No. First mover advantage is just that strong. How are the competitors to whatsapp or facebook doing? At best you have something like tiktok, which might be technically "social" media but is a totally different segment. You don't catch up with old high school buddies on tiktok, for instance.
All of the examples you gave, the challengers had some revolutionary idea/improvement on top. Tiktok had its recommendation algorithm and short videos. Google had pagerank. That's also the reason why whatsapp hasn't been supplanted. There's no room for innovation (or nobody bothered trying). The same is true for digital distribution. Every steam competitor is basically "steam but [publisher]" or in epic's case, "steam but with steam games".
That's what the person who started this comment chain said, though. Every Steam competitor has been "does the same thing as Steam, but worse" so why would anyone switch over?
There is some argument to be made that the cost benefit analysis for your average user doesn't make sense unless the platform is a significant improvement over steam. Having two fragmented systems is a huge inconvenience to users now almost to the point that I will outright refuse to play games that are not on Steam.
And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doing the work of the devil himself
That's not the same as "terrible" though? Signal is basically "whatsapp but not facebook", but you wouldn't say it's "terrible". Same with lyft (which came after uber), or ubereats (which came after many food delivery startups).
