The digital distribution service from Valve doesn't really have competition

May 25, 2014 13:42 GMT  ·  By

Valve is now the biggest service that distributes games for Linux and it looks like it’s the best thing that’s happened for this platform in a long time. The problems with this picture is that Steam is slowly transforming into a monopoly, which is never a good thing.

The Steam for Linux platform is barely a year old and it has already gathered all the major publishers and developers around it. Steam is slowly becoming the main driver of why the developers are porting their games for the open source platform. This is not a bad thing, especially now that the service is still in its infancy.

Valve is also building an operating system based on Linux, called SteamOS, which will eventually power the Steam Machine, a console / PC hybrid scheduled to be released later this year. The assault started by Valve has shaken the Linux platform from its status quo and more games have been released in this past year than in all the previous years combined.

On Linux, Valve is starting from scratch and there is no competition for it, at least not in the true sense of the word. There is Desura, but it has a very small Linux user base, and GOG.com will probably launch Linux support in the fall. Even if you combine these two services, you won’t get even a fraction of what Steam already represents.

This means that Steam is about to become a monopoly and there is no one available to challenge it. Furthermore, it has already started to push others aside, even if it’s just a just an unintentional side effect.

Some of the younger Linux users might have heard of Linux Game Publishing, one of the very few companies that actually published titles for the open source fans. Linux Game Publishing seems to have disappeared from the publishing scene, even though its demise is not yet certain. Basically, no one is interested anymore to use anything other than Steam for publishing new games.

The Windows platform doesn’t have the same problem because the retail industry is still powerful and provides some competition for Steam, and there are a number of other digital distribution rivals.

Steam is now the savior of Linux because it brought much needed attention and development efforts, but in a couple of years, the domination of Valve will be obvious. With no retail industry to challenge it, they will be able to do pretty much everything they want and users will have to abide by it.