What, exactly, do they need to "step up" to?
- Their platform offers by far the most features to both customers and developers. (And it does so for free to gamers, including e.g. unlimited cloud space and of course online gaming)
- Until just now, it was also the major platform with the best revenue share. Arguably, it still is (it's not like Epic launcher is major outside of a single game).
- They offer great support to open standardization processes, and also pay several open source developers simply for continuing to contribute to their own open source projects.
- They never pay for exclusivity. That's actual consumer choice. Which much of the "competition" seems to be hell-bent on eliminating.
- When they introduce a new client-level feature, they take great care to make it available and useful to as much of your existing library as possible. That's a real development nightmare, but it means that when you bought a game on Steam 10 years ago then you can now use features like in-home streaming or Steam controller rebinding seamlessly with it.
This idea that Valve is somehow
worse than other platform holding companies and large-scale publishers who
mostly don't do any of that is frankly utter bullshit and pisses me off since it's so self-destructive. If any of these other companies -- especially the public companies -- were in Valve's place, I am quite certain we'd be far worse off.
Now, with that said, we can talk about the impact on developers, which might be positive in some cases because of more competition on revenue share.
The thing is,
I don't think console platform holders will bite.
They don't care that everything people are forced to pay monthly fees for on console is free on PC, they didn't care back in the days that PC didn't have a royalty share at all while consoles did, and they'll continue to happily charge their 30% plus recurring customer fees. If I'm wrong then I'll be ecstatic, but I doubt it.
And that's before getting into the issue of whether it is at all a good idea for the industry as a whole to split PC eyeballs and interest across many storefronts.
But I'm sure an actual indie developer will have a perspective on that:
I see.