RogueSix wrote on Mar 14, 2024, 22:15:
What does an earlier launch have to do with the status of the competition?
The original (intentionally misleading) assertion: " ... or if you basically had a monopoly on online sales for decades until Epic decided to challenge you. "
The launches of the competition show that Valve had plenty of competition before Epic started their store. The fact that none of them supplanted Steam's position as market leader doesn't mean that the competition didn't exist. The revenue of the rival platform is completely irrelevant, since the operation and marketing of those platforms are funded by their owners' other very revenue streams. EA's 2011 revenue was 3.8 billion, much more than Valve as a whole at the time. EA didn't release Origin as their store and then just let it run as a totally separate and unfunded business entity.
Second misleading assertion: Monopoly, implying that Valve threw its weight around like Microsoft to maintain its position.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/ shows only releases starting 2006, but ok, let's make 2003 the start of Steam, 2005 the first 3rd party titles, and then it took until around 2009-2011 for Steam to really became somewhere that 3rd party titles really needed to be on in order to sell (leading to Greenlight being set up in 2012 for titles that didn't have big publishers behind them, which would automatically get them on Steam).
Third misleading wording: Decades, word choice invoking something like JP Morgan type monoliths and Epic coming around finally to challenge the ancient institution. Epic is older than Valve, Steam hasn't been dominant for decades, and Epic is not some David figure out to slay Goliath. They're just another Goliath.