this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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You forced it on people by demanding it for a must-have game... which came on discs. To some extent, even now, fuck you.
Other comments talk about great sale prices, which is often an anticompetitive practice called "dumping."
I'd be less blunt if people could admit it's a monopoly. 'Oh I never even consider other stores.' Uh-huh. 'I mean there's competitors, but they hardly matter. Even billion-dollar companies can't make theirs relevant.' You don't say. 'Valve can even afford to let devs sell keys wherever, and the customers still get their ecosystem!' Yeah, wow. We have a word for that. 'How dare you.'
The problem is everyone who tries to do what Steam does does it incompetently so it's not viable.
GOG Galaxy is the closest I've seen to a viable competitor though and I respect the work they put into making older games run on newer hardware.
Steam is a monopoly surely, but it's a rare case, or maybe the only case, where it became a monopoly both because it is actually a good service that is not enshittified, and because the competitors kept shooting themselves in the foot.
I guess that's what you get when you don't have any obligation to shareholders.
I think most ppl agree that it's a monopoly, it's just that they are a monopoly not because of anticompetitive practices but because everyone else sucks. steam does give a lot of value to small game devs cause it makes it easy for ppl to find your game (but I'm not sure if that's worth the 30% revenue cut). if there was a better platform that took less revenue then devs would simply use that instead.
This, I mean.. Epic tried and had a storefront so terrible they had to bribe developers into making their games exclusive. Something that never fucking worked for any game that wasn't Kingdom Hearts; and only resulted in the games bombing because they released on a constantly malfunctioning storefront that constantly got bad publicity.
And Origin was literally ran by EA, so..... yeah...
GOG is the only real competitor Steam has, and most people's opinion of it is "This is nerd shit", which is a take even I agree with because the only games it really has are older than dirt, meaning I'm the only one who gives a shit about them.
I don't agree that being the best at a thing is a monopoly. Being the literal only thing is a monopoly.
No monopoly has ever been literally the only thing.
there are thousands of government-granted monopolies where they are literally the only thing
SiriusXM is that kind of monopoly right fucking now. They are the only provider of satellite radio and have no direct competition after XM and Sirius were allowed to merge.
Wow, hopefully we'll invent some competing way to listen to music in a car.
But y'know what, sure, my absolute was overreaching.
Yours still was too.
Standard Oil never had all the oil. AT&T never had all the phone lines. The worst, most blatantly illegal monopolies had competitors. They were still monopolies. What the word almost always means, does not require 100.0% market share. Shit gets weird well before that.
AT&T did have all the phone lines in a given area. They still do. Just like cable. The market isn't always as broad as the entire world, the entire country, or even an entire state. Comcast has a monopoly in many places by being the only provider of cable service in a lot of places, just as AT&T was the only provider of phone service to a lot of places.
And if a single house in the county has DirecTV, it doesn't count. Right?
AT&T tended to have abundant small competitors, even since the 19th century. They just kept suing them out of existence or buying them.
All of which is really missing the fucking point - absolute monopoly is rare and weird. Most monopolies have competitors. They're still monopolies. They command overwhelming market share, which lets them single-handedly shape the market. Having that power is what makes them a monopoly - abusing that power would make them a trust.
They do not.
They really do not.
They really, really do not.