Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.
Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.
PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.
Seriously, it’s a four-player game. Not some MMO clusterfuck. Not an arena shooter bragging about 128 codblops on a single map, like it’s Stand On Nuketown. You need matchmaking - you want anticheat - you’ll do some DRM bullshit. Other than that you should want to offload bandwidth and latency to your players. They’re all on the same team!
Part of why Sony nowadays is a game company with a movie hobby is that discs were dirrrt cheap compared to cartridges. They’d fund any stupid bullshit people wanted to make, get finished cases on shelves, and know whether consumers loved it, before N64 developers had finished negotiating a production run. Their cost per disc was measured in cents and their manufacturing turnaround was measured in days. One of the slowest and riskiest aspects of game publishing suddenly cost next to nothing.
Digital distribution isn’t necessarily cheaper per-gigabyte… but there’s no mastering. There’s no lead time. There’s not even the concept of a production run, anymore. Developers can ship whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want, essentially for free.
I remain flabbergasted there’s no simpler way to get ten buttons of input and 240p of output on a generic 32-bit ARM device with a zillion official and unofficial add-ons. Especially when you look at the unholy chain of adapters necessary for input.
Especially once you swap the console playing the game for an early-model Wii, which has been hacked to hell and back, and has Gamecube, Bluetooth, and technically USB inputs.
I have no love for this company whatsoever. Most of the their revenue streams should frankly be illegal. But I’m not exactly thrilled about every glorified software repository taking a pound of flesh off all revenue, licit or otherwise.