> Many of these alternatives failed because they were forced onto users who had already paid over $60 for a game

I really doubt that hurt their adoption. Yes, it pissed people off, but that doesn't mean it suppressed adoption. Being slow and clunky, sure, but you're probably not going to get anywhere without some high value exclusives.

Isn’t that exactly what Steam did with the Orange Box? They just did it in the 2000s, years before anyone else.

There was no competitor like Steam at the time.

Yes, that's the effect a monopoly has on the market.

Not really. When Steam was the only digital distribution marketplace in existence, it didn't have to be better than any other digital distribution marketplace to convince users to switch to it, by virtue of being first. The followers who look at Steam's profits and want to capture that for themselves have to do so. It just happens that it seems every marketplace since has attempted to compete for developers (particularly in the vein of trying to achieve exclusive games) and generally ignored competition for users except as a byproduct of developer competition.

And the result is that users overwhelmingly prefer to use Steam, with alternatives largely relegated to at best grudging acceptance for those games that require alternative launchers. Since companies are reluctant to post numbers, it's hard to tell what the exact situation other than "Steam is well over 50% of the market", but the next largest is probably GoG, especially if you exclude self-publishing from statistics (if you include it, the popularity of Fortnite might push Epic Game Store into second place). And note that GoG is pretty much the only store that offers users a specific value proposition to use them over Steam: GoG is DRM-free (better publisher/distributor split is a value proposition for developers, not users).

You're replying to a chain about how valve got steam started, are you suggesting that the market was existing in a state of monopoly prior to their actual existence of the product you say held that monopoly?

No, of course not. I should have been more accurate by saying that they were able to do this because there wasn't a monopoly at the time.

That only explains a couple of the stores but not all of them.

Xbox and Epic don't fall in that category. I don't believe EA does either, but not 100% sure.

To be clear here. I am referring to the being forced after buying a game. None of these, to my knowledge, you were forced to use after buying the game on Steam. Unlike Ubisoft.

XBox and Epic absolutely do fall in that category. People, myself included, detest using either of those stores, because of their poor implementations. They're slow and unwieldy. The Xbox store on PC is actually so bad. I bought Forza as a chill on the couch and relax kind of game and it is one of the most regrettable purchasing experiences I've ever had. The Epic store is just outright unpleasant software.

The Epic store will only show me prices in Rubles. Never tried to debug it -- who needs it, anyway? -- but always thought that was somewhere between bizarre and hilarious. (US computer, US IP address, no VPN, en-us locale.)

The Epic store might not've been slow, but it was missing so much. It was launched with almost no features, not even reviews. They also didn't have any communities/forums/groups.