this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com)
submitted 9 months ago by nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] Paradoxvoid@aussie.zone 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

People saying Steam doesn't have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.

While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.

Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.

[–] SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 1 points 9 months 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

[–] nora@slrpnk.net -1 points 9 months ago (2 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.

[–] coltorl@programming.dev 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months 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
[–] SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 1 points 9 months 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.