What really seems to make Steam a functional monopoly is how launchers are generally treated. Nobody wants to have more than one launcher, launchers fucking suck if you have to juggle them, and so people would prefer to just use one launcher for all their games. GOG, Humble Bundle, Itch.io, and even to a limited extent (as in it's probably not actually intentional but more a result of the... "economical" implmentation) EGS can all have their games downloaded, installed, and updated through a third party FOSS client, which makes it at least theoretically possible to truly integrate them into one launcher. You don't have to launch a separate launcher to launch (most) EGS games, you can simply install Legendary, a FOSS CLI tool for managing EGS games, and have a FOSS launcher use that to launch those games without even having the EGS app itself installed on your system. Heroic is a GUI frontend for Legendary, for those interested.
But Steam (and Origin and uPlay, for that matter) requires you to launch their full-fat client to launch games bought on that platform, and the experience of launching a launcher is really, really bad. Origin, at least, has a thin client whose purpose is to make this launcher-launching-a-launcher business not suck as much, don't know so much about uPlay but I believe they still make you launch their whole fucking GUI for it. And so people generally would rather just launch their games through Steam rather than use a FOSS, interoperable launcher (or, gasp, an OS's package manager!).
And that's how Valve's able to have something of a walled garden on PC, because they got their launcher in first and nobody can reasonably pressure them into making their games comply with an open standard so that a FOSS launcher or package manager could integrate their games seamelessly (and so make the choice of storefront somewhat more competitive).
If I let myself speculate wildly, I'd suspect the reason Valve's actually p generous about Steam keys, letting developers sell Steam keys on other stores while Valve takes a 0% cut, is specifically to avoid antitrust regulation. I would suspect that at some point some of these companies trying to have their own launchers just to avoid paying Steam 30% will attempt to have some sort of interoperable standard for game ownership authentication (NOT NFT'S JESUS CHRIST); that would allow a single client to basically support any arbitrary store, so that you can buy Origin and Bethesda games in the same place and neither company has to share their profits, because I suspect they're aware the "I don't want more than one launcher" issue gets worse when they all have their own bespoke launchers that have, like, three games worth playing apiece. In that context, I think it'd be more likely that some sort of legal action might be taken to try to coerce Valve into supporting that standard lest it be seen as anti-competitive, at which point Valve will go absolutely fucking apeshit because that would fundamentally threaten their de facto monopoly on PC.
because I suspect they’re aware the “I don’t want more than one launcher” issue gets worse
Except they probably use their clients to collect information about your computer, what programs and hardware you have installed, and sell or at least use that information for marketing and business decisions, so they won't want to support a standard launcher. Plus with their own launchers they can introduce you to the store page and notify you of stales and junk. And also supporting standards actually requires some effort and cooperation and desire to improve things which most of these companies have none of.
Possibly, but I think the value of that data is less valuable than not paying Valve 30% of their sales revenue, data is worth money but certainly not that much, especially when they're struggling to have many concurrent installations and especially when the games themselves could collect telemetry just fine. I'd imagine such a standardized launcher could also easily support multiple storefronts. Agreeing on the standard in the first place would take effort but also corporations do that all the time anyways when it suits them.
Most companies with their own launchers attract people to them with exclusive titles (their own games) and they probably don't lose thaaat much revenue. EA has a bunch of properties, Blizzard has a bunch, Epic Games has Fortnite, and so on. However, EA did recently decided to release their games on Steam again, I think they've probably negotiated a better profit-sharing agreement (most big companies can do this), although it still just launches their own game launcher. It doesn't really seem like the paradigm of Steam as industry leader and other launchers just... existing, is going anywhere. Having annoying launchers probably isn't going to lose them many sales, although with GTAV and RDR2, the Rockstar launcher is infuriatingly bad and might lose some sales.
What really seems to make Steam a functional monopoly is how launchers are generally treated. Nobody wants to have more than one launcher, launchers fucking suck if you have to juggle them, and so people would prefer to just use one launcher for all their games. GOG, Humble Bundle, Itch.io, and even to a limited extent (as in it's probably not actually intentional but more a result of the... "economical" implmentation) EGS can all have their games downloaded, installed, and updated through a third party FOSS client, which makes it at least theoretically possible to truly integrate them into one launcher. You don't have to launch a separate launcher to launch (most) EGS games, you can simply install Legendary, a FOSS CLI tool for managing EGS games, and have a FOSS launcher use that to launch those games without even having the EGS app itself installed on your system. Heroic is a GUI frontend for Legendary, for those interested.
But Steam (and Origin and uPlay, for that matter) requires you to launch their full-fat client to launch games bought on that platform, and the experience of launching a launcher is really, really bad. Origin, at least, has a thin client whose purpose is to make this launcher-launching-a-launcher business not suck as much, don't know so much about uPlay but I believe they still make you launch their whole fucking GUI for it. And so people generally would rather just launch their games through Steam rather than use a FOSS, interoperable launcher (or, gasp, an OS's package manager!).
And that's how Valve's able to have something of a walled garden on PC, because they got their launcher in first and nobody can reasonably pressure them into making their games comply with an open standard so that a FOSS launcher or package manager could integrate their games seamelessly (and so make the choice of storefront somewhat more competitive).
If I let myself speculate wildly, I'd suspect the reason Valve's actually p generous about Steam keys, letting developers sell Steam keys on other stores while Valve takes a 0% cut, is specifically to avoid antitrust regulation. I would suspect that at some point some of these companies trying to have their own launchers just to avoid paying Steam 30% will attempt to have some sort of interoperable standard for game ownership authentication (NOT NFT'S JESUS CHRIST); that would allow a single client to basically support any arbitrary store, so that you can buy Origin and Bethesda games in the same place and neither company has to share their profits, because I suspect they're aware the "I don't want more than one launcher" issue gets worse when they all have their own bespoke launchers that have, like, three games worth playing apiece. In that context, I think it'd be more likely that some sort of legal action might be taken to try to coerce Valve into supporting that standard lest it be seen as anti-competitive, at which point Valve will go absolutely fucking apeshit because that would fundamentally threaten their de facto monopoly on PC.
Except they probably use their clients to collect information about your computer, what programs and hardware you have installed, and sell or at least use that information for marketing and business decisions, so they won't want to support a standard launcher. Plus with their own launchers they can introduce you to the store page and notify you of stales and junk. And also supporting standards actually requires some effort and cooperation and desire to improve things which most of these companies have none of.
Possibly, but I think the value of that data is less valuable than not paying Valve 30% of their sales revenue, data is worth money but certainly not that much, especially when they're struggling to have many concurrent installations and especially when the games themselves could collect telemetry just fine. I'd imagine such a standardized launcher could also easily support multiple storefronts. Agreeing on the standard in the first place would take effort but also corporations do that all the time anyways when it suits them.
Most companies with their own launchers attract people to them with exclusive titles (their own games) and they probably don't lose thaaat much revenue. EA has a bunch of properties, Blizzard has a bunch, Epic Games has Fortnite, and so on. However, EA did recently decided to release their games on Steam again, I think they've probably negotiated a better profit-sharing agreement (most big companies can do this), although it still just launches their own game launcher. It doesn't really seem like the paradigm of Steam as industry leader and other launchers just... existing, is going anywhere. Having annoying launchers probably isn't going to lose them many sales, although with GTAV and RDR2, the Rockstar launcher is infuriatingly bad and might lose some sales.
why not? it's a good use case for them