this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
749 points (90.3% liked)

Games

16838 readers
715 users here now

Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)

Posts.

  1. News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
  2. Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
  3. No humor/memes etc..
  4. No affiliate links
  5. No advertising.
  6. No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
  7. No self promotion.
  8. No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
  9. No politics.

Comments.

  1. No personal attacks.
  2. Obey instance rules.
  3. No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
  4. Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.

My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.

Other communities:

Beehaw.org gaming

Lemmy.ml gaming

lemmy.ca pcgaming

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Steam is a natural monopoly, which although still not entirely good but are a wholly different beast from monopolies made by exploiting flaws in the system

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What's a natural monopoly? Valve currently has the freedom to implement anything they want within an extent because they're so popular. If they decided they wanted to charge devs 35% would people stop using it? Probably not. Steam's monopoly is as bad as any other for the same reason any other monopoly is bad.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A natural monopoly is when an industry is difficult to break into, making competition difficult or impossible. This favors incumbents, in fact, a lot of industries are natural monopolies (pharma, aerospace, chip production).

The difficulty of breaking into an industry may be because:

  • new players cannot compete with established scale
  • start up costs require a nearly all-or-nothing approach, high risk
  • regulations tie the hand of new innovators
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Look it up? It's an actual term, not something I made up for whatever reason you assumed to argue against something I didn't even say. I already said it's still not a good thing, it just would have happened regardless of whoever that was able to do it on scale first.