this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
170 points (93.4% liked)

PC Gaming

8502 readers
412 users here now

For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki

Rules:

  1. Be Respectful.
  2. No Spam or Porn.
  3. No Advertising.
  4. No Memes.
  5. No Tech Support.
  6. No questions about buying/building computers.
  7. No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
  8. No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
  9. No off-topic posts/comments.
  10. Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
170
Valve faces a £656 million lawsuit in the UK for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers' (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
131 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago

Monopolies are often great for consumers... When they're nationalized. Obviously that's not going to happen with Valve any time soon.

What would the benefit be to breaking up Valve? How would you even go about doing that? The obvious choice is to break out different business units- break things like the hardware sales and game development into separate companies. But that still doesn't address the issue of them having too much market share for software sales.

The next beat thing I can think of would be to have some sort of regulatory body just to place restrictions on the industry. Which, of course, would vary from country to country, and would probably have to include all of their competitors: Epic, GoG, and the various publisher-specific stores, maybe even other storefronts like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It would be hard not to also hit the mobile games industry too (which, to be fair, might be a good thing). But this kind of thing is usually reserved for things like utilities, communications, financial markets, etc. Such an organization for a luxury recreationak market... I have to wonder how much political appetite there really would be for that? Is that really what people want their governments to be focusing on?

Do you have a better solution to propose?