this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Steam is not a monopoly in any way.
Yeah, I suppose you're right, I overstated it.
But Steam is pretty dominant. Steam is also pretty well behaved and privately owned. If they ever went public, I could see all sorts of hijinx Steam could pull with their PC gaming dominance, between exclusive release deals, leveraging publishers to use Steam exclusive tools, etc.
That's all hypothetical though at this point, but I still like to buy stuff on GoG and Humble Bundle at least sometimes, even though with my Steam Deck, and just Steam's Linux support, Steam is by far the best and easiest way to buy games.
I think as long as Gabe and actual Steam employees continue to run things, we are okay. It's when the venture capitalists and such get in, that they start to "maximise profit", and everything gets enshittified, the service tanks, becomes a shell of it's former self, and yet the vultures all take off with mad stacks. Steam has earned my trust, and they seem to continue to deserve it.
steam is a monopoly
they're engaging in price fixing, which is pretty much by definition monopolistic activity, by denying publishers the ability to price games lower on other distribution platforms
if ea, the otherwise second largest distributor on the platform, can't compete without crawling its way back to steam, then it's pretty clearly a monopoly
The price fixing is only for steam keys which is completely reasonable.
The mere existence of the Epic shop, let alone Humble, Itch, hell, the ifcomp.org and /usr/ports/games exposes your wild hyperbole.
"exposes your wild hyperbole" lmao
your argument is that all these organisations are successively: setting up shop, attempting to compete with steam, and then failing, should be all the proof you need that steam has a monopoly on the PC market
comcast doesn't have less of a monopoly on internet just because google fiber exists in one city somewhere