam is a monopoly (or at least an oligopoly), and I wouldn’t be the first to do so either. There’s a stark lack of competition in the PC game distribution space, and Valve is basically the only provider for most games that are released on PC.

While it’s great that Steam has managed to still do right by consumers, it’s more or less the same application that it was a decade ago. Sure, it has some modern features, and there are improvements that have come over the years like a better messaging experience, a new UI, and some fun community aspects like the Year in Review, but it’s still the same program it once was. In contrast, applications since that time period have changed drastically.

How often do you hear people complain about Netflix? And how often do you hear people complain about Steam? The difference is staggering, and the lack of change in Steam highlights a lot of what’s wrong with modern tech.

Steam has stayed consistent

It’s more or less the same as it always was

Just like other app stores on Android and iOS, Valve takes 30% of every sale on its platform through Steam. That figure hasn’t changed in over a decade at the very least, and at least in the early 2010s, was quite an enticing deal to developers when competing platforms could have taken as much as 50%. That cut can drop further when games sell well too.

While some may argue that this is a high figure, the truth is that it’s also been an unchanged one. It’s not as if the service has gotten worse, or paywalled certain features, or even outright removed features; it’s just the same Steam that it always was. That’s appealing to consumers and developers, but the fact is that the lack of innovation that drives Steam is part of what makes it appealing, which is a damning indictment of the wider tech sphere.

For most people, they don’t want new features. As an example, Spotify has been the subject of a number of price increases in recent years, and alongside that came podcasts, AI features, blends, and more. Some of the features are fun, but how many people would prefer to just use Spotify as a service in the same state that it was in 2015? I imagine quite a few people, as most people use it as an app for music.

Whatever you want to call, it’s bad

“Enshittification”, “crapification”, and platform decay are all terms used to mean the same thing

The ongoing goal of a business is to make money, and a common way that companies have attracted users in the 2000s and 2010s so far has been to draw them in with good deals and an inarguably better value for the consumer than the alternatives. Uber is a great example of a company that did this, entering the marketing and undercutting the competition at a lower price, gaining a foothold in ride sharing, then proceeding to raise the prices once people were used to using the app and benefitting shareholders and the business alike.

That’s where Steam is different; Valve is still privately owned without shareholders, and Valve’s Gabe Newell seemingly intends to keep it that way. Steam began as a project aimed at tackling piracy, with Newell arguing that the biggest deterrent to piracy was offering a superior service, something he believed Steam to be. Anecdotally, I can say that some DRM services in the past were less convenient than just pirating the game itself, and games like Trackmania Sunrise with its StarForce DRM are an excellent example of that.

In that same vein, Spotify started off similarly, with ambitions to capitalize on the ongoing piracy epidemic and offer a more convenient, superior solution to music streaming. Just like Steam, it worked, capturing a massive audience. Now, Spotify has gone through several UI disasters, with the app resembling a weird crossover of TikTok and music streaming, while trying to be a one-stop-shop for all things audio.

That’s where Steam is different, though. Aside from a light expansion into listing more than just games (and they’re not shoved in your face either), not much about the service has changed. It’s easier to get your games on the platform if you’re a developer than it once was, but it’s still the same Steam that you used a decade ago. It still works the same with extra features that you can ignore if you want, with a similar UI to the one that has always worked and the same fees and charges that it always had.

Tech isn’t what it used to be

It’s not just Spotify

Source: Pexels

Airbnb, Reddit, Amazon, Facebook, Google Search, and more are all examples of services that have seemingly changed their focus from users to profits, knowing that users will be locked into the platforms that they’re using. Make no mistake; Steam’s position in the market is highly abusable, and with a captive audience of millions that have hundreds of games in their libraries, there’s a lot that it could do to try and make more money than the service already does. It’s in a monopolistic position, it’s just that the company is run by people that don’t want to abuse it.

In a sense, Steam is a shining example of what tech could still have been today. While there’s no telling what the future of Steam holds if Gabe Newell retires or passes away, the truth is that right now, it’s clear that people at the company care enough to make money in a way that they aren’t making a service worse at the expense of consumers. Nobody really talks about or complains about Steam — it’s simply just there and exists, more or less unchanging.

That’s not to say I don’t welcome competition, as the likes of Epic Games can actually hold a candle to Valve to a certain extent and offer a good games library, but most gamers are still locked in to what Valve offers. The promise of free monthly games on Epic Games was a great initiative to get people involved, but it also meant a lot of people simply claimed the games then went back to their Steam library to play the rest of what they had. It’s a tough one to crack for any other company wanting to get into the industry, and a lot of power is in Valve’s hands.

Let’s hope they don’t have a change of heart.