this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Steam has several competitors, they all just suck, most of all EGS.
Google made the same argument in this case, but Epic responded by saying that impairing the competition is sufficient to describe the behavior as unlawful. Like Google, Valve control the vast majority of the market, charge a fee that is way above the cost of service, and have rules that make the competitors less appealing. Like this one:
(source)
But Valve doesnt do anything to impair competition. Google owns and controls the operating system, require their store to be installed, and pay off other companies to be the default. Valve doesn't do anything like that.
In fact Valve is pretty much the only company trying to promote a FOSS OS that no one controls.
You mean like Play Store?
No, not even a little.
What? Oh FFS. Context. Yes, Play Store has competitors, so yes absolutely a lot.
Then he has no competitors.
What exactly did they do that Steam has also done?
Steam does nothing to prevent others from competing, to my knowledge, other than just being the best at what they do.
Depends on what you mean by "monopoly". In the strictest sense it means they have zero competition (hence the prefix "mono",meaning one), which is clearly untrue because we have Epic, GoG, Origin, Battlenet, Meta, etc. etc.
In the case of Google, it means they take anticompetitive measures. I've asked you what anticompetitive measures Valve takes but you don't seem to want to provide an answer. Why is that?
If you mean "big business that other companies have trouble competing with", that does not fit any definition of a "monopoly".
It's not "impossible" at all. It is very difficult because you're fighting established brands that are not regional, and have decades of experience and brand recognition on you. Competing with them would require a fuckton of money and also some sort of novel features to bring to the market that they're not. These are not anticompetitive measures, it's just effective business.
How would you go about even trying to rectify that? Would you force Valve to give money and promotion to a competing service? Or would you just go full CCP and ban them entirely in favor of the state-sponsored Bytedance option?
That's simply not what a monopoly is. You're confused.
A monopoly is when there's only a single energy company available, which is not the case here.
I already have. Lots of companies are doing that right now, but they all suck. I mean GoG is great as a simple game store but most publishers are not willing to sell without DRM and their store is mostly nothing more than just a store, where Steam is so much more than that.
Epic has a long history of anti-consumer behavior that has earned them a bad reputation. They're also partially owned by the CCP.
Did you even read your own link?
This is for like, cell tower companies and stuff where infrastructure costs are in the billions. A game store has no infrastructural costs in excess of any other business.
You can't just call a business a monopoly because it costs a lot of money to compete with them.
You've replied to me 3 times now without ever answering my question about what anticompetitive measures Steam has taken to remain a supposed monopoly and thus I'm left to assume you're just trolling and will have to end this conversation. Goodbye.