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US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'.
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Steam...
Edit: Funny how I was replying to a comment with examples of companies that wish they had 70% of the market under their control yet people didn't disagree with OP but bringing up Valve? Oh man, Gaben can do no wrong! 70% of the market under the control of a company owned by a single man? No problemo!
You can't break up steam and improve the market in any particular way. Since they're not really big on exclusivity agreements, there's also very little a court order would do to make the market more competitive.
If consumers were more evenly spread around different platforms there would be actual competition to determine prices and margins for the developers. Right now Epic takes a smaller share of the revenues but the price is the same to try and compensate for the smaller number of buyers. With their dominant position it's pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more (which would require a ridiculous amount of capital), people have their well established habits and won't move even if the product they're using isn't necessarily the best or they're spending more than they need to.
That's not what a monopoly is.
Epic had all the money in the world and tons of time (and users) to create a viable alternative. They didn't fail because valve squeezed them out, they failed because they refuse to improve their product. In fact, it could be said that Epic wanted to become the monopoly themselves. If they spent half as much effort on their product as they do on lawsuits and exclusivity deals, they would have been a viable competitor. But they didn't. At the end of the day, it sucks to use. Steam does not.
EGS is perfectly usable and in my opinion is better than Steam in some aspects (way less bloat, open the app and your games are right there to launch even if you're on the storefront), your saying they refuse to improve their product just shows you're not using it because it's way better than it was on release.
And yes, Valve has a monopoly, they control enough of the market that it goes where they decide it's going and they're the default solution people turn to when they need the services they offer, they're also working on increasing their reach with streaming on the platform, forums, reviews and so on. If all you need is found on a single platform and it's the platform that a vast majority is using then what do we call that? That's right, a monopoly.
Want a similar example? Microsoft is considered to be in a monopolistic position with Windows, yet they have competitors, same with Office, same with Explorer back in the day. Google is a monopoly even though competitors exist.
Fun fact: You can change which page your Steam client opens up to by default. I haven't seen the store unless I wanted to in years.
Opinions aside, that's still not the legal definition of a monopoly.
Monopoly: Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service.
Valve does not have exclusive control of the PC gaming market. The EGS funded lawsuit even says that in the docket. They are only suing on the grounds of the keys issue. I don't disagree with you that when Newell leaves, things COULD change, but you can't base the present on the possible future. At this time, steam is on "top" because the vast majority of users have voted with their wallet and time. Not because they are engaged in sweeping anti-competitive backdoor dealings. You know, like EGS does.
Well then, by your definition Microsoft never had a monopoly and Google isn't one either.
You're reaching because steam makes you seethe for whatever reason.
Betting you have a rage-boner for Firefox too.
I'm guessing you feel this way about any company from the west lmao
(1) Many PC gamers simply wait for games to go on sale. Epic buying exclusive agreements isn't as dominating of a strategy as they think it is; even if it's expensive.
(2) Steam is the incumbent. You have to be better in order to be worth it to switch. As you mentioned, Epic is lacking in features
(3) Valve has not treated the desktop market the way Apple as treated the app store. Look at how far Epic has taken Apple to court; compared to their biggest rival, Valve
(4) Valve has put in alot of work in other layers; such as making open hardware and contributing to AMD GPU drivers on Linux. They work on the whole platform, even parts they do not directly make money off. This is called investment.
(5) What exactly would you break Steam into being? One app for reviews, another for buying, and another for launching games? Break the development studio into a different company? Even if Epic is throwing around money made from its game engine and games?
That's the thing though, with their market share an hypothetical competitor could be better and people still wouldn't switch, Steam is where their games are, it's where their friends play, building everything from scratch elsewhere wouldn't be worth the trouble even if the alternative was better.
Store, development, forums, trading platform, launcher, online gaming services, hardware, streaming integrated into the platform, DRM... Valve has their hands all over the place and there's a single person at the top of that. Wanna wait until they start becoming bad before considering that maybe it's not a good thing that they have a hold on 70% of the market? Hell, just the fact that Newell could decide that they're closing their doors tomorrow and no one has access to their games anymore should be fucking worrying to everyone.
