What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.
Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)
The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.
A monopoly is holding a large marketshare. It is a label determined by courts. That the marketshare is from consumers picking the product is irrelevant to being declared a monopoly.
In the late 90’s Windows was the overwhelming market leader for OS’s because the alternatives weren’t good. Linux didn’t have good consumer focused distros and was therefore used on servers. MacOS at the time was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from almost 20 years earlier. So Microsoft was declared a monopoly and had restrictions placed on what it could do despite all other competitors already doing what Microsoft did (like including a web browser). That’s why years later Apple was able to make Safari the ONLY web browser (all “alternatives” were just reskins of Safari) whereas Microsoft was forced to include support so that you could switch the default web browser.
Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space.
They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive the use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that.
If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.
but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
That is absolutely not true. I was President of a mid sized ISP at the time. We shipped both IE and Netscape on CD for consumers to pick which they wanted to install.
The bundling was a problem because of their already pre existing dominant market position.
Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome
Microsoft did not own and control Netscape’s rendering engine which was the really dominant market player. Apple uses their market position to make Safari the majority web browser in the US. (phones outnumber home pc’s and Apple has over 50% marketshare.)
go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.
I don’t give a fuck about Epic. Steam is Walmart and Epic is Kmart.
What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.
Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)
The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.
A monopoly is holding a large marketshare. It is a label determined by courts. That the marketshare is from consumers picking the product is irrelevant to being declared a monopoly.
In the late 90’s Windows was the overwhelming market leader for OS’s because the alternatives weren’t good. Linux didn’t have good consumer focused distros and was therefore used on servers. MacOS at the time was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from almost 20 years earlier. So Microsoft was declared a monopoly and had restrictions placed on what it could do despite all other competitors already doing what Microsoft did (like including a web browser). That’s why years later Apple was able to make Safari the ONLY web browser (all “alternatives” were just reskins of Safari) whereas Microsoft was forced to include support so that you could switch the default web browser.
Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space.
They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive the use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that.
If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.
That is absolutely not true. I was President of a mid sized ISP at the time. We shipped both IE and Netscape on CD for consumers to pick which they wanted to install.
The bundling was a problem because of their already pre existing dominant market position.
Microsoft did not own and control Netscape’s rendering engine which was the really dominant market player. Apple uses their market position to make Safari the majority web browser in the US. (phones outnumber home pc’s and Apple has over 50% marketshare.)
I don’t give a fuck about Epic. Steam is Walmart and Epic is Kmart.