Alan Wake 2 Still Hasn't Earned Back Its Budget

Except Valve allows people to sell their own keys without Valve taking a cut. That system is why at least half the vendors here can exist at all. The dev/publisher cuts a bunch of their own Steam keys and dumps them off with these shops who take less than the 30% cut that Valve takes from sales within Steam and the dev/publisher gets to keep the difference or pass that on to the customer as a discount. Steam just isn't a monopoly. They allow sellers to use everything that their platform offers for nothing more than a percentage of what is made exclusively from sales within the platform. A seller can sell their game through their own website and take home 100% (less whatever their payment processor charges, usually a single digit percent) of the sale, while still using everything that Steamworks and Steam in general is bringing to the table and all without any lock-in or requirements that they stick with Steam. All of that is a HUGE strike against considering Steam a monopoly, but that's not even everything.

So far as "the competition does not matter" that's largely because the competition (Primarily talking EGS here, but it's apropos UPlay and Origin too) hasn't done anything to make for a better value proposition other than paying for store exclusives and giving developers a rightfully higher cut of sales for a shot at a much smaller portion of the PC market. If Epic offered answers to Proton, Steam Link, communities, workshop, meta-games in the store, quick UI, marketplace, etc... It might make for a real challenge to Steam, but as it stands now there's nothing in EGS that puts up anything approaching half of what you get for the same games in Steam. I've never bought anything in EGS, but trying to use their app with any of the free games that they've given me has immediately turned me right around and sent me back to Steam while it takes literal minutes for the app to get me signed back in and going (and often has to spend time updating a game once it does) while Steam was good to go 2 seconds after boot, never needs me to reauth once I've signed into a system, and keeps my games updated silently without my having to notice or worry.

Now GOG on the other hand, where I have spent a decent amount of money and own a good number of games has managed to make a proposition of giving me a barebones store that gives me barebones downloads of games that don't need updates, or a launcher, without any DRM so I can just download an EXE and get my games. They matter, they're bringing something to the table that nobody else does and I love them for that. I go out of my way to buy games on GOG when they're the sort of things that don't need any of the stuff that Steam is providing.

If any of the other publisher owned storefronts tried to do anything half as ambitious as GOG or Steam, they'd probably matter, but the fact is that they won't because they don't think like Valve or GOG, they think like MBA shitlords who's single trick is extracting rents for properties made by smarter people, often back in the days before those MBAs knew their multiplication tables. The same school of idiots who saw how Netflix had a really good thing going and thought that they could have the good thing themselves so now we have a worse situation than we had before Netflix destroyed the cable industry and we get all of these platforms that don't work as well as Netflix did/does where you have to go to 30 different shitty places to get what you used to find in one really good place. A whole lot of idiots who paid a lot of money to learn in fancy schools that you can personally get rich by convincing a company to kill the golden goose, so long as you immediately proceed to get out of town so it's the next guy's problem to solve before anyone notices that the golden eggs aren't rolling in anymore. It's incomprehensible to me that people are going to bat for those muppets when all they ever do is make things worse so they can line their 401k with another million.

"I prefer a quality storefront that at least presents the pretense of caring about providing a quality product to one that just wants to separate me from my money"

"What are you, some kind of fanboy?"

Called it.

What does this post have to do with anything when it launched on PC the same day as PS5 and XSX? As well, a 10 year old pc would likely have a GTX 1070 or better and that's enough to run the game just fine?

So you are advocating against user driven reviews the alternative which tends to be corporate relations driven reviews? You don't want consumers to have a voice or user based resources?

isn't optimising the games extra costly?

These days compilers can optimise it for the hardware mostly on their own.

I can imagine the annoyance of getting bad reviews on steam because some Dingus is trying to play the game on a 10 year old PC.

Yeah, that's the great thing about PC. You don't have to upgrade your hardware more than once a decade, and you can give feedback to games publishers that chasing ever increasing graphics trends is alienating their customers. You console gamers have to take whatever slop you're given, but us PC gamers don't have to worry about a publisher not supporting backwards compatibility, so we have more market power. We can apply greater pressure on the industry to apply pro-consumer business practices.

Also, something like 30% of PC gamers pirate their games

That's definitely not true. I wish it was.

PC is the largest single platform right now. Even if 30% pirate the game, there are more copies sold for the typical game on PC than PlayStation.