“Valve broke capitalism”: Ex-Epic Games engineer blamed players for Steam’s dominance — because of them, a competitor to the service has still not emerged

The specialist believes that because of players, competing with Steam is extremely difficult.

Steam is criticized not only by Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney. Recently, a former Epic engineer shared his thoughts on the Valve service on social media. He expressed dissatisfaction with the store’s high commission and shared his opinion regarding the reasons for the Valve service’s dominant position.

Kiaran Ritchie finds it “very sad” to see Valve currently “milking a 30% tax out of the industry”. In the specialist’s opinion, making an alternative to Steam is easy — it could be “vibecoded in a week”. The problem lies elsewhere — in the players.

Players, Kiaran explains, are very used to Steam — now they want to expand their library specifically on this service:

User gk99 mocked this opinion: “Shocking news: the best way to retain consumers is... to provide them with a quality service.” Other participants in the discussion pointed out that Valve is a private company and can afford to act as it sees fit — it faces no pressure from investors who constantly demand massive revenue growth and do not force it to “ruin the service” with their ideas.

Kiaran believes that Valve “played capitalism so well that it broke it”. Now, even if a quality alternative to Steam appears on the market, attracting players will be very difficult. They have already formed the habit of buying games on Steam to continue building their digital collection. In addition, they already have friends on this service with whom they play.