By Nelson Schneider - 11/09/25 at 02:11 PM CT
Just when you think the corporate overlords that are actively ruining the economy on a global scale can’t get any more cringy or stupid, they always manage to find a way to lower the bar even further. In a recent study performed by the “who the heck are they” digital games sales consulting firm, Rokky, 72% of survey respondents said that they “perceive Steam to be a monopoly” in PC game sales. What’s interesting is that 75% of the people questioned in this survey were C-Suite Executive Sh!theads, so using some incredibly suspect “math,” it “seems” that only 3% of these plutocrats actually understand what a monopoly is, with the remaining 97% seeming to believe that a monopoly is “anything that prevents ME from having 100% of the business in a given sector.”
Based on their long-running stupidity, it seems that C-Suiters don’t know what a monopoly is when looking at it from either side. First, they’ve spent decades proclaiming that none of the wireless telecom or broadband Internet service providers are monopolies because “satellite and dial-up were always competing options,” when in fact neither of those are viable competition to high-speed cellular service like 4G and 5G, and even less capable competition against fiber broadband, coaxial cable, or even top-tier DSL. Thus regions with exactly ONE cell company or ISP could be fleeced by their legislated monopolies who had no reason to offer better service than the bare minimum. Now, the same people who said that having ONE option for service in other fields wasn’t monopolistic are claiming that Steam is a monopoly in PC gaming, even though it is available on all open platforms and has several other active players in its sector that have actual name recognition, like GOG and Epic Games.
The real issue that the results of this survey illustrate is the fact that corporate suits don’t seem to care about the actual principles of Capitalism anymore, even while proclaiming that they love the system. The primary basis of Capitalism is Free Markets, and in the case of Valve’s operation of Steam, they don’t have a “monopoly,” but are instead the “market leader.” Steam does have the biggest share of PC gaming, but it’s not because they’re the only choice: It’s because they’re usually the BEST choice. Any C-Suite Executive Sh!thead could easily start their own PC game distribution service, but it would have to offer something to the PC gamers who make up the customer base – NOT shareholders, NOT private equity, and NOT the C-Suiters themselves – in order to erode market share from Steam.
Valve, as a company, is somewhat infamous for “doing nothing, and winning,” and that has typically been their response to competition in the digital distribution space for PC games. Even the MJ Crew has noticed over the past decade that Valve’s enthusiastic promotions of their sales with gimmicks, mini-games, and 3-hour Flash Sales have degraded to the point where Steam Sales no longer feel like events to look forward to, but rather just another turn of the hourglass. And yet, none of their competitors – or any wannabe new players in the sector – has made a move to do anything better. Epic gives away (terrible) games every week. GOG continuously flogs the idea of “owning” vs. “licensing” digital games (even while getting into bed with Amazon). And yet Steam continues to dominate simply by doing nothing. Steam isn’t intrusive, it’s just a client that gets out of the way. It offers a fully mature set of online and community features that are almost entirely user-driven. Indeed, the two biggest moves Valve has made lately to prove that it is, in fact, NOT doing nothing, have been its massive contributions to the FOSS community with its SteamOS Linux distribution and Proton variant of WINE alongside continuing efforts to automate and improve the discoverability of good games from new/small developers that would otherwise be buried and forgotten by the constant influx of garbage that scammers, skimmers, and asset-flipping profiteers dump onto Steam every single day.
Valve’s Big Boss Gabe Newell (all hail Lord GabeN!) said long, long ago that piracy wasn’t a price problem or a DRM problem, but a service problem. Steam has been the epitome of that statement since its inception. Valve wins by “doing nothing” because in “doing nothing” they aren’t actively working against their own users. That’s a lesson that none of the big corporate executives seems willing to contemplate, let alone actually learn from.
