Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valve is cool, but they're only able to afford this style of development because they take a 30% cut of all PC gaming revenue. Not profits, revenue. When you're making that much money you can do whatever you want and still stay afloat. They've mismanaged some games (Dota 2), abandoned other games (TF2) and completely messed up other games (Artifact 1 and 2). They have my loyalty as a consumer because they've treated…
It's not like they have some artificial monopoly though. Developers put their games on Steam (well, some do) because Valve has a huge audience. Valve's audience exists because Steam is a good client and has excellent features, and places the consumer first. Valve has no artificial monopoly, does nothing to keep people on their platform, refuses to even do things like sign exclusivity agreements, and the past decade h…
Eh, as a developer I don't feel like I have a choice. There's a kind of vicious cycle where as a consumer it's honestly kind of difficult to not engage with Steam at all because a lot of games only release on Steam (looking at you, Vampire Survivors, which had an itch.io version during early access and then went Steam exclusive once it came out).
Part of the reason for that is that Valve offers a lot of services that you can't use outside of Steam -- you can't just pay for them as a developer, they're exclusive to the Steam version of the game. As a result, a lot of games get kind of locked into the platform or can't afford to offer full compatibility off of Steam. And the end result of that is that a lot of consumers only buy games from Steam. There are some exceptions, but it is remarkably difficult to get consumers to care about a game that's not on Steam, and a lot of the community management then gets centered on Steam.
You go off of Steam and you're losing access to Steam Input, you're losing access to mod management -- these are services that could be debundled from Steam, but aren't. Even on the Steam Deck itself, shader caches mean that games you buy from Steam literally perform better than games you buy specifically from a developer because distributing shader caches outside of Steam would be copyright infringement. To their credit, Valve is trying to improve performance in that area, but I have seen multiple people on the Steam Deck subreddit talk about how they've switched over to 100% Steam games specifically because of shader caches.
And if you're a developer, that kind of becomes a chicken and an egg problem. You're not going to be able to convince those people to buy from you off of Steam now. So you release on Steam, and then it becomes harder for users to avoid Steam because you're not keeping an itch.io version up to date or it's missing features from the Steam version. So then those users decide they'll only buy from Steam. And it goes round and round.
Things are a little complicated, I generally like Valve as a company. But there's no denying that they have a lot of power over the gaming market, and regardless of their intentions, that power tends to be self-reinforcing. Not all of that is Valve's fault necessarily (it's not Valve's fault that the community-run SteamGridDB only allows API usage with a Steam account, making it useless for fetching artwork outside of Steam). But regardless of who's fault it is, the more that communities centralize around services the harder it is to build alternatives to them.
Consider something like Steam Input; good luck launching an alternative that's missing the thousands of user-submitted input configurations that are locked into Steam. You import a game from a 3rd-party storefront? Unless you're very particular about naming, you no longer have community input configs. That kind of stuff tends to create a lock-in effect where consumers feel like they can't buy games outside of Steam without sacrificing features, and so developers basically have to release there.