People want retail games and if the big 3 can’t cover that market a new and more sustainable subject will fill that space. Maybe it’s time to bring back physical media to PC, a more open system where publishers could make profit selling their retail games similarly to vinyls for music.
No, it’s not beneficial. The difference between consoles and PCs is that PCs have an open infrastructure, which lets you back up your data to any medium or service you want.
For example, if Steam goes out of business and doesn’t release the DRMs, they will easily be cracked. You cannot say the same for consoles.
There are also multiple places to buy from. Steam is pretty dominant, but only because they’re the best option. You can buy from Sony on PlayStation, that’s it.
That’s not really true. Most recent games I’ve bought, I tried to buy off Steam. But they weren’t available anywhere else.
It also hardly even matters as no one on Steam is allowed to price below Steam. So they effectively control pricing power, like Sony; the screws just aren’t so tight yet.
I find it pretty hard to believe that you couldn’t find a major new game on Epic or the Microsoft store. An indie title? Sure, a lot of those are limited to Steam, because the devs prefer it. Older games are even more likely to be on GOG than Steam.
No idea what you’re on about with not being able to price below Steam. That is not a thing.
Yeah, it’s mostly newer indie or “AA” games I’ve been into.
On the pricing: https://blog.subimpact.net/2026/06/valve-allegedly-threatened-to-delist.html?m=1
But in a nutshell, the allegations is that Steam threatens to delist games if they’re priced lower than Steam on other storefronts, similar to what Walmart or Amazon are accused of doing.
That’s not true at all.
if a popular console platform became a ‘free for all’, i don’t think its ‘protections’ would last very long under what would become a globally crowdsourced endeavour.
You can’t crack a required server-side download