At least two major retailers are set to demand games publishers remove Steam from their games - or they will not sell them in any form.

That's according to trade mag MCV, which reports that key retailers fear that the Valve download service - said to serve a huge 80 per cent of the PC download market - has a monopoly on the sector and will damage their own in-preporation rival platforms.

"If we have a digital service, then I don't want to start selling a rival in-store," the digital boss at "one of the biggest UK games retailers" told the mag.

"Publishers are creating a monster - we are telling suppliers to stop using Steam in their games."

The head of sales at "a big-name digital service provider" agreed: "At the moment the big digital distributors need to stock games with Steam. But the power resides with bricks and mortar retailers, they can refuse to stock these titles. Publishers are hesitant, but retail must put pressure on them."

Gaikai CEO David Perry speculates however that Steam could become the games-equivilent of iTunes, dictating the terms of the games market - not the other way around.

"Steam has made it so easy for everyone and they have lots of users. But how long do you wait before you take control of your own digital strategy? Like with iTunes, at some point it's going to be too late," he said.

Some of the biggest PC games - such as Call of Duty and Fallout - currently use Steam. Ultimately, do you reckon games retailers will stop stocking those games any time soon? We can't see it, somehow.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar ... ?id=275026

Yeah... mind that failboat there

You can see their point to an extent. It is going to be the end of retailers otherwise.

As I see it, they have three choices: Do nothing, throw their toys out the pram, or go out and make a damn good service to rival Steam.

The third option costs time and money so they won't do that. Doing nothing will get them nothing, so they throw their toys out the pram...

The scary thing is that Steam offers a wider range of games than most retailers. I only buy retail games when they are in the 3 for £10 bundles type thing. My only other "retail" games now are presents bought for me. Everything else on the pC is Steam or GOG.

I have not bought a game from a shop in ages. I get them through Steam now. They are automatically updated, you don't have piles of disks everywhere and you can back them up just by copying your Steam folder off to another HDD. No need to re-install them disk by disk.

Plus you get some great deals on Steam. Recently I bought Dead Space for £7.50 and Stalker SoC and CoP as a package for about £6.50

Does that mean that eventually each shop will only sell games that are on their own download service? If so, then they'll soon find themselves with very few titles, as the developers are most likely going to either go with the most widely used (Steam) or go across platforms.

Foot - gun - bang!!!1