Notch is concerned by Steam’s PC dominance

Have you ever noticed that Minecraft isn’t on Steam?

Well, it isn’t. Which is odd as Steam is the biggest digital PC distributor and Minecraft is one of the PC’s biggest success stories.

The reason, it transpires, is that the game’s creator Markus ‘Notch’ Persson remains concerned about Steam’s grip on the PC market. And the success of his game so far suggests that, to date at least, he hasn’t needed Valve.

Minecraft has kept growing very fast (and it selling faster than ever), which combined with us not being on Steam leads to some potentially interesting strategic positions,” he told PC Gamer.

I’m not quite sure what those are, but we’re a bit wary to submit Minecraft to Steam without knowing more about what we want to do.

As much as I love Steam, I do somewhat worry about the PC as a gaming platform becoming owned by a single entity that takes 30 per cent of all PC games sold.

And although it’s obvious that nothing concrete is in place, Notch also hinted that in future perhaps he may consider working on his own distribution platform.

I’m hoping for a future where more games can self-publish and use social media and friends to market their games,” he added. Perhaps there’s something we could do to help out there? I don’t know. If nothing else, we might work as an inspiration for people to self-publish.

We’re trying to figure out what we want to do long term with the position we have now. We only recently decided to stay as independent as possible and cancelled an unannounced project that we were doing in collaboration with someone else. It’s going to be an interesting future.”