For clarity, it's important that readers know that using alternatives (like GOG, Uplay, EA) isn't actually a valid option here because they do not carry the same games that Steam does (due to Steam's dominant position in the marketplace, many avoid releasing on other stores at all). I'm not stating they don't carry identical libraries as some difference is tolerable, I'm talking about vast vast portions of Steam's collection are unavailable elsewhere.

Meaning those stores would be put at a terrible financial disadvantage trying to get developers onto their store. Hence why most of them (excluding GOG and Epic) just have their first party games on there. This pull is so intense, that most of those you've listed have put their games on Steam again.

Then there are those like Humble, which aren't actually a separate platform, they just sell keys and for the longest time they exclusively sold Steam keys. This is crucial to understand because "using Humble" still means encouraging Steam lock in.

GOG and Epic are real competitors, with GOG's competitive edge being they only have games that are DRM free. I suppose this is a bit of a double edged sword, as most gamers don't care about DRM and therefore just want the latest game available, which GOG does not carry if it has DRM. GOG usually gets games years after launch when the developer feels DRM is no longer needed. So their competitive edge becomes yet another reason most GOG buyers also have Steam accounts.

> even though you can use GOG, Uplay, EA, Humble, BattleNet, Amazon Prime, MS Store and the countless other options on PC if you wish unlike on iOS and consoles

Note that if you're an indie developer and you want to make money, you pretty much are going to use Steam. The alternative is if someone like Epic sponsors development or something. But yeah, you can release on stores like itch. Nobody will buy it, but you can do it.

This can lead to a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Ideally, devs will put up both a Steam version and an Itch/GOG version. But in practice they often don't; you sell on the store that brings in the vast majority of revenue. And then pretty soon your mods start getting managed through Steam Workshop, your input starts getting managed through Steam Input, your achievements/multiplayer starts getting managed though Steam's cloud. Because frankly, players want that. Steam players want to use Steam Workshop, and they don't really care if that means the mods are harder to use outside of Steam.

None of these services can be separated easily from the Steam platform. You can't pay Valve some money and integrate seamless workshop support into your game when it's booted up from GOG.

So users may try to avoid Steam for a while (I generally do), but you can only really do that if you're willing to skip games (still waiting on Spelunky 2, Ultrakill, Cruelty Squad, etc...). GOG and Itch are great and some devs are genuinely great about supporting multiple storefronts, but it's always going to be a subset. So eventually users get tired and just buy everything from Steam. I mean, if you buy from Steam you get input profiles set up out of the box, you get cached shaders, and importantly you never need to wonder whether or not a game is coming to the storefront you use. Never. And if a game ever doesn't come to Steam (hello Epic Games) you can have an existential meltdown and say that the devs are ruining PC gaming.

And as a consequence, if you're an indie developer, you are releasing on Steam. Because it's really difficult for users to avoid Steam because that's where the games are, and as a developer it's really difficult to avoid Steam because that's where the users are, and we go round and round until a nontrivial portion of PC players believe that PC gaming effectively means Steam, and anything that's not on Steam might as well just not exist.

You kind of saw this with the Epic Games fights around exclusives. I'm no friend of DRM and I'm no friend of exclusives, but not being able to get a game because it's not on the storefront I want to use is extremely common for me, and it was extremely weird seeing Steam users act like this was the end of the world when it happened to them. It really cued me in to how much power that Steam has, to the point where people basically treat it as a default platform. On some level it is on devs like me to support multiple storefronts, but people need to recognize that there's really not a lot of incentive to do so beyond trying to make the ecosystem healthy. Breaking Steam's stranglehold over the PC market would need to be a coordinated effort from both developers and players, it's not something developers can do on their own.

Users: "Steam is awful, we need alternatives."

Epic: "Okay, we've started buiding one."

Users: "Yeah well it sucks because it doesn't have these extra, non-core features it took Steam two decades to build."

A shopping cart is not a non core feature if you want to have large sales, and it shouldn't take a decade to build.

This whole conversation always devolves into straw man nonsense and it gets old. Is steam perfect? No. It has a lot of classic valve issues and the biggest argument I see is should they be able to take 30%.

Was epic a competitor? So far no, and mostly because of screw ups on their end. If you want people to adopt an alternative from something that's already very convenient , then you need to make yours more so, not less. People aren't sticking with steam because of forums or profiles or whatever. They're sticking with steam because the only competitive advantage epic offers is Free games (which are easy enough to grab and dip) and exclusives (which ignoring if this should or shouldn't be a thing, isn't nearly enough to pull people over rather than make them sometimes hop across)

No end of consumer hostile practises, undeclared telemetry gathering, half-baked service even today (is there a wishlist yet?), basically ran by the Chinese government through Tencent.. ok that last one is a semi-joke.

There are many valid and grave complaints people have regarding them, not merely some princess and the pea type things as how you make it out to be.

The website is right there, feel free to check if they have wishlists.

The point I was trying to make is that wishlist, shopping cart, and similar features were missing for the longest time, not at all what you'd consider "extra, non-core features it took Steam two decades to build"

If your adoption strategy requires people constantly checking in to see if you've finally got features they want, then it's a bad strategy.

I like Steam, but IMO this is a bad faith way of arguing in their favored. Let people who don’t like it present the argument instead, if you can’t even wait until you’ve finished presenting the anti-Steam argument before coming up with counterpoints.

It's basically the very definition of bad faith to respond to a comment asking for reasons to believe a thing like this.

Valve charges 30%. I personally believe that this is an evil amount. The fact that the market bears it is, by my estimation, strong evidence of their monopoly position. The same argument holds for any "platform" charging that much more than the the cost of hosting.

Calling your opposition terminally negative is pretty shitty.