It's a chicken and an egg problem. Developers won't come until you have marketshare, and users won't come until you have games. Paying for exclusives is a way to bootstrap a chicken without an egg.

I understand that side of it but valve goes above and beyond so much that even if Epic or Origin had huge user counts I seriously doubt they would put the effort in to building features like "remote play together" which streams a game to other people and streams their controllers back to you so you can all play the same local coop game. Or Proton which allows playing games on linux.

Valve even has linux kernel devs around who fix bugs in drivers for gaming hardware.

Steam may have been a monopoly but it was a pretty good one for the end user.

Worked real well for TV. Lots of people went back to piracy because you have to be on so many platforms.

I guess it's not a fair comparison though, since you can't really subscribe to steam. So I regret saying anything.

Has anyone tried that model? "Pay us $30/mo and play whatever you want."

EA has this with Origin Access (2 tiers, $5m/$30y and $15m/$100y), alongside Ubisoft with UPlay+ ($15m). And I guess platforms like Stadia would fall under this category.

Of course, the games are specific to the publisher or the partnerships the platform has.

See also Xbox Game Pass for PC (10+ games, Windows 10), and VivePort Infinity (for VR, 600+ games).

Playstation Now for PS4/PC (800+ games, PS4 / Windows)