Competing with Steam isn't as hard as they make it out to be.
"even if someone builds a better launcher"
But it's not just the launcher that's good. It's how they treat their user base. There's a ton of unorthodox ways they deal with support tickets and such, they allow free speech, they don't let big companies shove ads down people's throats, they actually read people's support tickets and help them
STEAM SALES.
Every single person who uses Steam can see the one platform on the internet that still treats people like they're not walking bags of money waiting to be sucked dry. If Valve created a YouTube competitor—my god, everyone would jump to it immediately.
Forget the damn launcher, it's the customer service that keep people on Steam.
Companies don't understand this though. They don't care about a regular person's plight, all they care about are profit margins and what they can monetize next. They would throttle download speeds and sell it back to us in tiers.
Epic was literally giving people free games and no one wants to use it. If that's not a clue that it's not the launcher, I don't know what is.
A former Epic Games dev says Steam has become almost impossible to compete with, even if someone builds a better launcher.
Kiaran Ritchie argues that developers aren’t really paying Valve’s 30% cut for its services, they’re paying for access to Steam’s huge player base.
He believes most Steam users simply have no reason to move to another store, even if it offers a better experience.
“They played capitalism so well they broke it.”
Ritchie says that Steam has become so dominant that developers can’t afford to ignore it, leaving them with no choice but to accept the 30% cut.