As a gamer, I love Valve. Problem is, I’m not their customer. Their customers are publishers and independent devs. Their main product is digital shelf space in the one of, if not the, most visited digital game store.

This is the lens through which any discussion of Valve’s business practices has to be viewed. None of the companies in this meme compete with Valve in this arena, except perhaps Epic Games. They are for the better part Valve’s customers, and they probably don’t like that. They might create their own stores to try to claw back some of their sales, but their core business model is not reliant on those stores.

As another commenter said, if this is a monopoly, it doesn’t seem like one created through anticompetetive behavior. You can watch Gaben on YouTube talk about how he just wanted to make a distribution platform for Half life that wasn’t clunky like Microsoft. Steam was just one of the first, imo.

(This isnt necessarily me condoning their business model though. Still feels like digital feudalism if you ask me.)