Because they are not publicly traded, i hope it stays that way

Valve and Steam have pulled their fair share of shady anti-consumer moves, like the time they violated Aussie and EU consumer protection laws with their refund policy (fucking EA Origin had refunds years before Steam); there have also been allegations of it being a toxic workplace with a trans former employee claiming she was referred to as “it” by her manager.

It also helps that they are essentially a monopoly.

I know that there are technically other game launchers, but that’s always been how monopolies work. They allow a few token “competitors” that they completely control to exist.

Other than steam the only other gamelaunchers/storefronts for pc are:

• EA (Only has EA games in it, which are mostly also on steam)

• Ubisoft (Only has Ubisoft games, also mostly all on steam)

• Epic Games (the only true competitor to steam, and everyone hates them because they aren’t steam)

• GOG (storefront only, I’m pretty sure they literally give you steam keys)

Only ONE of them is a true competitor to steam, Epic Games, and they don’t have anywhere close to the usage steam does. The others are exclusive storefronts (that also have their games sold on steam) or storefronts that sell steam keys.

Steam is so deeply ingrained into the PC gaming space that I’m not sure most gamers understand how devastating it would be to get banned from steam or to have steam go under as a company. Their terms of service in relation to your “ownership” of games are a nightmare, if you get banned from steam your entire library disappears. Poof. Gone. Unrecoverable.

If there were actual alternatives to steam andiwere able to untie my library from them then I would do so in a heartbeat, but as it is my entire games library is trapped in steam and there isn’t really anyway to retrieve it without having multiple terabytes of storage space ready to just hold all of those games at the same time.