Not really, what they actually do for most games is basically what Google and Apple do: a token review, then nothing apart from some niceties for players. Then they pocket an immense profit, it came out in one of Epic's cases that Valve net $50 million/year profit per employee.
The only thing for developers they still do better than Google and Apple really is a few promotions throughout the year that target specific genres for released games developers can register for (whereas Google and Apple select the games they promote), and the "Next Fest" 3x a year for unreleased games.
They used to do stuff like "visibility rounds" that would reach 100,000s of people who didn't know about your game - the same feature today targets people who already wishlisted your game, so these days most developers have to put significant effort and money into promoting their Steam page on other channels like tiktok/youtube/reddit.
Well, plus there's the whole version management and packaging and hosting and distributing giant amounts of data.
If you are an indie team that makes a 50GB game and has 50k players, distributing and update management would be a gargantuan task without Steam or something like it. 2.5 petabytes of bandwidth isn't cheap.
Yes what they do is profitable, I'm not saying that it isn't. But paying for what they do is (clearly) still more attractive to developers than rolling their own infrastructure to do the same.
That firehose isn't pointed at everyone, being the newest game on Steam has a very fleeting value and then it's on you to find customers. It used to be that Steam played a much more active role in spreading traffic around games but these days the median game is doing $1,000 - $2,000 in sales which is like 100 - 200 copies sold. It's more and more like Google and Apple where what you get out of it is just a function of how much you spend on customer acquisition, how well you reach social media, and whether you can leverage these to become popular enough to achieve prominence.
Everyone launches on Steam because they are an utterly-entrenched monopoly, all other PC game distribution channels are collectively a very small percent.
The firehose only ever pointed at "everyone" back when Valve was hand-picking every game that got released on Steam. Back then we only saw a few games released every week, and because of that they got that much more attention. But that also meant that most games never got any attention on Steam, since they were never released there.
However, Valve has since removed most barriers to entry and these days Steam sees more than 350 releases every week (nearly 20k in 2025), a number that is constantly growing. Add to the fact that there are already more than 130,000 games on Steam, that every new release has to compete with, and it is no wonder that median sales are low:
The low barrier to entry means that a lot of crappy games being released on Steam, that were never going to sell a lot, and the actually good games have to compete with all the other good games on the platform, that are probably also being sold at a much greater discount than your newly released title
Right, all the games that they think will be successful. Most games won't- it's a power law market.
There's nothing preventing a game dev from selling exclusively on their own site. It's not as though Steam has exclusive access to Windows customers like the App/Play Store do on their platforms. Steam earns its customers and their trust and developers follow.
