Once you have a sufficient good solution that you like, you will not switch to another sufficient good solution unless you are highly motivated to switch. It can not be just 5% better or 10% better, it needs to be meaningfully better so that you are motivated to undergo the switching cost.

Part of that switching cost is your purchased game library only works with the platforms you purchased it from. A fact that currently greatly benefits mostly Steam on desktop platforms.

So I do expect that a court case in the future will be Epic Games suing Steam in order to have "game portability" between game platforms.

      Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at research and analyst 
      firm Newzoo told GamesRadar+ that "As long as Valve is independent and not a 
      publicly traded company," it looks impossible for Steam to be overthrown as the 
      de-facto PC gaming marketplace.

It's not cool that they successfully made themselves a rent seeker on PC game installation because gamers below a certain age didn't want to learn how to click on setup.exe. We needlessly gifted them a closed platform where it had previously been open in a way that Playstation (for example) is not.

Well as a linux gamer, I'm ok with this. Nobody has been more successful at getting linux to be a first class gaming platform.

They are currently very benevolent monopolist: they don't seriously compete with publishers that use their platform. They only occassionally produce a great Half-Life or DOTA game as a some sort of "halo effect" demo to encourage industry to move forward (e.g. to show how VR is done right with Half-Life Alyx). Avoiding releasing Half-Life 3 might have been good for their neutral role. They are like a TSMC of game distributors, who explicitly promised not to compete with their customers.

They remain one-stop shop for games. The gamers don't have to weigh down their systems with a bunch of different bloated game stores, each "needing" several GB of memory occupied at all times and adding minutes to machine startup.

Not to mention conflicts between a bunch of different anti-cheat and anti-piracy technologies on the same machine. And stores with bad UX (e.g. that make you suffer additional wait screens or naggings; Steam is as unobstructive as it gets).

Compare that to Netflix: at the begining, it was a "one stop shop" for movies, it had a lot of classic movies and TV for reasonable price. When the concept was proven, the production houses revoked the license for content. Competition came to the sector and each movie production house set up their own subscription based streaming service. You need to keep paying a whole bunch of services if you want to be able to keep up with all popular TV production or watch classic movies.

So, the competition would in theory be great. But even if stores didn't have subscriptions, the gamers don't want to fill their personal data, check privacy settings, configure, troubleshoot, debloat, ... a different app store for each game. When people have a slice of time to play, they don't want to deal with all of these.

I'm sure that when Valve forgets what keeps them successful and start becoming a Netflix, the Steam store will get replaced.

Steam created a platform that works for developers, gamers and the platform itself. It is managed well. They pushed Linux gaming. They are not perfect and monopolies are dangerous but currently they are beneficial for the gaming community as a whole. They have not won capitalism they just have a consistent product that they didn’t enshitify to squeeze out ever short term earnings they can. I only fear that at some point someone greedy takes over and ruins it. Epic failed to create a proper alternative even with a good example and many many years of time to iterate on it.

Wow. What propaganda. People use Steam because Valve isn't evil. It's as simple as that.

Epic is evil. They actively compete with their customers. Epic has even used their position with the Epic engine to clone a business customer's games and release it for free. And personally, as a gamer, Epic stole the game Rocket League from me after I purchased the native linux version from the company Psyonix. Then Epic bought Psyonix and said there'd be no changes to Rocket League. 6 months later and no linux or mac clients people bought could play the game. Epic just buys game companies and puts their games behind it's app store and/or gives them away for free to try to lock people into their app store. They're abusive and exploitive and they constantly lie and make things worse for every game they buy.

People don't like that kind of behavior from Epic so they chose not to use their products and app store. This is just crybullying from Epic.