Recent moves from Epic Games, comments from its ever-chatty CEO Tim Sweeney, and scrutiny of Valve's handling of AI-reliant games has left many people revisiting a timeless question in PC gaming: can anyone, anywhere, ever beat Steam at its own game?
I brought this question to Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at research and analyst firm Newzoo. In the past few weeks, we've seen more developers dissect and debate Valve's chokehold on PC gaming – how Valve got to this position, how Steam's dominance affects game devs and players, and the feasibility of Steam becoming a meaningfully smaller portion of the market.
Alternatives to Steam obviously exist. GOG is a great source for specific games, Rosier notes the success of many "local launchers" in Asia, Battle.net is selling The Witcher now, Itch.io is like a big box of chocolates, and, well, the Epic Games Store is vibe coded. But nobody really threatens Steam as the market leader. Can it be done?
"Steam is difficult to avoid, I would say, at this point in time," Rosier reasons. He says "this is kind of a pendulum" that has swung back and forth, and we've currently caught PC gaming in a very Steam time in its life.
"10 or 20 years ago, the big publishers decided to have their own platform distribution on PC, and then they almost all went back to Steam," Rosier adds. The likes of EA and Ubisoft all came crawling back, and even Blizzard has Overwatch on Steam now. "So yeah, for me it's a pendulum, and I don't see, right now, the big publishers moving back to, 'Yeah, we're gonna get out of Steam, we're only gonna do our platform.' I don't see that happening at this moment."
One big question here, Rosier notes, is Microsoft and Xbox Project Helix. Microsoft owns Activision Blizzard and, through it, Battle.net, and its next console is positioned as a PC hybrid. You can play PC games on Helix, but can you run Steam? The shape of Microsoft's ecosystem is still unclear.
The irony is that Steam's dominance is, itself, a big part of Steam's dominance: it's a compounding function of investment and familiarity. You can reasonably argue that unseating Steam gets harder every year. I'm reminded of Phil Spencer admitting that Xbox lost the "worst generation to lose" to PlayStation, allowing tons of people to build up digital libraries on somebody else's platform, thus making it much harder to get them to move.
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/can-anyone-overthrow-steam-on-pc-as-long-as-valve-is-independent-and-not-a-publicly-traded-company-analyst-says-it-looks-impossible
