Games

Oh come on, comparing Steam to telecoms is a bit of a leap. Nobody needs access to video games on a day-to-day basis. Video games are a luxury item at the end of the day.

Their breaking up also assumes that hosting video games for downloads is a thing only Steam can do. Steam hosting the game files and Steam as a service for the customer have little to no relation to each other. Steam, or anyone else for that matter, could just as easily use AWS. Breaking up Steam into many, smaller Steams might lead to lower prices, or devs will choose one, that one will become the dominant one, and we're back to square one.

The best way to drive prices down is competition. It's economics 101. Do not blame Steam for being successful, blame their competition (Epic in this case) for being inept. Epic was the VC baby everybody was banking on going toe-to-toe with Steam, but they couldn't even get basic shit like a cart or a wishlist working for far too long.

Steam's 30% cut is a different problem altogether. Yeah, it's probably excessive, and would ideally be tiered by sales. However, all the games (that I have seen) that released on Epic first, with their paid exclusivity, eventually came out on Steam. So what does that tell us about how impactful that 30% cut is. Steam's pre-existing userbase is a factor. Userbase they have, and maintain, due to their wide array of features. And, all those features Steam provides aren't free to maintain. They host the game on their own servers, they host all the user generated content on their servers, Steamworks matchmaking is ran by Steam. Game devs aren't just getting their game sold through Steam, Steam does much much more than that.

Sorry, they didn't gobble up existing infrastructure. Comparing them to telcos is just a bad argument.

Question from the back?
How would Valve be broken up?
Would it be game developer and store front separated?
How would that aid or assist in the purchasers?

That's most likely just cause they enjoy the auto downloader, patch tools and anticheat software that they can bundle in.

GOG has installers for AAA games like Witcher and Baldurs Gate 3 because the developers were better about giving the option. Heck lots of AAA games on epic. We don't complain about PlayStation and Nintendo exclusives. Blame the developers for liking the easy features to only be on Steam. Ask them to change not Valve.

Translation: agree with me or you are wrong.

Brother I already buy things on GoG lol.

Steam is great and all but ownership is far more important to me personally

No, it is where it is because Valve decided it wanted to invest in it outside of it being a launcher/updater for Valve games.

And it's not really the first. The first was probably Battle.net by Blizzard, which initially was a way to connect players (chat and join games) back in the mid-90s. It wasn't a game sales/distribution service for many years, but it got there w/ the release of the dedicated desktop app in 2013 and had some of the core features that makes Steam special (chat and match making). In fact, I had the desktop app before I had a Steam account, which I created in ~2013 when Steam came to Linux (I switched to Linux in ~2009, and had played games on Windows for years before that). Blizzard was never interested in becoming a game distribution network, so Battle.net remained largely exclusive to Blizzard titles.

I wouldn't have bothered w/ Steam if it didn't provide value. I was fine managing games individually, and I bought many games from Humble Bundle and directly from devs for years before Steam became a thing. I only started preferring Steam when it provided features I couldn't get elsewhere. These days, it provides so much value since I'm a Linux user, that I honestly don't consider alternatives, because everything else is painful. Heroic launcher closes that gap substantially, so I'm actually considering buying more from GOG (outside of a handful of old games I can't find elsewhere).

If another launcher provided better value vs Steam, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I use both Steam and Heroic, and I still prefer Steam because it has great features like controller mapping. But if, say, GOG supported the features I care about on the platform I use, I'd probably switch to GOG because I also care about DRM-free games. But they don't, so I largely stick to Steam.

If tomorrow someone made a better Steam, how many years would you have to wait to be reasonably secure that it's not fueled by venture capital and serving as a loss leader foot-in-the-door scheme? It's not impossible that Steam itself would enshittify and open an IPO, but the fact that the option's been on the table for decades and Valve hasn't taken it is better evidence than any other platform could muster. Valve has proven that it's profitable and that it doesn't need to care about YoY growth. Let's overestimate their operations costs (CDN, R&D, employee salaries, hardware production, licensing, etc etc) at 5 billion a year. If they made ten billion in revenue last year and only make seven billion this year, Valve is fine. Think about that. Think about what a sixty percent drop in profits would do to literally any shareholder-backed company. It'd be apocalyptic.

That's the main reason I'll use Steam happily but never install another storefront on my PC. I'll buy games on GOG or Itch as DRM-free installers, and store the installers locally, and I'll buy and play games that distribute without a storefront launcher, but the only "storefront platform" anyone's gonna get me to install in the next decade is Steam. If "better Steam" happens, it needs to demonstrate immunity to being bought out by Microsoft/Elon Musk for eighty morbillion dollars. And that can't be demonstrated in a day.

That's without any mention of actual "features" like reviews or remote play or proton or steam input or anything that actually makes Steam as a program good/bad. It's all about the company's refusal to go shareholder-driven. If Gabe sells Valve or his successors do, I'm off the ship and scraping the DRM off of my library. What I won't do if that happens is go to someone else's shareholder-value-generating storefront.

Gabe Newell is a man who, for the past decade at least, has had a big red button on his desk. This button, if pressed, will deposit eleven or twelve figures directly into his wallet to distribute however he likes, at the cost of letting some company gain control of how Valve operates. Make all his employees multimillionaires! Race Musk and Bezos for biggest number! Buy a small country! Whatever! Gabe Newell has not pressed this button, and has signaled that after his retirement or death that no successor to the company is going to be allowed to press it either. If Newell's managed not to press it for this long, I'll "trust" him as far as it goes. His successor hasn't earned that trust yet, so is only coasting on "trusting Newell to pick the right guy" which isn't guaranteed - a lot of guys would sacrifice a lot to press that button.