Speaking of Valve -- there's an area that is absolutely ripe for disruption. The Steam client hasn't really improved over the years. It's missing basic features -- like sorting your game list. They completely lost the social game to Discord and Curse, and the steaming game to Twitch. Their review system is maybe their best feature, but it's still pretty bad -- vulnerable to brigading, and not a super clear indicator for me if I'll be interested in a game or not.
They're basically a CDN. For me, that's all they provide.
And they charge an INCREDIBLE amount for their services, to developers -- 30%, I believe. Do they really provide THAT much value? I doubt it. I personally can't wait for some startup to blow them out of the water.
They're essentially the universal gaming app store. If you create your own store you're going to have to 1. provide a significant discount to compete and 2. have large names jump ship with you.
At this point, the only way a competitor has a fighting chance is if Origin or Blizzard starts opening up to third party games. Blizzard did that with Destiny 2 but it seems like they might only want to partner up with high quality dev work (whereas Steam is littered with shovelware made on RPG Maker).
I don't know about Origin or the Battle.Net client. Origin has a terrible reputation. Blizzard doesn't like to share, they're slow to move, and even though they're great at making games, they're not so hot at the services that go along with those games, generally speaking (remember VOIP in WoW?).
Discord seems incredibly well-positioned to take on Steam directly. They've got huge adoption in the gamer community. They're great at the community management side of things, as far as I can tell. They've figured out how to provide a better voice experience than pretty much any other service out there, so they're smart. If it's possible to provide the same thing that Steam does at less cost (which I strongly suspect it is), Discord could do it and probably make a killing at it.
Both Activision and Blizzard are owned by Activision Blizzard Inc. and are working independently besides game publishing (IIRC Blizzard used some help with Diablo 3 for consoles, Destiny 2 is the first non-Blizzard game on Battle.Net).
As for the 30%, imo it's about right.
I personally try to avoid games that aren't on steam (and more recently GOG).
Steam provides friendliest, cloud saves, simple install to anywhere, automatic updates, matchmaking, workshop, easy uninstall, and playtime tracking.
All of these are minor features but combined they greatly incentivse buying there.
Maybe it's been fixed, but as of a couple years ago Steam didn't seem to have a way to kill an account. After some security breach or another I decided it was time to remove it (I was never fond of the ownership model anyway), but couldn't find any way to do it.
They also have effective lock-in. I don't buy movies on Amazon or Google play because I don't want to be locked in, or Kindle books without de-DRMing them, but Steam games? 80+ and counting.
Steam's monopoly is also why it sucks, I think. It seems like a textbook example of what happens with monopolies -- it produces an expensive product that could be much better and much cheaper.
Frankly, the publishers that have their own Steam competitors are worse. Steam at least supports Linux well and listens to players more than the publishers. I do wish DLCs were less rampant, but this is a gaming industry issue and less of Steam's wrongdoing. The GoG and Humble Bundle models are proven successes at this point, and I've easily spent 5-10x more on them than on Steam.
They're basically a CDN. For me, that's all they provide.
And they charge an INCREDIBLE amount for their services, to developers -- 30%, I believe. Do they really provide THAT much value? I doubt it. I personally can't wait for some startup to blow them out of the water.