It's funny because if Bethesda, EA, Ubisoft and Epic joined forces to make one platform they could put a dent in the steam monopoly.
But since they're bunch of shittiy toxic managers with mentality of screwing everyone around for their own benefit, it's never going to happen. They will always fail and crawl back to Gabe
For a short period, yes probably. But Bethesda is a failing studio and so is Ubisoft. EA has popular sports games but I’d guess that’s a very small portion of PC sales considering those games do poorly on the platform compared to consoles. Epic does have loads of money but not enough to float the other companies.
In my view, Microsoft and their GamePass stuff is the only real competitor that will ever take a small dent out of steams sales, mostly because of the Call of Duty titles being on there now. But in order to take 0.05% or whatever of their sales they had to: own the OS for almost every computer running steam, buy dozens of game studios, compete (and lose) in the physical console market over decades, and they had to buy not one but two of the largest studios out there. To the point where they own a significant portion of the iOS App Store that is orders of magnitude more money than PC games and still they cannot compete with steam on their own operating system.
If that doesn’t spell out how unstoppable Steam is, I don’t know what will. The thing that might actually hurt Steam is if those publishers were all GamePass exclusives. Even then, Steam would be just fine I think. Crazy.
Non profits can still be super corrupt, especially in the US as they don't have to disclose any money flow so a huge percent of the time it goes to the board of directors.
I’m more optimistic about that. I don’t see why the storefront or their general philosophy would change. At least not quickly. What might change is how they treat their IP. Ask yourself if you’d be okay with another half life game being just a 7/10 game. Because I think that’s what would happen.
That’s kind of why I said ask yourself. Because I think some of their titles Id rather see live on at a 7/10 level but others I don’t think need it. Like I could handle a TF3 at that level or maybe even a portal game. But half life would kind of hurt to see it not be a 10/10 maximum effort game. I wish they’d finish the story while Gabe is still at the company.