Steam? Set your sights lower. Maybe try to beat GOG or the EA launcher.

Steam will stay great so long as they stay a private company. It's the enshitification of going public and appeasing boardmembers and shareholders that ruin companies like Valve. I hope GabeN chooses a great successor when he decides to step down. Hoping for another 27 years of awesome.

No book store could ever take on a retail store....

You realize that the cut they're taking ends up being used to pay for a yacht collection, right? They don't need board members and shareholders to enrich the few at the expense of the many and to take anti diversity decisions...

Which means that's an area where they could've tried to set themselves apart from Steam.

Prime is better than Netflix imo. As is Disney Plus.

Yes they are now but it took a very long time to get there. And prime gets subscribers by default so to, well, prime . Netflix still has over 300m. I’m not even a sub, I cancelled a while back and only have Disney. What I was trying to say is, like steam, there was originally one platform in Netflix. Everyone was on it and it was a good time. Then, like steam, a lot of publishers left steam/Netflix and took their content in favour of their own platforms. And then years later due to costs and lower numbers than needed, ended up making their content not exclusive.

Prime was tragic for years with terrible interface and content. It’s only recently in the last year or so that it got to a decent level. Disneys content is very good these days, but their interface could still do with some work. I’m only a subscriber of Disney as their content matches my interests. I despise Amazon so only get a free trial or pay for a month when something like Reacher is on. Netflix own content no longer interests me especially after cancelling half the things I like. I feel like everyone is missing the point here.

Those are terms set by the games publishers, Steam and other platforms pass them on to the customer. The only platform big enough to strongarm publishers to not do that is Steam, but it would definitely make some publishers pull out of Steam completely.

Every single Amazon product is a half-arsed mess off things that barely function. They're basically just a delivery company that charges a percentage of the package value now.

Their Luna product seems to be different to Steam. It's a streaming platform like Playstation Now or the Google Stadia one that got shut down. The other games that they've got on there primarily seem to be DRM-free GOG codes, mixed with some for the Epic store. Maybe they meant they were taking on Steam by boosting their competitors?

Again, doesn't sound similar to me. There are plenty of exclusives both on the streaming and the videogames world. But the history on steam doesn't follow Netflix's history at all. I think the problem is equating a public trade, stockholders driven service that is entirely in the gutter of service quality and shitty corporate behavior. With a private company that has a mostly solid ethic track record (with few exceptions) that offers unrivaled added value. Netflix already lost the streaming wars. Max exclusives will never go to Netflix, Disney would rather feed children to the pigs than share their IPs. While devs already negotiate time windows to end the exclusivity deals with Epic right out of the gate. Publishers will foam at the mouth about exclusivity just to release steam versions two years later. It's a massively different situation to Netflix.

They'd have to do something really crazy to have me pick Amazon over GOG!

... and then they'll recoil in horror when you mention that's what a monopoly is. Monopolies can be positive and functional. They're still monopolies. Streaming was better was Netflix was the only choice, and had everything, for a reasonable price. Competition's supposed to be what drives those qualities. Exclusivity breaks that. Exclusivity splinters the market into desperate fiefdoms. But there's still a word for when only one store matters.

What position are they taking advantage of? If they ask for a smaller cut than 30 percent they get botched at for being anti competitive and being too cheap to try and compete against. They ask for more than 30% and they're price gouging. Sure, everyone who works there is happy and sleeps in piles of money, but they can't do anything about it without turning into more of a monopoly. As it stands they at least blow money on potentially cool things in R&D like the steam controller, steam box, and Steam Deck. What do you actually want Gabe to do? He's already far and wide the industry leader in employee compensation, and he can't take a smaller cut without becoming a monopoly. Yeah, he could donate loads of money to charity, but his giant stack of cash also keeps his private company lush with funds to continue paying his employees if anything dire does happen, instead of doing like everyone else and laying off people.

'Why didn't they just try harder?' is an increasingly worrying take. A company could copy Steam's storefront and backend, verbatim, and it wouldn't impact Steam's monopoly on PC game sales. They're entrenched *and* they're well-liked. You can't buy a reputation overnight. Blaming the action without considering the environment is still a mistake. Epic tried everything, and people still scoff about UI, like *that's* the billion-dollar difference. Nah: it's attributing the difference in outcome to surface-level distinctions. And if Epic unfucked their apparently ugly storefront, these people would pick another excuse, because I guarantee you it wouldn't change EGS's irrelevance.

Steam was the first to offer 2 hour/14 day refunds, as well as refunds over broken games. They brought reviews to the storefront. Communities and discussion boards to communicate with devs and find like-minded players. Demos, 4 packs, easy access to servers and SDKs, easy update delivery and tracking for consumers... It's a store-front with a strong focus on consumer happiness. People are not going to give that up for EGS or Prime, which are run by psychopaths and not even remotely consumer-friendly. Tim Sweeny even said EGS is made for developers, with the implication it is not for consumers. GOG is probably the closest competitor that stands any hope of success but they have steered clear of actually entering Steam's territory, preferring to grab a market Steam neglects (retro PC gamers). Considering they have not developed the other systems Steam has I don't think they *want* to compete and are content to coexist.

You're defending the owner of a yacht collection and saying his money is used to keep his business lush... Get real.

I hate the idea of more game stores because exclusives piss me off, and that's the only viable tactic another store could use to get people to leave steam. When Netflix was all there was, it was great. We saw in real time how that shitshow ended. I had to bring out my old ship and chart new waters. I do not want to do this with my game library.

Something like 70% of their net income comes from AWS that pretty much runs a huge portion of the internet.