I'm not sure on that:

1) Lots of people think they are partly complicit in all the skins trading/gambling that children do, which is basically skirting gambling laws. This has culminated in a current lawsuit in New York which claims they broke gambling laws.

2) They also currently have a large antitrust lawsuit going on, due to them requiring Most Favored Nation pricing while setting a 30% commission fee vs 12% on competitor platforms, which exploits market position and artificially raises game prices to Steam's benefit.

1) This is a legit point although i don't see Valve as a big problem in that area. They invented lootboxes but refused to be as bad as others who followed them. Today with valve these things are restricted purely to cosmetics.

2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.

Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.

The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.

The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.

Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity. Sure they offer matchmaking - but all your players have to buy your game on steam otherwise other players can't play with their friends.

Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).

They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.

> The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.

Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing. The actual written rule, from the Steamworks documentation, says: "It is important that you don't give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers." It even allows discounts at different times on other stores, as long as Steam gets a comparable offer within a reasonable period. There is no written policy preventing a developer from selling a separate, non-Steam-key version of their game cheaper elsewhere. The claim that Valve informally enforces broader price parity beyond Steam Keys is the unproven allegation at the center of the lawsuit.

And the broader claim, that lower commissions would lead to cheaper games for consumers, has already been tested and disproven. Epic exclusives like Borderlands 3, Control, Metro Exodus, Phoenix Point, and The Division 2 launched with no Steam version at all, complete pricing freedom, and a 12% commission. They were all priced at full retail. The hypothetical £35 game you describe has been possible for almost a decade. Nobody has produced it because developers and publishers set prices, and they choose to maximize their own margin regardless of what the platform takes.

> We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends.

Steamworks matchmaking requires a Steam account and Steam does not force developers to use Steamworks. This is how every platform-specific networking layer works: Xbox Live requires an Xbox account, PlayStation Network requires a PSN account. They offer a free matchmaking service if you want other platforms use other platforms. But i guess it is because of:

> Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront.

Yeah this sounds a lot like:"How dare they deliver a better service in the pursuit of user retention."

> taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026

This lists surface features and ignores the infrastructure: global CDN serving petabytes of downloads, payment processing across dozens of regional payment methods, fraud prevention, Workshop mod hosting, cloud saves, anti-cheat, regional pricing tooling, Proton development, Steam Deck compatibility, discovery algorithms. But the real test is simpler: developers are not forced to use Steam. If the value were as thin as claimed, the lower-priced competitors would be winning. They are not.

> should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value

"Very little value"? It's clear that you've never developed a game before. Don't speak so confidently out of complete and total ignorance - it leads to making utterly insane and totally factually wrong statements like this one.

State where the value is then, without just stating features that cause lock-in.

You can't blindly just call me an idiot and say there's loads of value without stating what it is (I mean you technically can, but it's not a brilliant way of getting your point across).

> without just stating features that cause lock-in

That's a false dichotomy. Features that cause vendor lock-in can still be incredibly valuable.

> You can't blindly just call me an idiot

Sorry, that was a little harsh. I wasn't meaning to call you an idiot - I'm sure you have domains of expertise that you're highly proficient in. But you clearly have little (if any) experience with gamedev, and my point is that you should be far less confident when speaking about it.

For instance, you said something just factually wrong:

> The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.

...which was debunked by another comment:

> Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing.

As for features that are actually useful to devs and users:

Local currencies, regional pricing/payment methods, gift cards, Steam Wallet, game gifting, product keys, wallet/credit system (Steam wallet), bundles, DLC, complex storefront (topics/labels, discovery queue, wishlist, sale notifications), user reviews, game refunds, CDN, a really good download/update system, player metrics, shader pre-caching, shared runtime management, cloud saves, game management across multiple drives, LAN downloads/updates, beta/release/build management, DRM and anticheat, game collections, developer updates, forums, Big Picture/Steam Deck UI, Proton, Steam Input, a complex social system (friends, text chat, voice chat, add codes, profiles), social integration with games, account 2FA, and many, many, many more things. (go and ask a LLM and I'm sure it'll be more than happy to give you a far longer list :)

These are all things that developers and players benefit from. The value added is immense and blindingly obvious even to people who only play games, let alone to developers who have some idea of how difficult it is to actually implement all of the above.

30% was set when they were handpicking every title, a home internet line today was a $10,000+ a month DC connection, and they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%.

The fact they whittled away the value they provided time and time again until they became a market of slop and had the audacity to keep a 30% cut is insane.

It's funny that gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is. It turns out trying to deliver value in a market has tough as gaming is not easy, and you will make tons of mistakes... at least compared to extracting nearly every dollar you can and leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship.

And I guess make $1,100 PS4s as a side hustle.

Are you a bot? The value they provide has only increased over time. Do you even know what proton is? They rebooutionized Linux gaming and made it open source. Steam input is a godsend, both for developers and players, and I speak as someone who's both. The steam workshop and community market make it easier than ever to add mod support to your games (and to mod your games, from a player's perspective. Just compare modding The Binding of Isaac before vs after the Repentance DLC), and to have marketplace for in-game items, respectively. That's without mentioning the sheer reach that the steam store gives your games.

They've always been the most pro-consumer company in all of gaming. They're still the only company who still gives full, first-class modding and community server support for their multiplayer games. Not a SINGLE other company does that, and as a player, I highly appreciate that. It's the only thing that keeps me from getting too mad about the way Valve has been treating TF2 in the last decade. Other companies (including Epic!) just let their games become lost media.

They're the biggest for a reason. Players choose them, and developers choose them. I have tons of free games on Epic. I even bought some games on there. But I just never play them. Logging in is a hassle, the app is slow, and it's just not as smooth, especially on Linux. Epic never gave a fuck about me. Valve helped me at times I thought no company possibly would. I managed to refund a game weeks after the deadline, because a Valve employee noticed I hadn't actually played the game until nearly a month after purchase, and they let me get my money back. Would Epic do that? I doubt it.

The PlayStation comment is just so uneducated and ignorant it's not even funny. I won't even take the time to argue with that

I'm not reading all that when you start with insulting me, get some sense kid.

Even Valve has its sins with questionable monetization, alleged anti-competitive practices, and of course DRM, it's just, for their size it's challenging to find companies that aren't much worse for these bullet points.

Still, a rare exception of a company that seems worth the openness of one's mind. It's pretty shameful that this alone is worthy of praise, even forgetting the things Valve does that are just generally positive.

Questionable monetization meaning essentially turning a blind eye to and profiting from the gambling industry that skirts regulations and targets kids that is enabled by the market for rare skins in their games (as well as the inherently gambling-like means that those skins are sold in the first place).

I'm not even exaggerating when I say that feels utterly benign these days. Merely just choosing to not police it is certainly a choice, but it's still a far cry from the more active participation in basically exploiting people that is pretty much normalized these days with stuff like sports betting and prediction markets.

I don't say this feeling that it is good, just that it is where it feels like we are at right now.

Valve is a company built on getting children addicted to gambling.

_built on_? not built on the games they developed or the platform they built?

Both!

Valve had to be dragged kicking and screaming by Australia just to provide the basic fundamental right of refunds.

Large corporations are not your friend. They are the enemy; they vary only in type and depth of diabolicalness.

I do always think it's interesting that the "bad" guys like EA had, for a long time, much friendlier store terms (refunds) than Valve did.

I also never thought that it was very nice of Valve to historically have security practices that are so bad that a group of security experts wrote them a letter begging for better security practices.

Yeah they’re not too shabby