At what seams would you break Steam at? In this day and age those are just app store features. Is there anything you listed Sony, Microsoft or Apple don't have?
I do understand having a Steam library would make it harder to switch but most of us have a few GOG games and collect Epic free games as well (though, I haven't even looked at the free Epic games since Christmas).
People even download a launcher like Hero Launcher on the Steamdeck to run games from other stores. We have the freedom to use Steam in tagent with other stores and we do. You can buy a game off GOG and add it to Steam to launch it.
Steam is simply the better product, hands down.
Edit: To prove that I see your point but just don't agree with it: Here is a quote from an ArsTechnica article about a judge viewing Steam as a monopoly.
Does this judge expect me to buy a game from Epic which is missing features and then pay Valve a fee to contact the developer through Steam? Will Epic cheapen their price by 30% so I can "enable Steam features." This would be unprecedented. I cannot go to Amazon to return/complain about a product I bought from Walmart.
If Valve was the company getting the exclusive deals and preventing Epic from selling things then I'd be more inclined to agree with OPs point.
Their market dominance isn't because of anticompetitive practices, it's because of customer-friendly practices. People like it, so people use it.
So? A private company having control of the market is never a good thing, no matter how good they are at the moment because you never know what will happen in the future.
So if people trust a platform it's hard to build an anti-trust case because the owner has a majority share.
It's okay if you don't like them for whatever reason, but comparing them to google, apple and Disney is ignorant at best, dishonest at the very least.
Rethink this stuff before you put yourself up as a reactionary lmao
Alright then, let's do nothing until Newell dies and they become controlled by someone else that people don't like as much, maybe you guys will wake up then.
"Let's wait for them to start doing illegal stuff before we use the law against them." Yeah, of course.
immediately reacts
Steam isn't actually a monopoly in a meaningful way
Neither did google. The problem is that this case, from the title stated in another thread, Google are doing anti-competitive shit to make sure they maintain the dominant position. But steam does not practice in anti competitive behaviours (as far as I know anyway). In fact, the competitor can arguably be held to anti competitive behaviour depending on how you spin it.
Steam is currently being sued for anti competitive practices and do we really need to wait until they do bad shit before we start to consider that a single company having a good on 70% of the market isn't a good thing?
Isn't that only about the 30% fee?
Steam provides a lot of value for that 30% fee, more than Apple does.
Wtf is with people deciding a monopoly is good because the company hasn't started enshittifying it yet. It will happen. It's what monopolies do. Healthy competition is an important part of preventing enshittification.
Steam has no competitors because nobody is competing with them, not because they are forcing nobody to compete with them.
Steam isn't abusing their dominant position to prevent competition. Other companies could make their own storefront and compete with steam. Nobody does in a way that's actually comparable to steam.
Steam has a monopoly, but it's not because steam is actively keeping it that way.
If you have enough control on the market you don't have to actively try and stop competitors, you're just the default solution and people automatically turn to you. Walmart doesn't need to use dirty tactics to compete against mom and pop shops, the day they open people just start going to Walmart instead because they have everything in a single place.
That wasn't always the case, and I don't know if it's currently the case. At least at one point, they would intentionally lose money by dropping their prices below profitability just to get mom and pop shops to shut down, and then raise prices back up to profitability. Or they'd force suppliers to cut costs only for them to the point where the supplier wasn't making a profit, but by then they had stopped selling to competitors.
There's a lot more evidence for Walmart committing anti-trust than Valve.
The day Newell leaves people will be eating their words.
Nope, about including price fixing clauses.
The 30% fee is another issue entirely.
The price fixing clauses are about steam keys being sold off-platform
And that practice is what? Providing value to the consumer? The thing that MAYBE can be used against them is the clause for selling STEAM KEYS outside of steam. But that is it. Take a look at mindustry, the game is free everywhere else but steam. But that did not violate steam ToS since they didn't sell the steam keys for less than what is listed on steam.
