Comment on Steam - new record for concurrent players online (37,185,128) on 19th May, 2026
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 1 week agoAfter killing the competition with exclusivity deals and shoehorning itself into physical copies as DRM.
I know you weren’t born when that happened, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Steam / Valve doesn’t do exclusivity deals.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Except they kinda did.
They pay publishers to use Steam as DRM for physical releases.
If you wanted to play the game on PC, you needed Steam.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Where do you get that Valve pays publishers to use Steam as DRM? And therefore forces them a kind of exclusivity deal? No, Valve does not do that.
GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They did.
They don’t need to anymore because they killed the market of physical discs for PC games.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Got a source on them paying publishers for that?
doublah@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Publishers used Steam for physical releases because Valve takes no fee for CD keys, so it was cheaper for them.