Former Epic Games Dev Says Steam ‘Broke Capitalism’ and Is Almost Impossible To Compete With
Sometimes it really does look like Steam does nothing and keeps winning.
Steam has spent more than two decades becoming the default platform to buy PC games, and one former Epic Games developer thinks Valve has become so dominant that there’s basically no realistic way to compete anymore.
Kiaran Ritchie, formerly a principal animation engineer at Epic Games, recently criticized Steam’s standard 30% revenue cut, arguing that developers aren’t really paying Valve for servers, downloads, cloud saves, Workshop support and everything else Steam provides.
They’re paying for the users.
“Steam takes 30% of gross revenue,” Ritchie wrote, arguing that in reality the fee primarily buys access to Steam’s enormous established userbase.
He says this is the edge they have and thinks the problem has become almost impossible to solve for any competitor.
Steam users have accumulated libraries, friends lists, achievements, Workshop subscriptions, communities and potentially thousands of dollars worth of games over years or even decades. According to Ritchie, you could build an objectively better storefront tomorrow and most dedicated Steam users still wouldn’t care.
“Kudos to Valve,” he wrote. “They played Capitalism so well they broke it.”
Epic launched the Epic Games Store with a significantly cheaper revenue model specifically to challenge Valve. Epic currently takes nothing from the first $1 million a game earns each year through its store, before switching to an 88/12 developer/Epic split.
Yet six years of free games, exclusivity deals and substantially better terms for developers still haven’t convinced PC players to abandon Steam.
Steam’s greatest feature isn’t any individual feature Valve could recreate or a competitor could copy.Instead, it’s the simple fact that everyone is already there. Steam was at the right place at the right time.
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney recently joined the argument himself, claiming Valve has “held gaming back for years,” particularly through Steamworks and Steam’s ecosystem. Even Sweeney, however, admitted earlier this year that Epic’s own launcher remains frustratingly slow and praised Steam’s social experience.
Steam’s dominance has attracted legal scrutiny too. Valve is currently facing active antitrust litigation from developers and consumers alleging that its practices suppress competition and contribute to higher prices. Those accusations remain contested, and no court has simply declared Steam an illegal monopoly.
However, we could also simply think of this from the other perspective. Maybe people keep choosing Steam because Valve spent twenty years building something users genuinely prefer using.
A 30% cut is absolutely worth questioning when one company controls access to such an enormous chunk of the PC audience. But competitors can’t simultaneously complain that Steam’s users refuse to leave while offering them very few reasons to do so. Ritchie ultimately says he doesn’t think the situation is “fixable.”
