I never understood people who argue steam doesn’t have real competition.

The number of fully funded attempts to compete with steam is impressive. Steam has more competition than any other of the major app stores. Steam also had to provide additional value over pre-existing methods of installing games on the PC in a way the Android Play Store or the PlayStation Store did not have to.

It is incredible how much the other stores fumbled the implementation. As a rule, Epic, Origin, etc apps were terrible. Laggy, bad UI, sometimes difficult to even complete a purchase.

You would have thought that close relationship with the games industry- someone must know how to make a high performance native application. Yet it always felt like web developers pumping out another half assed Electron platform. The Steam store must generate billions in revenue -put some real manpower behind the engineering.