[danaris]

I don't care how good any one company is at $thing; that doesn't mean they should be allowed to own the entire market for $thing. That's just not healthy for a society or an economy.

There's already way, way, way too much consolidation in industry today (not just "the games industry"; all of industry). What we need to be doing is breaking up many of these megacorporations, and then reversing the burden of proof for mergers & acquisitions: not "we'll stop this if it's proven that it would be harmful," but "we won't allow this unless it's proven to be beneficial", with a fairly high bar.

It just seems so absurd to me to see so many people who trumpet the power of the "free market", but then advocate for this kind of hyper-consolidated situation as if it's remotely like a "free market". Yes, sure, I can buy my $thing from Oppressive Megacorp A, B, or C, all of whom have a huge interest in maintaining the status quo and avoiding meaningful competition.

[Godel_unicode]

Do you really think that Amazon and Walmart don’t meaningfully compete? What about Ford and GM? Android and iOS?

[danaris]

I think that a duopoly, or other very small number of meaningful participants in a market, is fundamentally much less healthy and much less beneficial to customers than a larger number of smaller competitors, whether or not they have explicitly colluded to partition the market (as, for instance, in the ISP market).

[Godel_unicode]

Since you didn’t answer my question we can assume that the answer is “yes they do meaningfully compete” which is good because that’s obviously the case.

There are on the order of 10 video game companies with over a billion usd in revenue. There are 3 distinct console manufacturers (4 if you count the steam deck, 5 if you include PCs). Then there’s the mobile gaming market, which has all the big players plus a bunch of others.

Duopoly’s and small markets goodness or badness is irrelevant in this situation.