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Not if Steam is simply the least shitty of the options! My point is that Steam is far and away the best product, so if Gaben wanted to make some money by milking his customers some more he could probably extract quite a bit from them before the Epic Games store looked like a real improvement.
There's a qualitative difference between "consumers pinch their nose and choose your product because the alternatives are worse" and "consumers happily fork over money and consider your product the standard to which all others should aspire."
While I'm not quite saying "Steam is indifferent to competitive pressure due to their position," I am saying the Gabe can make decisions without worrying about the next quarter's earnings report. And he's consistently made decisions (including the decision to NOT change certain things) that make the users happier.
Can you explain why other existing players, which are also multi-billion dollar corporations, haven't just gone ahead and copied Valve's model for the Steam store as closely as possible? Why is there no Pepsi to Valve's Coca-Cola in this situation?
I think they have and them some. Weren't some platforms literally giving away titles for free to pull away customers? I don't pay that close attention because I rarely play games (especially modern games) anymore.
I think your worldview is just plainly wrong. It reminds me of friends who complain about how modern clothes are shitty and don't last but don't buy solid durable clothing. I buy unbranded quality clothes or lightly used well established brands and my clothes last yeaes. They buy trash for the namebrand or because it's cheap and then get mad as if they didn't choose to make that trade off. With basically any product you have a million choices (exceptions were already stared, mainly in government backed monopolies or high barrier to entry markets). I can't really take the "Products are getting enshitified!" meme seriously when I can literally just go on google and find you an equivalent product for basically anything you ask for. Assuming you're in America, that is.
You really seem to buy into the "corporations only look at the next quarterly report" meme way too much. Amazon and google were not profitable for like a decade because they just kept reinventing their revenue. There are some cases where investors punish long term thinking (recently Intel) but I would say it's really not the norm, at least in growth industries.
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