You’ve just shut a game off after an immensely satisfying play session. You know you should shut your PC off as well, but out of curiosity, you check the “Featured” section of the Steam store. And there it is: Rainbow Six Siege, a game lots of your friends play, on sale for $5—a 75% markdown. You aren’t even that interested in the game. You don’t even like games with similar gameplay and pacing. But it’s only $5, you think, it’s so popular, it must be good. You quickly fish out your credit card and buy the game, adding it to your already over-inflated library of games that you’ve never played. 

To those who have never used Steam, this experience is likely both foreign and familiar. I’m sure each and every citizen in a capitalist society has endured the plight of waiting through massive, cash-clutching sales, whether on Steam or otherwise. Conversely, to those who are avid users of Steam, this encounter with willpower is especially recognizable. Our large libraries and larger wishlists strain our computers’ storage (unless, like me, most of the games owned aren’t even installed). Steam, without a doubt, is the internet’s largest storefront for buying PC games and a shiny, pheromone-ridden bottle of poison. Designed to entice potential buyers, Steam makes you consume from it “willingly” and inebriate yourself.

Steam is an online store exclusively selling video games. The largest of its kind, it competes against the likes of Battle.net, Origin, GOG, and The Epic Games Store in attempting to sell us masterfully assembled ones and zeroes. Steam is incredibly popular, meticulously polished, and immensely rich. Its creator, the game developer Valve, has only made one new and original game, Half-Life Alyx, since 2013, when they had released Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. They’re comfortably kept afloat by their massive 30% cut taken from all game sales on their platform.

Steam was introduced in 2003 as a method for Valve to sell their games, and since then, the platform has expanded to mostly sell third-party games. Holding 75% of the market share for all PC games, Steam is often considered a monopoly. Whether you like the app or not, using it is nearly unavoidable if you buy games on a PC. It’s an elegant and incredibly well-functioning storefront with ridiculous sales that cause logical dilemmas, impulsive purchases, and all sorts of madness in its users. To put it simply, steam is a drug. 

Before we pick apart Steam’s foibles, controversies, and fallacies, we should give credit where it is due. Since Steam’s catalog is so vast, there is something available for anyone to purchase. The store’s all-encompassing video game variety cannot be sold as a negative feature. Although this does mean that there is no quality filter–some of the games available are garbage–in the end, this is still beneficial because anyone can find some sort of game that they would enjoy playing on the platform. It’s incredibly difficult to criticize a store that sells a wide variety of items, requiring mental gymnastics that aren’t worth your time. Having all or most of your games in one place is a fantastic thing, as you won’t have to sift through a multitude of launchers and folders in your PC for where your favorite game is. It’s all there in your Steam library.

Another plus of Steam is simply that it is a well-designed app. Its design hasn’t changed much since it was made in 2003, except for a few coats of virtual paint added to make it easier on the eyes. After all, Valve’s philosophy has always been “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The user interface is incredibly concise, menus are easily navigable, and sections within sections aren’t easy to get lost in.

Steam’s minimalistic design works incredibly in its favor. The site’s simple gray and blue aesthetic is immediately recognizable—it’s nice to look at but is unobtrusive enough in that it doesn’t distract you from what you should be giving your attention to: the games. Little effects, like games in your library shining when your cursor hovers over them, and the ability to order your games by your hours in them, their metacritic score, or your percentage of achievements completed are all cherries on top. With its user-friendly app design, it is already above the glitchy, cluttered likes of Origin (EA’s online store) and miniscule library of Battle.net (that of Activision Blizzard). 

A blessing and curse of Steam are its massive sales. Going by names such as, “Summer Game Fest,” “Midweek Madness,” or more mundane offerings like “Publisher Sale,” Steam mostly boasts huge markdowns in the 60% to 90% off range. In my tenure as a Steam customer, I have seen more sales from 50% and 90% off than I have sales from 10% to 40%, which in my experience is the opposite of the vast majority of other merchants—software or otherwise.

At first, this appears to be fantastic. If you use Steam instead of its competitors, you’ll likely be able to get a $60 game for $40 if you buy it during the right week, and if you wait until the summer or the holiday season, you may be able to get it for $7.49. You think that you’re saving money, and that is how you are grievously incorrect, and the dual-horned visage of Valve is laughing at you. Over time, you begin to buy more and more of these supposedly dirt-cheap games. It becomes second nature; you buy on impulse. Your Steam library grows beyond proportion. “It’s just a few dollars,” you say to yourself each and every time. Due to these sales, you end up spending more money on these lower priced games than you would on a single full-priced game. You may think that this is still okay–you’re getting multiple games, correct? Still your money’s worth?

Wrong. To think this way is to forget our most valuable currency: time. Most people who aren’t streamers don’t have a lot of time for video games (I certainly don’t). And with each and every Steam user, there are always one or two games that very clearly overshadow all the others. For example, one avid Steam user might spend most of their time playing Destiny 2 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While they may have 20 other games in their library, some have just a few hours logged in them, and many others have none at all. The player simply doesn’t have the time to get the full value of their money out of the multitude of the games they bought, due to one or two beloved games that take up all their time. Talk to nearly any Steam user and they will either admit to having some form of this problem, having resisted this happening, or are clearly like this but refuse to admit it. This isn’t malicious. Steam isn’t violating your rights, and they aren’t scamming you either. But what they are doing is exploiting dopamine fluctuations in your brain, that rush when you buy a new game and download it, sending a little tingle when you see the “New in Library” sticker on a game icon. A user develops a crippling addiction to buying, which can hurt their actual life tremendously. 

Steam is a well-designed app that is incredibly skilled at selling products. It does exactly what it was intended to do and more, but is this good for the consumer, and society as a whole? This addiction to consumption is exactly how capitalism functions. Effective merchants sell effective products and effectively use the psychology that we, as humans, share, to make as much money as possible. It takes advantage of the ape in man, forcing you into a buying frenzy. We fill our libraries and empty our pockets, draining what could have been used on more important things. Steam isn’t necessarily a monopoly because there are other competitors—competitors with badly designed sites, smaller inventories, and less frequent sales. 

Steam’s variety and has similar design principles, and if a developer like Epic, Activision, EA, or Ubisoft had massive control over the market like Valve does with Steam, this hypothetical “Steam but not Steam” (let’s call it UOrigin) would actually be a monopoly, unlike Steam. It would have shady business practices, massive prices that one must pay to obtain games, and worse quality games and services due to competitors not existing. People buy from Steam simply because it’s better, not because it’s the only option. In a regard, Steam resembles neoliberal capitalism, while the hypothetical UOrigin is a turn of the 20th century-era robber baron. Steam is a lesser evil; it could be worse. But in the words of Geralt of Rivia (from Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books, games, and TV series), “Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all.” 

In conclusion, I recommend Steam near-wholeheartedly. If what you need is a site to buy video games for your computer, you simply cannot do any better. All of the competitors, even though they offer some of the same games, are objectively inferior digital storefronts. The caveat is that using Steam requires self-control. You must watch yourself to make sure that Steam does not consume you, as it has consumed many others. The philosophy that I have spent so much time laying out is not meant to dissuade you from using Steam, but it is a warning. You wished for a great site to buy video games with great variety, a concise user interface, and low prices. In Steam, you have it, but you should be careful what you wish for. 

 

written by Nathaniel Hertzberg

edited by Saanvi Gutta and Evalynn Bogusz

 

References

Sapkowski, A. (2021). The Lesser Evil. In The Last wish (pp. 85–127). Short story, ORBIT US.

Valve. (2021). Steam store. Welcome to Steam. Retrieved October 6, 2021, from https://store.steampowered.com/.