Despite facing increased competition in the space, not least from the Epic Games Store, Valve’s platform is synonymous with PC gaming. The service is estimated to have made $10.8 billion in revenue during 2024, a new record for the Half-Life giant. Since it entered the PC distribution space back in 2018, the rival Epic Games Store has been making headway – and $1.09 billion last year – but Steam is still undeniably dominant within the space.
Valve earns a large part of its money from taking a 20-30% cut of sales revenue from developers and publishers. Despite other storefronts opening with lower overheads, Steam has stuck with taking this slice of sales revenue, and in doing so, it has been argued that Valve is unfairly taking a decent chunk of the profits of developers and publishers.
This might change, depending on how an ongoing class-action lawsuit initiated by Wolfire Games goes, but for the time being, Valve is making money hand over fist selling games on Steam. The platform boasts over 132 million users, so it’s perfectly reasonable that developers and publishers feel they have to use Steam – and give away a slice of their revenue – in order to reach the largest audience possible.
People talk about the “features” epic is missing but honestly the vast majority of those features are kinda pointless?
I don’t like epic’s store because the layout is annoying and it likes to send me ads in the bottom right corner. It’s not that complicated.
I mean there’s still no user review system lol.
That is storefront 101 and they still don’t have it.
Congratulations for not using the other systems they have I guess?
Many of steams users engage at least a little with a lot of what steam offers.
Hell steam has integrated VR support, steam link for remote play, and fantastic 2FA account protection.
Epic is way behind
Storefront 101 supposedly yet it took steam almost a decade to implement and is largely useless due to being filled with jokes and sourced from people who don’t actually understand how to review something.