Gabe Newell Shoots Down Steam Monopoly Claims As Valve Faces Antitrust Scrutiny

Gabe Newell is one of the few CEOs in tech who is largely viewed favorably by gamers, but critiques of Steam's ubiquity have spurred antitrust lawsuits both Stateside and overseas. The Stateside class action lawsuit initiated by Wolfire Games started in 2021 argues that through Steam, Valve has been allowed to stymie competition and punish developers for offering better prices on competing storefronts.

In a meeting at the Arctic Club Hotel in Seattle, Newell was quoted by Bloomberg denying this allegation, stating that "Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices" for third-party stores. Even after being presented with seeming evidence of Valve employees enforcing a rule, Gabe repeated his denial, "at times verbatim," again and again.

The big headline-grabber was Newell's response to a lawyer asking how Valve would react if developers did discount games on other storefronts. Gabe expressed confusion at the question, then stated that "Many of our partners and many of our customers are quite happy with the service that we're providing."

Considering Steam's firm grasp on the PC games market, even in the face of competitors like the Epic Games Store outright giving away games for free on a weekly basis, it's hard to say he's wrong. I myself use Steam near-exclusively, and I can imagine that most Hot Hardware readers fall squarely into the same camp  Even proponents of other storefronts, like New Blood CEO Dave Ohsry, point out that "GOG's great. It's just that I don't have a reason to use GOG or GOG Galaxy instead of Steam."


That said, Gabe's words do seem to contradict stated Steam policy. This is despite examples of Steam keys being sold directly by developers for lower prices on other storefronts, sometimes even ahead of launch.

One such example is Fanatical, where I tend to pre-order major AAA releases (including Devil May Cry 5, etc) from Japanese developers like Capcom for prices lower than what's on Steam. Even for Steam keys, Valve is definitely allowing developers to lower their prices on other storefronts, or else Fanatical, Humble, and the like simply would not exist.

Everyone’s being too harsh here. There has been a significant rise in the cost of components that Steam customer spending ultimately funds, and economic trends have created severe disruptions in the component parts supply chain for megayachts. pic.twitter.com/w8iHVdSatK

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) May 28, 2026

Valve's official position throughout these proceedings, per Bloomberg, is that Steam has outperformed its rivals through consistent innovations and that "Customers have enormous choice. They can decide where they purchase their products, where they buy the game [on console, Epic, etc] or whether they buy it directly from software developers." While there does seem to be a few Valve employees marring that image, it does ring generally true.

Image Credit: Sergiy Falyonkin on Flickr (CC2.0 Share-Alike; photo from Valve HQ)