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Steam competitors be like. [Extended?]
(thelemmy.club)
Not OC, duh.
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this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to ask "are other companies bad?" when trying to determine if a company is a monopoly. One thought experiment I like to do is pretend the CEO dies and is replaced by Satan. How much damage could he do? If it's a lot, then probably you've got a monopoly.
Suppose Gaben dies, and he's replaced by Satan. Could he do damage to the gaming community by doing something exorbitant, like charging a 30% cut of game sales from the folks who actually develop the games? Could they do anticompetitive vendor lock stuff like only allowing you to purchase DLC through steam? Only time will tell. And it will, because at some point Gaben will die, and he will be replaced by someone less magnanimous and angelic than him.
They do have competitors, they competitors just aren’t very popular. There is the colloquial definition of monopoly, and a different legal bar for being declared a monopolist under US law.
To be declared a monopolist requires that a company already has destroyed or is actively seeking to destroy competitors through anti competitive behavior. Even if people mix terms, the general idea is that they’re not doing anything unreasonable and anti-competitive to gain their position in the market. They have competitors, they’re just not popular, and steam has not done anything to make them unpopular.
The real danger is that if steam decided to suddenly start being externally anti consumer, like many of it’s competitors already are, it would be difficult for people to migrate away due to a lack of interoperability between services. Users can’t transfer licenses to play games between services, nor can they easily interact with social features on other platforms. But that’s not really steam’s fault, that’s how all the competitors (for the most part) work as well.
The US legal bar for being a monopoly has been a joke since Reagan. But even aside from that, legality is not an interesting concept in discussions like these. Slavery was legal. The real question here is whether this situation has the potential to cause serious harm to society.
Exactly, this is the problem. This is anticompetitive behavior.
Yes it is, this is a deliberate choice they made. No one held a gun to their head. And it is precisely this kind of stuff that antitrust laws were supposed to protect us from. And you can see that in countries which do still have reasonable antitrust laws, Steam is being sued for precisely these practices.
It’s not anti competitive if it is litterlay also what all the competitors are doing, and have been doing since the very dawn of digital markets for software. It also dubious if they could legally even set up such interoperability even if they wanted to, as it could potentially violate parts of the DMCA.
They’re not doing anything to destroy their competitors, they’re not a monopolist, and the repeated failures of court cases against them all over the world shows that. There are a few on going cases against them, but, there are far far more cases that have already finished that failed to show any monopoly seeking behavior.
That also makes no sense. Literally any large company could do great deals of harm even if they have countless competitors if they set out for the goal of just doing harm.
There is a serious fundamental difference between a monopoly and a general market preference.
If every single one of your competitors all decide to be stupid and you don't you arnt a monopoly. You just are the only one not being stupid.
Which is why there shouldn't be any large companies.
Surely you understand that the amount of harm that a company with no serious competitors can do is much higher and longer lasting than the harm that a company with competitors can do.
If they start being stupid, they’re suddenly on par with the competitors already being stupid. Suddenly they have viable competitors.
A monopoly is when all competitors have been destroyed, not when competitors aren’t particularly competitive. At least, under the letter of US law.
Yes, an evil ceo could do much harm by turning steam into the companies shooting themselves in the face. However, they are currently one of the only ones not doing that, so that's where gamers will go.
There's a difference between a monopoly that exists because all other options are shit and a monopoly that exists because of anticompetitive practices.
Tbf they already take a 30% cut, I dont have a huge issue with it though.
30% isn't a big cut, and the DLC thing is to prevent customers from getting scammed
Wow, thanks Steam!
Dude... What? Just pass the blunt pls
Haha love this post. I find it astonishing how "leftist" lemmy can't see this and keeps defending this obvious Monopoly just because the current CEO is an intelligent greedy guy.. Happy suckers all around I guess..