[crowbahr]

There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails. Amazon threw billions at it. So did Google. So has Epic. And Microsoft.

None of them dethroned steam, so 30% is still the cost to access the steam user base.

If tens of billions can't overcome this "inefficiency" then it sure seems like there might be more to the story than economics 101.

The fact is that Steam has an incredibly loyal _userbase_ and you won't convince them to leave unless steam betrays their trust, which they haven't.

The trust in any competitor is nearly 0 compared with Steam which has been a platform people have loved and used for over a decade now with basically 0 issues. No corporate missteps.

Arguably the biggest controversy is the latest way they made CS2 loot boxes less valuable, popping the insane bubble in the skins market. That's still ultimately good for the average gamer and I expect they'll come out smelling like roses.

[cubefox]

> There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails.

Yes, network effects, as discussed in the Wikipedia article linked above. It's the reason why Facebook or Twitter are so hard to replace, or eBay, or Amazon. In these cases larger platforms benefit from the fact that everyone else is already there, which makes switching hard. That doesn't mean they are inherently better though. They can even be significantly worse than alternatives, apart from network effects.

[vablings]

Part of the reason why these companies are still around and strong is because they continue to innovate. Facebook spun up Instagram for younger folk, Amazon has some of the best shipping/warehousing/distribution in the world. eBay has slowly become less relevant for local p2p purchase because its market share got eaten up by Facebook Marketplace.... Twitter had a big chunk of its userbase eaten up by Threads, hey I'm seeing a pattern here?

[crowbahr]

Ascribing my entire comment to network effect makes me wonder if you even read it.