[r1chardnl]

  There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.

Except for the (large) Steam library of games you already have on Steam.

[m11a]

That's a weak form of lock-in though, because you can switch to another platform going forward, and access your previous Steam purchases for free. No ads, no subscription fee. Stay signed out of Steam Chat and the social stuff, and you've basically just got a heavy application launcher.

Compared to PS+ and Xbox Live, which charge subscription fees to continue accessing online content, it's a pretty sweet deal for the consumer.

[legacynl]

Eh.. how can you access your steam games on another platform for free?

AFAIK your games are locked to your account, and you'd need to log in at least once a month or something to keep access even in offline mode.

If you close your steam account you lose everything, so I don't see how that's a weak form of lock-in?

[0xTJ]

I phrased that as "never buying another game on Steam" because of the existing library aspect. Sure it's nice to just have one launcher, but you can absolutely move to another marketplace while using Steam for the games that you've already bought.

You can keep Steam installed and keep downloading your games through it, but you don't need to give them another penny.

[Hojojo]

The other platforms on PC are exactly the same though. If you're against Steam because of this particular aspect, you should be against almost all platforms on PC as well as every console and phone platform. This is how it works on almost every digital media platform. It's not sufficient reason to treat Steam like a monopoly, because in itself it's not anti-competitive behaviour.

It's also not solvable unless you legislate platform agnostic licenses that are valid regardless of platform. Fat chance of that ever happening and I doubt that's actually what you're suggesting.

[mtsr]

Sure, but it works on all pc platforms and the runtime is pretty light and can be pretty easily circumvented from what I’ve heard.

Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.