You know anyone can be sued for anything right?
Being sued doesn't mean a damn thing, the case judgement is what matters.
You don't need to have full control of the market to be considered a monopoly, you just need a big enough share that you can make it sway in the direction that you want, which Steam has. Example: Microsoft is considered a monopoly even though there's Apple and Linux that get market shares.
I always find it funny how defensive people get when I bring this up about Steam on Lemmy of all places, suddenly people are perfectly ok with the centralization of power in the hands of a single person.
It's not about market share, it's about actually using that market share to negatively impact competition. Steam doesn't have any sort of exclusivity agreements with anyone, nor do they get paid if a customer buys a key on another platform or on the dev's own website. There's no anti-competitive behavior here at all, people use Steam because they like the experience more.
There's a massive difference between anti-competitive behavior and just being a really good option. You don't get broken up because you're successful, you get broken up because you're abusing your dominant market position. I have yet to see any evidence that Valve does this.
Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it's customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call
Funny the things you can do when you don't have to worry about shareholders.
So because they're treating you right it's ok to put 70% of the market in the hands of a single person?
They're not anti-competitive, that's the difference. Devs can even sell Steam keys on their own website and take 100% of the profit if they so choose, and there's absolutely no lock-in.
I'm not sure where the anti-trust is. Having a high marketshare by itself doesn't mean you're committing anti-trust, abusing that market position does.
You say that like your only option is to buy games from steam.
There are many other online stores you can use. Sorry you don't like the most popular/oldest/one that reflects the wishes of the consumer the most.
Where companies with monopolies are found to gain that title by ousting competitors and brutal buyouts and tactics literally every time, Valve exists. Literally. They just exist. Big difference between a monopoly and the best.
Other companies also exist. In fact there are several launchers and two other digital distributors, and several websites, where one can purchase games. There are some things Steam is shit on. The still feels old interface as a broad example. Competitors could push in, like Epic. Instead, they manage to create the next step up from a gold-tainted dung pile, shit on their own launcher or store stability and performance, and create an experience so bad that Steam is able, through the fuckups of their rivals, maintain a market majority.
SHHHH!!!
Monopolies and authoritarians aren't bad as long as people like them! Hadn't you heard?
Huh.
Maybe it's just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO's ranting about steam and swearing they'll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.
I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn't what I'd call monopolistic anymore, it's just good sales on games and inertia.
Given epic's often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.
I agree, sort of. People may be right to point out that it's not only about a dominant position but also about abusing that market power to lock people in. Still I think our entire platform-economy is a little problematic. People want one-stop-shopping because it's really convenient, and people tend to go to platforms where others already are. So most people stick with Steam, Spotify, Uber, Whatsapp, etc. I don't think this has to be a problem, if indeed these platform are in a way neutral, free, not abusing their power. Sometimes these platforms already behave in responsible manner, but there really is no guarantee that this will stay that way. Everything with a dominant position can be enshittified, including Steam. What we need are FOSS decentralized platforms! Platforms where everyone comes together are so important, that they shouldn't be left to for-profit companies, people should come together in public squares.
Thing is we can't know for sure they're not abusing their power... Oh wait, we can in fact!
Game price is based on wanting a return on investment after a certain number of sales, the amount of money needed to make a profit is based on the development cost, every time someone in the distribution chain takes a cut the price increases. Valve takes a 30% cut and that's enough to have made their owner a billionaire, those billions come from money you and me and all other Steam users spent that we didn't need to.
It's the same logic as in any other market, the only difference is that other companies are trading publically so people get angry because their numbers are public and we can easily see that they're making billions in profit off of us to enrich investors, well with Valve there's only one investor.
And again, do we need to wait until they start acting in truly awful ways before we act on the fact that they control a majority of the market and are trying to increase their market dominance? Newell could die tomorrow and the company could then be made public and turn to shit, what then? "Dang, we should have done something while we had the chance I guess..."???