“Users have many choices”

Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem. Gabe Newell, head of Valve, said something like this a few years ago. Newell commented that the fastest way to stop piracy it was not pput up stronger barriersbut to give users a better service than what they would receive from pirates. And it is clear that Steam offers a good service for consumers, but… what about video game companies?

That is what, in recent years, has awakened the criticism that Steam is a monopoly. And don’t think that it is a criticism on networks or with a small mouth: it is something that is sparking a deep debate, which has already brought Gabe Newell to court and which translates into two open judicial processes.

Newell’s response? Users have many alternatives to buy their games. The reality? Not so many, precisely, because of that good Steam service. But of course, this is a double-edged sword.

Steam and the “monopoly” with which users agree, but not all developers

David Rosen is an important name in this story. He’s the founder of a studio called Wolfire Games which, if that doesn’t sound familiar to you, is completely normal. What might sound familiar to you if you play on PC is Humble Bundle. At first, Humble Bundle was a website where you paid a certain amount and you took keys that you could redeem on Steam.

For 5 euros you got great games and you could decide who the money was going to (non-governmental organizations, the developers, the store or a little for each one). Over time, Humble Bundle evolved and became a store, but also a subscription platform.

Things were going well for Rosen and if I tell you this it is because, in 2018, the developer began to pay attention to certain Valve policies that, according to him, harmed smaller creators.

These creators would see fewer benefits from having to pay higher percentages per sale on Steam than on other platforms, but they knew they should stay on Steam because it is the platform the user is on. Given the context, in 2021, Rosen himself approached Valve to ask if his studio (the aforementioned Wolfire Games) could publish his game ‘Overgrowth’ on both Humble Bundle and Steam, but at a discounted price on… Humble Bundle.

According to Rosen, Valve said something like “you’ll see”, which implied that they would not advertise their game on the cover (something key for visibility). According to Valve, that’s not how it happened, but the result is where we are right now: Rosen and Wolfire Games decided to sue Valve directly for policies that they considered were anti-competitive and anti-consumer.

During all this time, and as they point out from BloombergValve has defended itself by stating that its internal policies are actually good for the consumer. And, as I said at the beginning of the article, there really is a lot of reason in this. Although they have questionable things like we didn’t really buy a game, but a license to useSteam is an exemplary platform when it comes to granting refunds if a game is not what we expect or is broken.

Steam, in addition, works much better than the store that Ubisoft had, that of Electronic Arts or an Epic Store in which Epic is burning millions of dollars without being able to make a dent in Gabe Newell’s ‘fishbowl’ empire. But Rosen is also right when he points out that This price parity policy is harmful to the user.

Because, let’s be clear, if a game is 15 euros on GoG (my favorite platform of PC thanks to the fact that you do have ownership over the games you buy) and 15 euros on Steam, the safest thing for the user who does not care so much about that property is to choose Steam for the achievements, the community, because it is where their friends are, the users who correct bugs or because you have a PC and a Steam Deck and it’s very convenient.

But if it is 10 euros on GoG and 15 on Steam, the easiest thing is for them to choose the GoG version. That price parity is one of the battles in these trials and, as usually happens in these cases, many details come to light. Although Valve offers vague explanations about these parity policies, in the Bloomberg report we can see statements from developers who indicate that they received threatening calls from the company.

For example, emails to Ubisoft threatening remove ‘Rainbow Six Siege’ edits from Steam because Ubisoft sold them cheaper in its own store or to Warner Bros. because ‘Middle-earth: Shadow of War’ was more expensive on Steam than on other platforms for the same version of the game. A name that has come up is Kassidy Gerberwho worked in business development at Valve and was the one who made those “requests” and, when having to testify, stated that it wasn’t really Valve’s “policy” because “that sounds a little bureaucratic.”

The trial, as we say, continues its course, but in the meantime, in the United Kingdom there is a case against Steam which could translate into a fine of up to 900 million dollars for this type of practices.

And… what does Gabe Newell say about all this? The affable Valve boss who lives on his luxurious yacht was asked about it, responding with the phrase we quote in the headline. That “customers have a lot of choice about where to buy their games” points out that Steam is not a bottleneck like the Google and Apple stores can be (a similar trial occurred between Epic and these stores that ended in both opening the range), but one more place where players can buy their games.

It means that there is Steam, but also the Epic Games Store, you can buy it directly from the developers, in the Xbox store for PC, in Humble Bundle, in GoG and in a few other alternatives. It is, according to that logic, a very large store within a huge ecosystem. In fact, former Xbox boss Phil Spencer praised Steam as the “backbone of PC gaming,” describing Steam as a positive force in the industry.

But of course, it’s what we said at the beginning: although there are many more stores, for more than 20 years an ecosystem has been built in which ‘Gaming PC’ and ‘Steam’ are two practically inseparable terms. We will see how far both Rosen’s lawsuit and the case in the United Kingdom go because they can mark a before and after in the PC gaming segment.

Meanwhile, Steam hosted more than 19,000 video games during 2025, generating total income of 11.7 billion dollars and the income they obtain exclusively from their commissions on sales increased from 1.1 billion dollars in 2015 to an estimated 3.2 billion in 2024, tripling in less than a decade.

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