[vlade11115]

> “Anybody who wants to put Valve out of business could do so, but nobody cares,” argues Michael Pachter, a gaming industry analyst at Wedbush Securities.

This is untrue; many tried. Almost every major publisher has its own launcher. The problem with them all is they absolutely suck. Even Epic Games Store, the biggest competitor with the most money poured into it, is ridiculously bad in almost every way. Aside from the lack of network effect, it just misses most of the QOL features, is slow, ugly, and very unpleasant to use. Almost universal agreement in the PC gaming community is that EGS is a bootloader for free games that it throws at the user. Every time I use EGS, I am constantly amazed by how bad it is, despite probably tens of millions of investments.

The second point that the article completely misinterprets is Microsoft's role. Microsoft (Xbox specifically) is hands down the closest company to beating Steam in its own game. PC game pass provides a constant stream of very good games available on day one for dirt cheap. The work that Microsoft is doing on optimizing Windows for games in general and for handheld consoles in particular is very promising (see Xbox Ally X). This is the threat that Valve faces. Not just a better store, but the absence of a store and "buying games" in general. For example, I intended to buy The Outer Worlds 2 on launch. Now that I know it will be available day one on Game Pass, there is almost zero chance that I will buy it on Steam or anywhere else.

[msgodel]

GOG has the only serous competitor to Steam IMO. It's the only big store that's well behaved enough for people to actually want to use it.

[wqaatwt]

Isn’t it very niche? What’s their market share?

[Yeul]

GOG is sabotaging themselves with their anti DRM policy.

The gaming industry will ALWAYS use DRM.

This will keep GOG a niche player.

[Maskawanian]

Their anti-DRM stance is arguably their only compelling feature as opposed to just buying steam.

I remember the old game launcher that was called Desura?, which a lot of those third-party keys sites would sell keys for, and it's no longer around. So one of the main concerns with these online platforms is them disappearing and losing all your stuff.

Quite frankly, I am happy that GOG exists for this niche. It would be less "sabotaging" if consumers would actually vote in their own interests. However, this has been shown time and time again to never happen, sadly.

[klik99]

I suspect by "anybody" they meant anyone outside of the "relatively small but healthy sector", and therefore competitors such as Epic or GOG wouldn't count. Outside analysts think of games as a subset of tech and that big tech companies would merely need to turn the eye of sauren towards games and they could conquer the market.

But outside analysts are wrong and completely misunderstand the games industry, see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanevansvp_as-vp-of-prime-g...