New PC Gaming Platforms Attempt to Challenge Steam
The PC gaming market is going through a radical transformation: new platforms emerging with the intent of usurping Valve marketplace's unchallenged position for years. Today, close to 1.86 billion people are PC gamers. For nearly two decades, Steam has been the central place where these computer game enthusiasts congregated in order to find, buy, and play games. With a ginormous library, community-generated content, and first-mover advantage, Steam became the platform of choice. However, recent trends suggest that Steam's dominance may not be as unstoppable as previously thought.
Different new and emerging platforms in PC gaming are starting to erode Steam's grip. Each boasts some new feature or service, set of philosophies, and appeals to a niche set of customers where competition against one another will be quite engaging. Among the first to make significant inroads was GOG.com, but it is far from the only challenger. Let's dive into the landscape of the PC gaming platform war and see how these new entrants will try to disrupt that monopoly.
The Rise of the Great White Hope: Steam's First-Mover Advantage
Steam is Valve Corporation's creation, which landed two decades after in 2003 but very swiftly went on to win the PC gaming market. Success lied in the first mover advantage-it was among the first to offer gamers a unified place where they could not only purchase games but interact with them. Steam allowed downloading games electronically instead of through physical copies, which greatly revolutionized the gaming industry at such a time.
An always-animated aspect of Steam is community engagement. On top of that, the service offered user reviews and discussion boards plus the opportunity to mod games via the Steam Workshop. Mods are game modifications carried out by users; they range from simple cosmetic changes to complete overhauls that make the game into a whole new one. The feature transformed Steam into more than just a marketplace-it became a social platform where the players could relate to each other and the games they loved.
Additionally, Valve's strong promotion sales, such as the now-notorious Steam Summer Sales, were offering discounted prices to many popular games. Players could patiently wait for a period of time before entering and making bulk outlays of games. This strengthened Steam's position of dominance for all PC gaming endeavors.
GOG.com: The First Real Competitor
For many years, Steam had few peers. That was until GOG.com took to the field. Launched in 2008 by CD Projekt, GOG, or Good Old Games, initiated as a service to restore older games and make them compatible with modern personal computers. The selling point here was that all the games on the platform were DRM-free. Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is a kind of control mechanism exercised by the corporate world with respect to how people use software, but for gamers, this has been one of the most debated issues, mainly because it restricts. GOG was to boast its faithful following of customers and clients with its promise of owning their games outright, having an active internet connection validating the owning process.
GOG further extended its difference with Steam through a customer-friendly policy, such as a 30-day money-back guarantee and community-driven game curation. Since Steam relies on algorithms and submissions from developers to manage the catalogue or the listings, GOG seems much more hands-on by making sure that every game offered on the platform has been played and perfected. The platform also caters to indie developers who want an alternative to Steam's sometimes overcrowded marketplace.
GOG, despite being much smaller in catalog and user base, has clearly carved out a niche for itself. It has incrementally nibbled its way to take bites out of Steam's stronghold.
Epic Games Store: The Battle of Exclusives
Arguably, however, the most aggressive competitor of Steam would be the Epic Games Store. Launched in 2018, Epic drew attention by touting better revenue splits to developers than Steam. To put it simply, where Steam takes a general cut of 30% from the revenues generated from game sales, Epic offers developers an 88% share in the revenue while taking only 12%. That was a major draw for game developers, especially the indie studios, to bring their titles on the Epic Games Store rather than on Steam.
Epic has also aggressively pursued exclusive games, hoping to attract users to its platform. Titles like Fortnite, Borderlands 3, and Metro Exodus were temporarily, at best, or permanently exclusive to the Epic Games Store, which meant that players interested in playing those games had to sign up for the platform. All in all, these exclusivity deals were unpopular among most gamers but did help Epic jump-start its user base overnight.
The Epic Games Store further sweetened the deal for users by dishing out free games every week. Players could claim titles like GTA V, Civilization VI, and Subnautica for free, which helped attract millions of users to the platform.
Microsoft and Xbox Game Pass for PC
Another one shaking up the PC gaming world is Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass for PC. This is a streaming service, and for the value of a monthly subscription, it gives you access to all this other huge library of games. Well, whereas in Steam, it is a buying-and-purchasing system where you buy a certain game, Game Pass is like Netflix, in a way. For this relatively little amount of money, you have access to hundreds of games, including many day-one releases from Microsoft-owned studios like Bethesda and Obsidian Entertainment.
This model appeals to gamers who would like to try a wide variety of games without committing to buying them individually. Further, the service often comes with new releases, which puts it ahead of Steam, where players might have had to pay full price for the same games. Also, the integration with Xbox Live automatically makes cross-platform play seamless, with PC and Xbox console players able to play together.
Xbox Game Pass for PC is highly attractive to gamers on a tight budget, and with a library that accommodates several, if not all, AAA titles, this makes great competition between Steam.
Ubisoft Connect, EA Play, and More
Quite a few more publishers have also developed their own platforms, aiming to compete directly with Steam. Any of these publishers' specific platforms offer the ability for users to purchase and play games exclusively through those platforms, such as with EA Play and Ubisoft Connect. Although originally services designed to manage the catalogues of individual publishers, they have matured into subscription services that now directly compete with Xbox Game Pass.
For instance, EA Play puts users at access to an enormous library of EA's most iconic titles-from The Sims to FIFA and Battlefield-and it costs just a few dollars more for the low monthly price. Meanwhile, Ubisoft Connect has allowed players to gain access to products such as Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, and Tom Clancy's The Division.
These publisher-controlled platforms are claiming to aim specifically at dedicated fans of their respective brands. Now, however, this is something that also poses another type of challenge to Steam because gamers can indeed get this exclusive content or early access to new releases in these digital marketplaces.
Humble Store and Itch.io: Indie Game Havens
While Steam and the Epic Games Store are interested in big-budget AAA titles, Humble Store and Itch.io serve as primarily indie-focused game stores. Humble Store is most famously known for Humble Bundles, where people can pay what they want for bundles of games and portions of the proceedings donated to charity. This charitable aspect, coupled with added discounts and bundles, has made Humble Store a favorite among the indie gamers.
Second, Itch.io targets smaller, experimental games, which indie developers love with open arms for its open platform, allowing developers to set their own prices and splits. These two platforms offer much more curated and intimate experiences compared to the drowning catalog on Steam, which has ballooned with time.
Steeper Competition Outpaces Steam
Steam still leads the market, but it's revealing when new players pop up their heads. All these platforms-from the exclusives emphasis that Epic Games Store sets to GOG's commitment of being completely DRM-free to Xbox Game Pass' subscription model-have something that Steam does not.
In response to the rising competition, Steam has evolved over the last few years with some new revenue splits for successful games, better user interface, and addition of features like Steam Remote Play Together that allows friends to play local multiplayer games together online. Yet this does not stop Steam losing the market share increasingly to gamers and developers looking for such an alternative which offers a better deal to them.
Conclusion: A New Era of Competition
For quite some time now, Steam has been running roughshod over the gaming world. But with the emergence of new, game-specific platforms like the Epic Games Store, GOG.com, Xbox Game Pass, and other similar pacesetters, the longtime market leader in digital game distribution is suddenly in danger of being upstaged, if not out-leaped altogether. Be it through better revenue splits, subscription models, or exclusive content, each platform lists its reason for coming and, quite confidently so, offering gamers choices they never even dreamt existed.And as it pushes deeper, competitors are going to keep pushing Steam, adjusting, and innovating to keep abreast of the demands of gamers and developers. The new age of PC gaming is very competitive, and by that, more options it brings for gamers, therefore better services, exciting future for the industry.
