One of the basic lessons they teach you in game development, and really, in any discipline ever, is "never bank on being the exception."
Point the exceptions out to me all day, but, hey, they're exceptions. I'll take you to the Wal-Mart games aisle, or Gamestop, or Best Buy, and we can go looking for the PC Gaming section if you'd like.
Steam is an effective monopoly.
I'd be curious if any of you have actually gone and sat down, face to face, with a publisher, talked about your options, gone back and forth with your dev team about what to do, what the best release strategy is, budgeting your development costs and all that. Because I have.
There's a reason there's only one Minecraft. There's a reason League of Legend's only competition comes from two multi-billion dollar companies. There's a reason that 3,496 games were added to Steam so far this year.
Project Zomboid
definitely wasn't pretty successful. It's why they had to show up on Steam. Slitherine, which adamantly refused for
years to put their games on Steam, eventually had to give in. Almost everyone who has elected not to release games on Steam gives in eventually.
It's an effective monopoly.
The reason I've used this term since my initial post is because it does satisfy the silly need to be as pointlessly correct as some of you want to be. An "effective monopoly" is a term used to describe a situation where a business might not
technically be a monopoly, but more or less is, due to circumstances beyond what one would consider to be a "real monopoly." While it's possible to slip past an effective monopoly, most of the time, you're left without any superior alternatives, and that's absolutely true of Steam. Sure, you CAN go release, say, Tropico 6 on the Humble Store as a DRM-free game, but if you do that, you'll achieve a non-viable sales figure. Most of the people I know who have released on multiple sites point to Humble as their second-biggest source of income, and it's less than 10% of all the money they make. It's not feasible to release outside of Steam.
Nothing is
preventing you from releasing outside of Steam. It's not
impossible, and that would make Steam a "real monopoly," but it's not logical to try unless you have massive infrastructure in place.
Shouting "Minecraft" at me is like saying "Doc, winning the lottery is an acceptable way to make a living!" Like, sure, if you win, but the chances are way too low to matter. You can't bet on it. You shouldn't bet on it.
Like, sorry, but ya'll are flat out wrong about this. Steam is, absolutely, by every definition, an effective monopoly. As such, there's no reason not to simply call it a monopoly, because it is. It's just not the specific kind of monopoly you're referring to. Doesn't make it not a monopoly, just means you need to learn more about how developers and publishers have to operate to sell video games.
EDIT: I realize I sound really snarky and judgemental here. Sorry. Pissy mood. IRL shit. Annoyed by people who wanna crow "but you're wrong" and don't know anything either though.