No, I don't think they are. There's plenty of competition and there will be for the foreseeable future. And if you look at the best-selling games of recent years, many aren't even on steam: Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2, Minecraft, Sim City, the WoW expansions, LOL, The Sims, SC2 etc.

unfortunately it looks like we will be using the STEAM locomotives and pumps in future like was used from 1800's to approx 1950's, they were replaced for performance and reliability reasons

Harpo the NON-subscriber

Steam is a de facto monopoly.

"De facto monopoly is a system where many suppliers of a product are allowed, but the market is so completely dominated by one that the others might as well not exist."

http://definitions.uslegal.com/d/de-facto-monopoly/

If Steam has 25% or more of the market share, it is a monopoly. (That's the economic definition. Yes, there can be 4 monopolies in a single market.)

I'd be surprised if Steam had less than 25% of the PC gaming market, there are just so few other competitors.

To clarify, I've just looked it up. Turns out that's just the UK definition, and it's to do with having "monopoly power", not being a monopoly, though there are very few differences.

There are over 200 items tied to my main STEAM account (which is only one of a few accounts within the household/family).  Yes, I have been proudly supporting STEAM for many many years, long before most of these forums still thought STEAM was the devil. 

There hasn't been, and likely won't be (at least without HUGE initial investment) any kind of competition for STEAM.  I'm sure over the next many years I will purchase another few hundred items through STEAM and by then they'll have become the government and we'll all be swearing allegiance to Valve Corp.  hehe

Steamworks will be the death-knell if anything is, I'm not the least bit worried about how pervasive they are as a distributor, but being locked into a platform is terrible.  If they go dark side, or go tits up, we're all fucked.   Too many studios wont have the resources(publishers sure as hell wont foot the bill) to remove their stuff from Steamworks, we'll end up fragmenting on not so legal hack jobs.

I was referring to the existing library of Steamworks integrated games you'd have that would suddenly become a virtual paperweight, legally speaking.  Anyone that does a hack job to get around the demise of Steam would be violating piracy laws in quite a few countries, the US included, thanks to wonderful governments.  It would happen anyway of course... but it would still be a pain in the ass, and will become a larger pain in the ass as they continue to evolve the complexity of the integration between games and the platform.

Monopoly power is what you get between monopoly and perfect competition. In a monopoly you can set prices to profit-maximize to your heart's content. In a perfect competition you have no control over your price. Monopoly power is the ability of the firm to control its own price. To some extent it can be argued that brand loyalty actually provides you with monopoly power, but afaik people prefer the term market power then (although as I understand it they are functionally identical). 

Anyway. Steam's prices are often price-matched by their competitors, Amazon, GamersGate etc. Looking only at price, they functionally have no monopoly power from a consumer perspective. Far more interesting would be to look at their 30% cut of any sale through the steam store, and their ability to alter that. Although as I understand it, they have maintained it at 30% for many years and continue to do so, probably as a method of building commitment and trust into their relationship with their partners (publishers, devs etc).

I can download my older stardock games from stardock website directly. But for newer games like Sins of the Solar Empire Rebellion and beyond, they are steam only due to integration with steam.

I hope Stardock new games will stop marrying themselves with steam.

i love steam, it's convenient, I don't have a bunch of hard copies gather dust in the corner, and for anyone above the age of 18 .. and with a job .. it allows those of us who are time crunched to load up what ever game we need and game with friends easily.  I wish all games where on steam it would make life easier.  

I just don't see the need to complain about them just because they are turning a profit, sometimes you need to be a behemouth in this world to have the cash to get shit done.   Hopes and dreams and wish full thinking doesn't pay for the unimaginable day to day that must go on behind the scenes at steam.  

That's the second time you've used that exact  line in response to one of my post. You must have a chip on your shoulder. FYI, I am over 18 and I have a job.

Straw man argument... I never said I was against them making a profit. Nor did I imply it.

Did you read the comments? It's not about making money. It's about charging people extra for full access to a game they already paid for..under the guise of spam prevention.

Stardock had one of the few 'ankle-biting' competitors to Steam with Impulse, which they sold to Gamestop which killed it (you can no longer buy games on it, and most games you bought on Impulse if you try to download with their legacy app now download in Steam instead :/).  There are a couple minor competitors like Gog which specializes (though isn't exclusively) old games (from even the MS-DOS area, like Master of Orion, M.A.X., etc.) with the software like DosBOX to let them run on modern systems and Direct2Drive and there are probably some others, but ... pretty much ... for all intents and purposes, Steam is a monopoly.