Steam’s position in PC gaming is being framed less as a feature race and more as a habit that competitors may struggle to break. Kiaran Ritchie, a former Epic Games engineer, has argued that no alternative storefront is likely to unseat Valve’s platform simply by being technically better, faster or cheaper to operate.
The argument comes amid Epic Games’ long-running push against the fees charged by major digital marketplaces. Ritchie’s criticism is broad: he objects to Steam’s influence over PC game sales and to the 30% cut he says is taken from gross revenue. But his assessment is also notably pessimistic for any would-be challenger, including Epic’s own store. In his view, Steam’s users are invested in the ecosystem already and can perceive another launcher or store as a threat to that investment rather than a welcome alternative.
“Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users,” Ritchie wrote, arguing that users could see a competing store as a problem for their existing libraries.
The real contest is not just download speed
Epic has recently highlighted work on a revised Epic Games Store client, with CEO Tim Sweeney saying a newly built version launches faster than Steam. Faster startup and quicker access to a purchased library are meaningful quality-of-life improvements. Nobody enjoys waiting for a launcher merely to open the games they already own.
Yet Ritchie’s central point is that a faster client is not necessarily a reason for players to change where they buy games. A storefront is more than its startup time. For a player, it can be a library of past purchases, an established account, a place to find sales, and a familiar set of social or progress-related features. Moving future purchases elsewhere can mean spreading that history over another application, another account and another set of routines.
That is why the debate cannot be reduced to whether a rival is capable of making a more responsive launcher. Ritchie characterized the basic client and infrastructure challenge as relatively straightforward in an era where cloud providers can supply much of the underlying computing infrastructure. His conclusion, however, is that technical feasibility and market displacement are very different things.
A digital storefront is the shop where a game is purchased, while a client is the software used to access the account, download titles and use associated services. Improving the client may solve frustrations with the software itself. It does not automatically persuade someone to rebuild a purchase history somewhere else.
Why a consolidated library has such weight
Ritchie pointed to the practical benefits players already associate with Steam: a single library, dependable access, sales, cards and achievements. None of those elements alone explains a platform’s hold on PC gaming. Together, they create a familiar destination where a buyer expects previous purchases and new releases to coexist.
Related coverage includes Former Epic Engineer Says Steam's PC Gaming Lead Is Too Entrenched to Dislodge.
This is often described as library lock-in, although “lock-in” should not be mistaken for a claim that users cannot install another store or buy games elsewhere. PC players can and do use multiple storefronts. The issue is friction: every additional store can require another login, another launcher, another friends list, another library tab and another decision about where to make a purchase.
For consumers, centralization can be a genuine convenience. A large existing library reduces the number of places they need to check. For publishers and competing storefronts, the same convenience can make it difficult to gain meaningful ground. A potential customer may agree that a competitor has a better policy, a smaller fee, or a faster app, yet still choose the place where their games are already collected.
Ritchie’s view is that Steam users do not merely tolerate this arrangement. He contends that many actively dismiss the case for competition, even when an alternative could be better by a chosen measure. Whether that description applies to every Steam customer is impossible to establish from a social-media post, but it identifies the commercial challenge: a rival has to offer an incentive strong enough to overcome convenience and attachment, not simply equal Steam feature-for-feature.
What the 30% argument is really about
The fee at the heart of Ritchie’s critique is commonly called a platform cut: the share of a sale retained by the marketplace that processes the transaction and provides distribution-related services. Ritchie says Steam takes 30% from gross game revenue, and he argues that this removes money from the wider PC games industry.
Gross revenue means the money generated by sales before deductions such as storefront fees. In this dispute, the important question is not only whether a fee exists, but how market power affects the ability of developers and publishers to choose an alternative. If a storefront is where the audience overwhelmingly expects to shop, a company may feel it has limited room to avoid that storefront’s terms.
That does not mean every customer sees the fee as their immediate concern. Players generally compare price, convenience, trust and where friends or libraries already are. A developer or publisher, meanwhile, may focus on how much of each sale reaches the people making and funding the game. Those perspectives can diverge. A platform can be highly convenient for players while still drawing criticism from industry participants over its commercial terms.
Ritchie’s frustration is therefore directed at both the fee and the market behavior around it. He argues that if users broadly reject alternatives, even an objectively improved rival may fail to change the balance of power. His language is deliberately stark, calling the result a situation in which 30% of gross revenue is pulled out of the PC games industry.
Epic’s broader fight with marketplace gatekeepers
Epic’s disagreement with Valve fits into a larger campaign against the cuts charged by digital storefronts. The company has also challenged Apple and Google in connection with getting Fortnite onto mobile devices. The supplied account describes a mixed outcome: Epic had to pay Apple $6 million, while it won against Google.
The common thread is Epic’s resistance to the rules and economics imposed by large marketplaces. But PC has a particular complication. The supplied information notes that there are dozens of PC game stores, so the problem is not the literal absence of alternatives. Instead, Steam’s advantage appears to be the degree to which players prefer it as their main destination.
That distinction matters. In a market with only one available route, the debate is about access. In a market with numerous stores, it is also about preference, audience concentration and the burden of splitting purchases between services. Ritchie’s comments suggest that opening another PC store is not the difficult part; persuading users that it deserves to become their default is.
What a rival would need to change
A faster launcher can remove one source of annoyance. It cannot, by itself, recreate a player’s existing library. Likewise, a lower platform fee may appeal to developers and publishers without being immediately visible to someone deciding where to click “buy.” The practical challenge for competitors is aligning benefits across both groups: terms that matter to game makers and reasons that matter enough to buyers.
Ritchie himself acknowledges the appeal of Steam’s established proposition. It works, he says; it is dependable; it has sales, cards and achievements. That is a stronger diagnosis of Steam’s resilience than a claim that users simply do not care about competition. People may be responding rationally to an ecosystem that contains years of purchases and familiar services, even if they can also criticize the storefront’s influence or fee structure.
For PC players, the most immediate implication is that multiple launchers are unlikely to disappear just because one has a dominant audience. Rival stores can still compete for individual purchases, exclusives, pricing and client improvements. But the former Epic engineer’s argument is that the biggest obstacle is psychological and practical inertia: users have already chosen where their gaming history lives.
For the industry, the dispute remains about the value of that convenience and who pays for it. Steam’s continued popularity may reflect a durable consumer preference, while Epic’s campaign keeps attention on what a marketplace takes from each sale. Neither point cancels the other out. The harder question is whether any competitor can make changing habits feel more valuable than keeping everything in one dependable place.
For another look at how platform ecosystems influence games and players, read our analysis of why a single card can shape player choices in Slay the Spire 2.
