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EA, Ubisoft, Epic Games, What do all of these companies have in common? Failed Game Launchers. What did Steam do differently to Succeed into making 16.2 Billion US dollars last year? Well, it all starts two decades ago, steam was simply a launcher for valve's games, like Half-life 2, team fortress classic, and counter strike 1.6.
Despite its dominance in the last 15 years, steam actually kinda sucked in the first few years of its introduction. When Half-life 2 released in 2004,with the influx of players trying to play the new game, the steam servers had trouble authenticating all the releases and it inevitably crashed. In 2004, the idea that a game you rightfully purchased had to be authenticated by an online server, when physical discs had always worked instantly without verification, was frustrating for many new players. But this easily became the new normal after a months of steams dominance, because we can easily see in January 2005 it sold a record-breaking number of 1.7 million copies sold.
By the Mid 2010s and 2020s, Steam became the best gaming launcher FAST. One of Steam's competition is the "Epic Games Launcher". Epic took a page out of steams book, publishing the widely popular game "Fortnite", and the most popular gaming engine/CGI engine, Unreal engine 5. In the start, it created some issue for steam, but looking at their quarterly earnings, we quickly see a difference, with epic making 5.7 Million and steam making 16.2 Billion. Currently the only two options you have for owning a game is steam, and epic, with steam being the clear choice with their additions of refunds under two hours of playtime, easily creating modifications for your favorite singleplayer games with the tool of "steam workshop" that can help you install mods with just a few clicks, not to mention their robust friends feature that has integrated voice-chat, texting, and even streaming to your friend's, in a twitch like interface. epic sadly has no response for these these features, and safe to say they might never have one.
Honestly, with the rise of greedy gaming companies like Xbox raising their gamepass ultimate pricing from $20 to $30, or EA's managing of their premier battle royale "apex legends" apparently making a set of cosmetic items that are mere pixels, cost $160-$170 dollars, and Ubisoft's infamous track record of adding microtransactions into their single player games. Many gamers nowadays accept steam as being a monopoly because of their simple choice not to go public, to prioritize gamers when it comes to quick and easy access to games, and their lack of greediness. This is why steam has a high revenue per employee, being 50 MILLION.
I hope this article proved why steam is the widely accepted monopoly currently reigning on gaming right now.
