• mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    6 hours ago

    You forced it on people by demanding it for a must-have game… which came on discs. To some extent, even now, fuck you.

    Other comments talk about great sale prices, which is often an anticompetitive practice called “dumping.”

    I’d be less blunt if people could admit it’s a monopoly. ‘Oh I never even consider other stores.’ Uh-huh. ‘I mean there’s competitors, but they hardly matter. Even billion-dollar companies can’t make theirs relevant.’ You don’t say. ‘Valve can even afford to let devs sell keys wherever, and the customers still get their ecosystem!’ Yeah, wow. We have a word for that. ‘How dare you.’

    • webpack@ani.social
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      1 hour ago

      I think most ppl agree that it’s a monopoly, it’s just that they are a monopoly not because of anticompetitive practices but because everyone else sucks. steam does give a lot of value to small game devs cause it makes it easy for ppl to find your game (but I’m not sure if that’s worth the 30% revenue cut). if there was a better platform that took less revenue then devs would simply use that instead.

            • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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              6 minutes ago

              Wow, hopefully we’ll invent some competing way to listen to music in a car.

              But y’know what, sure, my absolute was overreaching.

              Yours still was too.

              Standard Oil never had all the oil. AT&T never had all the phone lines. The worst, most blatantly illegal monopolies had competitors. They were still monopolies. What the word almost always means, does not require 100.0% market share. Shit gets weird well before that.