[estimator7292]

Dominant and successful, yes. Monopoly, no.

It take more than simply being the best or most successful business in a sector to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is an active choice you make as a business by intentionally engaging in anticompetitive behaviors.

Valve isn't putting any pressure on anyone in this sector. There is still competition, but Valve has simply been more successful than everyone else. Mainly because the alternatives are so, so much worse like EA and co who are actively malicious and predatory.

Valve hasn't done anything to pass an antitrust sniff test.

[DanielHB]

The EU has this concept of gate-keeper platforms which seems more appropriate

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...

"Companies providing at least one of the ten core platform services enumerated in the DMA are presumed to be gatekeepers if they meet the criteria listed below. These core platform services are: online intermediation services such as app stores, online search engines, social networking services, certain messaging services, video sharing platform services, virtual assistants, web browsers, cloud computing services, operating systems, online marketplaces, and advertising services. One company can be designated as gatekeeper for several core platform services."

"There are three main quantitative criteria that create the presumption that a company is a gatekeeper as defined in the DMA: (i) when the company achieves a certain annual turnover in the European Economic Area and it provides a core platform service in at least three EU Member States;(ii) when the company provides a core platform service to more than 45 million monthly active end users established or located in the EU and to more than 10,000 yearly active business users established in the EU; and (iii) when the company met the second criterion during the last three years.

The DMA defines a series of specific obligations that gatekeepers will need to respect, including prohibiting them from engaging in certain behaviours in a list of do's and don'ts."

The arguments there match the Steam platform in my opinion, but it is likely Steam already fulfills the existing obligations of the act. Seems a fairly good approach to things, if you are a dominant player you get burdened with extra rules and scrutiny.

[ido]

I think what you’re saying is that they are a natural monopoly, which isn’t nefarious or illegal. But is still a monopoly.

[galagawinkle489]

Steam is not a natural monopoly.

[ryathal]

It's pretty close to one. Having all your games in a single digital library along with cloud saves and achievements for those games in a single place is a real benefit that would lead to a monopoly.

[tyleo]

Amazingly Windows even has a store built in. Yet the Windows store is so bad it’s losing despite its considerable advantage as a default.

Reminds me of Edge & Chrome.

[DanielHB]

Edge market share has grown a lot in the past few years.

[gruez]

>It take more than simply being the best or most successful business in a sector to be a monopoly. Being a monopoly is an active choice you make as a business by intentionally engaging in anticompetitive behaviors.

By that logic are Amazon and Whatsapp also not "monopolies"? Are they simply just the best e-commerce company and chat app respectively? What competitive behaviors are they employing against their competitors?

[cpburns2009]

Amazon may be dominant in a couple markets but it is far from a monopoly in them. For online retail you have Walmart, Target, eBay, Newegg, and 100s of other well known retailers with third-party sellers trying to compete. On the data center side you have large players such as Microsoft Azure and Google GCP, and small ones like Digital Ocean, Hertzner, OVH, Vultr, and many others.

[galagawinkle489]

Amazon sold products at a loss for years in order to capture market share, then raised prices. That is blatant abuse of market power

[gruez]

>Amazon sold products at a loss for years in order to capture market share

Selling at a loss on a cost of goods sold basis, or the entire business as a whole? I'm aware of the latter but not the former. The latter also isn't obvious "abuse", because it would include all sorts of market entrants, including eg. intel trying to enter the GPU space and making a loss because of R&D.

[Agingcoder]

Yes - I tried the other platforms.

Much to my surprise (and granted, I have the means to do so) I will favor steam whenever possible, it’s just significantly better.

[NekkoDroid]

I do mostly agree with you that Steam is better as a storefront than all other ones out there, but in my opinion the Battle.net launcher is still my favorite game launcher edging out Steam because of how snappy it is.

Steam just sometimes feels really slow when launching for the first time or when switching tabs/pages (I do also have it just sometimes be just a black windows, but I haven't figured out the cause yet but it is the only window that does it, so...). In comparison B.net just feels decently snappy.

They are both effectively using CEF for their launcher, but since Steam starts so slow for me I always keep it in the background and its WebHelper taking up 414MB (rn, but its always in that ballpark) is not helping its case.

[ThrowawayR2]

People favored Google as much as possible in the '00s and then they turned evil.

For games, I favor Good Old Games rather than Steam as much as possible and go out of my way to wait for releases on their platform. Whatever becomes of them, at least I'll have my downloaded DRM-free version of my purchases.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Yeah,they also force you on a very crappy OS which they decided not to support.

I used to buy on GOG, but open source support and portable pc made a huge difference