You say they engage in monopolistic practices, but did you cite one? You dismissed a lot of the same points from the video that I did, but I don't see what supports your point that they're behaving as a monopolist.

not to mention you have the entire steam proton system and the VR system at your disposal both of which are Super complicated to set up stand alone.

Proton is actually super easy for a competitor to set up standalone. There's nothing stopping the likes of GOG from just distributing Proton or Wine with their Windows executables for Linux customers, if they wanted, and they can even obfuscate it and make it invisible to the player like Steam does. The big trick that Valve pulled out of their hat for Proton, which again is not monopolistic, is that they re-encode videos that use Microsoft's proprietary video codecs, since they can't legally share the DLL that enables playback of those videos. To do what Valve does here is replicable, but it comes at a cost to the distributor. I can't speak to the effort involved in setting up a competing VR platform, but it seems to be of less and less concern at this point.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's monopolistic practice is soley due to its market share, that alone is enough to. It's a monopoly that isn't anti-competitive, it's inherently not bad, as long as it isn't being Abused, many misconstrue anti-competitive as monopolistic, the term doesn't go hand and hand. Monopolistic competition exists when many companies offer competing products or services that are similar, but not perfect substitutes. This is valve at the moment with steam. Alternatives exist but none come even close to being a full substitute. but that's OK it isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't change the fact it's monopolistic.

As for the gog thing, maybe it is easier than I thought, if so I'm surprised that no other game store has done so, steam dedicated an entire division to it and it still has a lot of issues with functionality and usage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

A monopolistic practice is one that enforces a monopoly unfairly. Just having market share means they're approaching a monopoly, but it doesn't mean they're getting there by monopolistic practices.