Its not even necessarily Steams fault that they hold such a huge chunk of the PC gaming community in their pocket, its the consumers. Literally there are so many alternatives, and some of them even give you Steam keys like Humble Bundles store, but every would rather use Steam than the others not always because they dont trust the competition, but a common complaint is that they dont want to have a bunch of launchers. The amount of times Ive seen people say something along the lines of “if its not coming to Steam, Im not buying it”, “Ill wait for a Steam release”, “no Steam, no sale”, and outright refuse any other service and bash others just for existing is stark. Valve doesnt even make it a point to compete with the compeition. Practically they just siit there and do whatever, and the others are the ones using whatever methods they can to bring people over.

This subreddit can never, ever be trusted to discuss Valve in good faith.

Valve 100% has a de facto monopoly, but people make excuses for it and frame it as a good thing.

EGS has, what, 1% of the market? And people shriek at Epic for being a monopoly?

And people want Xbox to be able to buy everything to get back at Sony, who has a 51% market share?

People here are only selectively upset at monopolies when they can protect Steam and get rid of console exclusives.