If you’ve ever looked at the PC gaming atmosphere, you’ve definitely heard of Valve’s online storefront called Steam. It is generally regarded as the top destination for PC gaming.
Just like any other online store, you make an account, buy games, and download them, and they’re stored on your account to play at any time. Following this logic, all of Steam’s competitors do the same thing: the Epic Games store, GOG.com, the Microsoft store, and the EA app formerly known as Origin all had the same online premise but are pale in comparison to Steam. I only ever use Steam myself, unless I feel like playing Fortnite.
So, I wanted to talk about why Steam has such a massive audience compared to its competitors. The issue of customer friendliness is a significant factor. Valve offers regular Steam sales that can reduce game prices by up to 90%. The autumn steam sale ended yesterday, so the next sale is happening in December with the winter steam sale. There’s also a plethora of smaller sales, such as the cooking fest from October 12th to 15th, which explains itself with cooking games going on sale.
Steam’s user interface is also incredibly smooth compared to its competitors; Steam shows you your games all in one list that you can sort and customize with favorites to your liking. Steam offers a “big picture mode” that allows users to navigate a console-like menu to play their games on with a controller, something no other storefront has tried. Valve gained nothing from doing this; they did it for their audience.
Valve has a positive reputation among Steam users. Steam allows any game under two hours of playtime that you’ve purchased less than two weeks ago to be refunded in full without question, so players can try out a game they’ve bought, and if they don’t like it, that’s not an issue. This practice is a universal thing people cannot prevent on the Steam Store.
People dislike Steam’s rival companies, Epic Games and EA, for their money-hungry practices, mainly microtransactions, which Valve does too, but Valve’s microtransactions are entirely cosmetic-based, while EA has made games like Star Wars: Battlefront with pay-to-win options behind microtransactions, and Epic Games has legally fought Apple and lost because they didn’t want to deal with Apple’s transaction cuts.
Epic Games even offers free games to get people to use their storefront; they’ve offered lower developer fees, meaning they take less of the money when a game sells, and they’ve paid developers for timed exclusivity on their platform, but it’s never enough.
Steam has the PC market in a chokehold. Why switch over to a less developed launcher when you have all of your games in one place already? There should be competition, but other developers shudder in fear at the idea of offering such customer-friendly options for these days. Valve’s steam serves as a bastion of customer friendliness, and it’s no surprise that they’re practically a monopoly. I fear the day when Valve’s leadership changes and these get ripped away in exchange for profit, but for now I welcome this monopoly since Steam deserves it.
