[dave_sullivan]

They're a monopoly the way apple is a monopoly. Maybe "anti-competitive" is a better word. There are other choices, but they have such a large share of the market "locked in" to their specific platforms that developers are forced to work with them or get out of the business. Good luck not having an iOS version of your app or not launching your game on steam, etc. With proper competitive pressure, the price of distributing a game or app should go down over time, not stay pegged at an arbitrary 30%.

> What makes you think that the Epic Store won't be exactly the same given half the chance?

The laws of competitive pressure.

[vimacs2]

I'm not a fan of Steam simply because it is a form of DRM (and I hate the way library sharing works) but this is such a bs comparison it's hard to take seriously.

Steam is not remotely equivalent to the Apple Store in terms of anti-competitiveness. For one, I do not have to jailbreak my computer to install games outside of Steam and neither does doing so violate the TOS of Steam. In fact, steam literally lets you add non-steam games to it's library as well as let you access features such as the overlay and Steam input.

If anything, Epic Games is the one who is practising anti-competitive behaviour here by trying to force their way into the market by buying out developers over providing a better service.

If they ever took the dominant position in the market over Steam, I would be shocked if we don't end up in a situation that is worse off for both the customers and developers.

Also, "the laws of competitive pressure" only really work out well for the customers unless we have many truly viable competitors. What is far more likely to happen here is an oligopoly and we know how well those turn out.

[kbenson]

I'm not familiar enough with the specifics of anything Valve/Steam might be doing, but I don't think they're necessarily anti-competitive (at least not in the same way Apple is). One way to think of this is that it doesn't take Steam being bad or anti-competitive to still have people benefit from alternatives and competition, so we can all be happy about more competition to Steam.

Apple, on the other hand, does many anti-competitive things to do with locking people into their whole ecosystem, such as restricting their software to run on their hardware (and their hardware to run with their software in the case of phones), and their store to run on their software, etc.

It's not so much that they have a walled garden, but that the garden is within a walled city and the city is within a locked down nation with mostly closed borders.

If Steam is anti-competitive (I don't know, perhaps they are) it may be best to note how, especially if you going to equate it to Apple's situation. Otherwise, people will likely see and focus on the ways they are different and/or think Apple's situation is similar, when it may not be.

[moistbar]

An anti-competitive company doesn't make contributions to open source projects that are only tangentially related to their own product, nor does it let you integrate arbitrary software with their product.

Epic, on the other hand, doesn't allow any form of reviews on their store and routinely forces developers into a one-year exclusivity period before they're allowed to sell anywhere else. Tim Sweeney himself even said he doesn't think Epic is capable of offering anything new and can only compete through exclusivity deals [0]. If that's not a damning review of the company's competitive practices, I don't know what is.

[0] https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/114368034400623411...

[zimpenfish]

> they have such a large share of the market "locked in" to their specific platforms that developers are forced to work with them

What makes you think that the Epic Store won't be exactly the same given half the chance?

[krageon]

They will, but it's pathologically impossible for either side to see that literally every option is elbow deep in corporate evil. Something has to be celebrated.