Steam is a closed source market place blob that takes 30% middle man tax. Valve however has understood FOSS, and the contributions they are making are immense.

When a true FOSS project is dominating this means the people are in control of it. Not corpos nor is it a monopoly. People have voted by donating work for it to be the most successful thing in its applicable area. Dominating FOSS projects also suck up and integrate a lot of innovation greatly reducing duplicated effort.

FreeBSD is alive and well, and it even benefits from Linux's DRM GPU drivers.

Although the drm gpu drivers are mostly of a corporate effort, we are seeing an occasional interventions by the people "no, not like that" to keep the sometimes shoddy quality up.

/

ow Linux dominates the server space.

Linux is free. Free cannot be monopoly. Bad comparison here.

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.

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.

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.

fr

It's not. You can still buy from the others if you want to be treated like shit, excepting GOG, in my opinion. Consoles are true monopolies, because you can only choose if you want to buy a console and marry to its store, now that physical media is becoming a rarity.

They have a big fraction of the market because they are efficient at selling what people want. I don't like it, I believe Newell, specifically, is profiting greedily from Valve's situation, but shit, this is not even a natural monopoly.

In fairness Google was just becoming evil at that point. It was a fantastic company when the founders ran it.

Google isn't privately owned. It's hard to be on the stock market and not be evil. I think Costco is the only one that has managed it for any appreciable length and that is under threat of death from one of the co-founders.

The difference was that people pretended like Google ever had an option to “not be evil”. At the end of the day, they were a publicly traded company, and thus, line must go up, or else the collective hive mind of the public market would vote the leadership out and replace them.

Steam is private, thus, the current leaderships can ignore the demands of the public market hive mind. Private companies can be evil, but it depends on who owns them. They’re not guaranteed.

really?

Will they? Probably. The thing is the others already did, and they even tried to hurt Valve in bad faith. The meme is good, but they took their shots at Valve before shooting themselves in their faces. I just hope GOG wakes the fuck up with Linux support, so I can buy more from them.

People call Valve a monopoly, and they are right but... is it a monopoly because they wanted to become one? Or because the competitors are completely clueless about what do the customers want? Can we blame Valve on becoming a monopoly when they simply are listening to the customers while the competitors (like Epic) keep ignoring users demands?

EA, Ubisoft, Microslop... they all tried to make their own launchers to move away from Steam and they all failed. Why? Because they wanted to make those launchers their way, while actively telling the users to shut up about their demands on what would make the launchers great.

Epic... Epic keeps throwing fortnite money to EGS launcher but keeps ignoring the most basic user demands.

Like, dude? I'm telling you that, for buying your product, it must have A, B and C. But, instead of offering me that, you make a product that lacks specifically A, B and C. And you expect me to buy it?

It is a monopoly, but because nobody else is even trying. And that pisses me off.

It’s still a monopoly though.

No, it is not. You and the other commentators need to stop repeating that propaganda lie by the true monopolists of PC gaming (Epic, Microsoft,…).

All of Steam combined makes up a fifth of the PC gaming revenue. A fifth! That's a very good percentage but a fifth of anything is not a monopoly and that's not even including mobile and consoles where Valve isn't even competing at the moment.

Fortnite, Rocket League, Valorant, League of Legends, Minecraft, still World of Warcraft, Roblox,… are where all that PC gaming revenue is concentrated but a few mid-tier games sell best on Steam (because the same priced copy on EGS offers worse value) and suddenly everybody keeps repeating the lie of the true monopolists that the company that isn't classified in the EU as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act is a monopoly (but Microsoft is).