3 minBusiness
Former Epic Games engineer says no competitor will ever unseat Steam
Former Epic Games engineer Kiaran Ritchie argues that Valve's Steam platform is entrenched because users prefer its library, reliability and sales over rival stores, despite a 30% revenue cut that critics say drains the PC games industry.
Former Epic Games engineer Kiaran Ritchie has argued that no rival storefront will ever displace Valve's Steam, even one that is technically superior. In a lengthy post on Twitter, Ritchie laid out a series of criticisms of the dominant PC games marketplace, focusing on the platform's 30% cut of gross game sales and the loyalty of its users. The post followed an earlier message in which he had written about the 30% share that Valve takes off the top of game sales.
Ritchie wrote that even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric a person cares about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users, who would in fact find it to be a problem and a threat to their investment. He also said that competition in the space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users but is actively denigrated. The consequence, in his view, is that 30% of all gross revenue is siphoned out of the PC games industry into what he described as a black hole.
The criticism comes as Epic Games has renewed its effort to challenge Steam. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney recently bragged on Twitter about vibe coding a new version of the Epic Games Store that launches faster than Steam. Ritchie acknowledged that launching quickly and letting users reach their libraries without waiting minutes is an improvement, but said he did not believe it would make much of a difference.
Ritchie also described the technical side of Steam as far from a barrier. He called the Steam client and infrastructure somewhere between « not that hard » and « trivial », describing it as a download service attached to a payment processor with a smattering of services on the side. Cloud providers now handle much of the infrastructure, he said, so building a comparable service is not the obstacle. Even so, he argued that a better client would struggle, because Steam users love having their whole library in one place. He pointed to features that keep them there: the platform is dependable, it has sales, trading cards and achievements.
The post adds to Epic's long fight over the share of revenue that digital marketplaces take. Epic has pushed back against Valve on this question, but it has also taken on Apple and Google in its effort to get Fortnite onto mobile devices. Epic had to pay Apple $6 million in that dispute, while it won its case against Google. With Valve, however, the difficulty appears to be different. Ritchie's argument points to a market in which most PC gamers already prefer Steam, and in which dozens of other game stores exist on PC yet many users remain on Valve's platform. Ritchie suggested that this pattern is unlikely to change, regardless of what Epic does next.
Source: ign.com
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