Valve is an effective monopoly. There is no talking around that.
They have made many straight-up anticompetitive moves, to cement that. The biggest example in my mind is the “other storefront pricing policy,” but there have been several over the years.
What other companies are doing is irrelevant to that point, unfortunately, as they don’t have enough market share to compete. It does not excuse Valve or make the situation any less worrying to me.
Valve is only a monopoly because they are the best. If another storefront showed up and covered the gaps in what valve offers then they’d be able to carve out a niche for themselves like gog with drm free downloads. You can’t get that on steam. The others such as epic only seem to be able to come up with anti competitive bullshit that only harms the consumer. All these fucking companies these days seem to have forgotten that they exist to serve us. Steam at least still has a great deal of momentum in that direction. They do far more for us than any of the other options IMO. It’s not even close.
As far as I’m aware only gog really “competes” with them the other platforms are worse by a lot.
…This is exactly what I am talking about.
Why do people pivot to whataboutisms?
Valve is an effective monopoly. There is no talking around that.
They have made many straight-up anticompetitive moves, to cement that. The biggest example in my mind is the “other storefront pricing policy,” but there have been several over the years.
What other companies are doing is irrelevant to that point, unfortunately, as they don’t have enough market share to compete. It does not excuse Valve or make the situation any less worrying to me.
Valve is only a monopoly because they are the best. If another storefront showed up and covered the gaps in what valve offers then they’d be able to carve out a niche for themselves like gog with drm free downloads. You can’t get that on steam. The others such as epic only seem to be able to come up with anti competitive bullshit that only harms the consumer. All these fucking companies these days seem to have forgotten that they exist to serve us. Steam at least still has a great deal of momentum in that direction. They do far more for us than any of the other options IMO. It’s not even close.