[b0rsuk]

Nitpick: without Steam and without any equivalent of it, PC gaming would have (probably) died 5 years ago.

Your sentence is like saying that without Internet Explorer, we would still be paying for internet browsers. It's praising Microsoft for what it did and mysteriously assuming that in absence of it, no one else would bring the cost of browsers down.

This is my nitpick with "what if X didn't exist" scenarios: people imply that nothing would fill the vacuum.

Another example I just made up: "If Linux didn't exist, we wouldn't have a free, open source OS". I'm pretty sure FreeBSD or something like that would grow like Linux instead. Not saying it would be better or worse, because, frankly, I don't know.

[Ant11]

Linux brought a large new demographic (hobbyists, students) to Unix at a time that it was expensive, little used and dying. The Linux movement, as opposed to the Linux software, was a true revolution and not easily replaced. Effective movements are a lot harder to build than effective software.

Another counterexample would be the internet itself. It could very easily have gone wrong and we would have been stuck with the likes of Compuserve and AOL.

[ralfn]

Fair enough. It's a statement i can not prove.

I don't think i'm wrong, but it's hard to argue about alternative history, right? It's all pure speculation. You are right about that.

[andyzweb]

this might shed some light on the why Linux beat out BSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi