[sershe]

Valve makes most of their money from Steam lock-in. Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...

Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Windows a threat, they need to commoditize OS for gaming. At heart they still make Amazon's attempts at monopoly look like a lemonade stand :)

[bee_rider]

Does Valve engage in a lot of unfair or anticompetitive behavior? If you were to apply some anti-trust enforcement what would you actually do? Split off their game studio (that makes like one game a decade) from Steam?

They mostly sell space in their digital game shop, and services directly related to that shop.

Like, when people say “split up Google” or “split up Amazon” I know what they mean: you have a bunch of things that would ideally be profitable competitive businesses, under one umbrella—Chrome, Android, ChromeOS imagine if browsers and operating systems didn’t have a market price of $0! AWS, Amazon shop, etc. Valve, I don’t see it…

[dleslie]

There is no lock-in. It is normal to have accounts on multiple storefronts, and have multiple storefronts installed on your gaming PC; one can access multiple digital libraries on the same PC!

Steam wins because it provides a superior product for the end-user, not because of lock-in. Games purchased through Steam can be vetted with user reviews, supported with user-created guides and steam input configurations, streamed across devices, shared with family members, and even modded; all within the Steam experience.

[Telaneo]

Valve is not a monopoly/part of a duopoply/oligopoly. They're also not behaving like knobheads. It's the combination of monopolistic practices and causing harm to consumers that should invoke antitrust enforcement.

There are plenty of other stores to get games from. They're just consistently worse than Steam.

[nemomarx]

One wonders why other, well funded games stores can't compete on features and sales pricing with steam?

Epic is giving games away but it still doesn't seem worth it to me to switch over because they lack steam input, good achievements, friend systems, good chat, inventory systems to trade items...

[tombert]

I use Heroic Launcher to play Epic Game Store games in the SteamOS interface in my Jovian box. I'm able to use the custom controller stuff with it without much problem, but it doesn't fix the other problems.

You need friends for a lack of friend systems to matter :)

[LtWorf]

They also don't support having a space character in your password.

[jcranmer]

> Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement

So the thing about antitrust is that it's not the act of having a monopoly that is punishable, it's the act of using that monopoly unjustly that is punishable.

Apple's app store is a good example here--their stipulations on financial payments in apps starts to really cross the line into illegal product tying to me. Whereas what Valve has done to lock-in users to Steam is... um... you might at best point to actions they haven't taken, but fundamentally, the alternative game stores have failed because they've not really demonstrated any value proposition other than "redirect Valve's profits to us", which isn't a big motivation for consumers.

[ZeWaka]

lock-in?

there's no lock-in in any of the contracts