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US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'.
(www.commondreams.org)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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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
Any company that makes their owner or investors billionaires while people like you and me have a hard time affording food and a roof is evil. That money comes from somewhere.
You really gotta aim your sights higher if that's the criteria you're using for a "monopoly". Valve is a private company, that sells games and other "wants", not "needs". If people can't afford games, without losing their house or struggling to eat, I don't think that's a company's fault.
If Valve was even close to using anti-competitive methods to maintain market dominance, you'd be correct. However, a company having superior quality products and making good business decisions is not a basis or definition of a monopoly. They just make good decisions and provide quality products that people want and enjoy.
Instead of using strawman and false equivalency fallacies, try taking a look at what really constitutes anti-competitive practices.
Continue defending the billionaires, I'm sure they care 👍
You're either a troll, extremely young, naive, and/or uneducated if you think my comment above is in defense of billionaires. I literally have comments in my history to the absolute opposite*. What I'm "defending" is the definition of a monopoly when it comes to business practices; of which Valve has exuded none of the behavior of.
You think any business doing well, providing quality goods and services, not being anti-consumer, and being the most trusted platform for gaming as a result is the definition of a monopoly. Again, you use fallacy to try and argue a point.
Wait... Are you that dickhead from Epic who pays for exclusivity rights, steaks user data from Steam files, or something? I could see that guy being pissed at Steam for seemingly no reason.
* one such comment, if I recall, is about how much I hated Steam when it first came out for killing LAN parties by locking down CD keys.
But that's exactly what you're doing though. You're in front of a company that controls 70% of the market, meaning they can do whatever the fuck they want regarding pricing and you're defending them because you don't see any issue with that.
So yeah, let's wait until they start truly acting like shit before thinking "Hey, maybe we shouldn't have let them get such a hold on the market..."
If they hiked prices above what other stores offered, consumers would leave. If they lowered prices to be untenable for developers, developers would leave, and consumers would follow (they'd probably grumble, but they'd go where the games are). There isn't a lock in for future sales on either side. So do you think they can do whatever they want with prices with no consequences?
If you're big enough and people are dependent on your product then no they won't simply leave.
It's not like owning a DVD deciding your next DVD player won't be a Sony because you don't like them. The products that you "own" are dependent on Steam, of you've got thousands of games on there you can't just leave and bring your library with you to another platform.
That's the same for any digital platform, though. Literally, any gaming store except for GOG won't let you take your library with you. You don't own the game as far as any of them are concerned. You're claiming Steam is some kind of monster because their platform for games you don't own is better than other platforms for games you don't own. Because their platform doesn't sucks, it earns them a lot of business. That's it. That's the magic sauce.
With options, if Stream sucked, people would go elsewhere.
If Steam had anything resembling a monopoly they'd do everything they could to remove platforms offering the same games. The number of platforms has only expanded since they started.
If Stream was a monopoly, they'd not only undercut others, they'd pay for exclusivity rights. Steam let's developers sell their own keys from anywhere the developer wants, while taking no cut when that happens, even though Steam still has to front the bandwidth and storage for the game to be played.
If Steam was a monopoly, they'd buy up smaller firms, buy businesses with similar, but competing services, or take another company's product, reverse engineer it, and make their own undercutting the original. They've done the opposite at every turn.
You really don't understand monopolistic tactics. You're not going to understand it, either, since you've continues to conflate good business decisions that earn trust and adoption with anti-consumer practices. Steam makes good business decisions, listens to their customers and developers about ways to make the service or products better, and has more business because of it. They have a better product without stooping to the air a in lot of current businesses are pulling.
That's it. 70% market dominance doesn't fucking matter. They could have 90% and it still wouldn't be a monopoly with their current strategy. Other businesses need to suck less.
You should review your definition of monopoly because it doesn't imply bad behaviour by the party in a monopolistic position, it just means they have enough control over the market to sway it in the direction that they way, may they do it or not doesn't matter and that's exactly the power that Valve has over the PC gaming market, hence why competitors can't succeed and companies end up just closing their platform and making their games available on Steam instead.
Did you read the articles? The judge acknowledged that Google is widely recognized as the best general purpose search engine but that part of why they are used so often is because of Google paying people to make Google the default search option which many people never change.
Doesn't matter, there's alternatives therefore it's not a monopoly, that's was the point I was replying to. I'm not the one making the rules or definitions!
(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.