I don't get it. Steam has a near-zero cost of entry and provides massive disintermediation. I'm a small indie dev and they gave me immense value. I'd never be able to make a living with this otherwise.
I'd love if they lowered their cut but as things are, no one even seems to be trying to seriously compete with them. All consoles and all other PC distribution platforms seem hell bent on hand curation through human intermediaries, which often comes down to rubbing elbows with the right people / impressing arbiters rather than just letting customers judge. Even itch.io does this for the promotion / discoverability part.
Mobile has a slew of its own problems but gets this basic thing right, too.
There's enormous disintermediation compared to what it replaced, which is publisher deals with many more hands taking a slice along the way. It's not a direct B2C relation, but it's certainly not "the exact opposite" like GP reply stated.
If anything it promotes centralization. Steam is a one stop shop for buying games that you can access globally, for the most part.
Before if you wanted to buy games you had to show up in person, so competition between corporations and mom and pops was limited to what a corporation was willing to spend on capex and staff for a new store. The internet destroyed that need and so now the costs of corporations to compete with more efficient services due to economies of scale is very low.
