^^^
It’s not a monopoly. There are numerous other stores like epic, GoG, and others. Consumers have other options.
Because a monopoly is a company that operates in their market unopposed. In this instance, it’s not Steam’s fault kinda sucks (or doesn’t quite aim to be a direct competitor in the case of GoG) but the argument is still there that Steam is sitting as the only distributor for PC.
Personally, this is why I keep wanting to root for GoG, Epic and such. Monopolies are dangerous to consumers and the markets they operate in. Right now, Steam is being surprisingly effective at remaining a “good guy” but there’s a lot of concern even among Steam fans of what the landscape will look like in a post-Gaben world. Setting the PC gaming market up to have Steam as the only option when that inevitably comes to pass (touch wood that that’s no time soon, of course) could spell a certain level of disaster in a world where the anti-monopoly law-makers have shown to not really care about upholding that standard.
There is little to no concern about steam, you can’t even say that they aren’t great (their launcher is horrible for example).
Steam has the worst launcher, except all the others.
I can use gog without any laucher.
Did you mean to have more in this post? I’m not sure I fully understand. I’ll remove if there wasn’t more you were trying to say
I assume he’s asking “why can’t steam be considered a monopolistic platform”
Mono means one.
There are multiple (more than one) other stores available.Mono does mean one, but that’s not the legal definition of a monopoly.
I was simplifying it for OP.
I’m also not a lawyer.
poly means many
so if both mono and poly are in monopoly, why do you only pick mono, or why does only mono matter here?
Because that’s the way i decided to dumb it down. Apparently it wasn’t dumbed down enough.
Thank god nobody from this comment section was involved in antitrust cases against Microsoft.
M$ did hella shady, monopolistic stuff (patent theft, market manipulation, very likely corporate espionage, and certainly most visibly prefferential treatment of their own software ecosystem and sabotage of third party software on their platforms) to create and enforce market dominance. Unless Valve has been doing something I’m unaware of to kill other platforms, they’re not really similar situations.
Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here. I think Steam is a clunky piece of software that’s popular mostly because everyone else missed the moment to start competing and Valve gained monopoly unopposed. Other viable competitors tried and failed at even gaining a foothold and are relegated to small niches because it’s impossible to move people who amassed content libraries over the years. Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard. You’re ignoring all of the warning signs because they didn’t screw you over yet.
Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.
It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.
But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.
It might be. It hasn’t been tested in court.
I lean towards ‘no’ because I do not see moves on their part to actively attack other distributors, but I admit I have not done research on this subject.
Based purely on having used many other distribution platforms, I think they (Valve) just legitimately have the best service currently. Everyone else either kinda sucking (GOG, as much as I love them), or really sucking (EGS, Origin, UPlay, etc), and losing to you in the market, doesn’t make you a monopoly.
I think they care about their customers just about as much as they care about making money, and aside from GOG, the competition simply does not. It’s a pretty good demonstration to how capitalism has failed us, to be honest, because any of those competitors would have been able to compete if they hadn’t treated their customers like shit.
I lean towards ‘no’ because I do not see moves on their part to actively attack other distributors
That doesn’t matter. There’s a difference between having a monopoly and abusing it to distort the market. It’s the abuse that’s illegal, not the monopoly in itself.
Don’t take this from me :(
