You don't need to fix the seats if you're the only bus up the hill.

So much that's so wrong with Steam would suddenly become a priority for Valve if there were a significant challenge out there. This could really improve the whole PC landscape. They're exquisitely improveable-upon.Įpic wants part of that space, and with the phenomenal success of Fortnite, they've got extremely deep pockets to try to achieve it. And I'm saying that in order to make the point that their position at the mountaintop of PC gaming is something they just sort of ambled into. What I'm saying is, Valve is far too haphazard and ramshackle to have tricked and manipulated its way to where it is now. To accuse it of such would credit far too great a level of organisation and discipline within the company. But it's tempting to assume that Valve, for all its idiosyncrasies and issues, isn't a Machiavellian corporation. Steam is by no stretch the promised land of game releases. Valve may make about a dozen inexplicably weird or unhelpful decisions a week, and goodness knows getting onto Steam had been a fraught and miserable process for new developers for many years. And Valve, while deserving of so much criticism, significantly have never - so far as we know - asked that a game be exclusively released on their platform. It just sort of bumbled and stumbled its way there. See, here's the weird thing: Steam, as damaging and dangerous a monopoly as it might have over PC gaming, got to this position a few years back without acquiring competitors, and without demanding developers and publishers bind themselves to inescapable contracts. Except, with yet another exclusivity announcement today regarding Metro: Exodus, they're going about it entirely the wrong way. And while not optimistic, I'd hoped that maybe Epic, with their lorries full of money, might be able to try. Something to scare them into action would be marvellous.

With a significant monopoly on the PC games market, such that present rivals like GOG and Humble barely take a dent out of its audience, Valve is able to take an infuriatingly lackadaisical approach to many aspects of Steam. Steam, unquestionably, needs a sizeable competitor.

Bumbled steam