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US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'.
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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You really gotta aim your sights higher if that's the criteria you're using for a "monopoly". Valve is a private company, that sells games and other "wants", not "needs". If people can't afford games, without losing their house or struggling to eat, I don't think that's a company's fault.
If Valve was even close to using anti-competitive methods to maintain market dominance, you'd be correct. However, a company having superior quality products and making good business decisions is not a basis or definition of a monopoly. They just make good decisions and provide quality products that people want and enjoy.
Instead of using strawman and false equivalency fallacies, try taking a look at what really constitutes anti-competitive practices.
Continue defending the billionaires, I'm sure they care ๐
You're either a troll, extremely young, naive, and/or uneducated if you think my comment above is in defense of billionaires. I literally have comments in my history to the absolute opposite*. What I'm "defending" is the definition of a monopoly when it comes to business practices; of which Valve has exuded none of the behavior of.
You think any business doing well, providing quality goods and services, not being anti-consumer, and being the most trusted platform for gaming as a result is the definition of a monopoly. Again, you use fallacy to try and argue a point.
Wait... Are you that dickhead from Epic who pays for exclusivity rights, steaks user data from Steam files, or something? I could see that guy being pissed at Steam for seemingly no reason.
* one such comment, if I recall, is about how much I hated Steam when it first came out for killing LAN parties by locking down CD keys.
But that's exactly what you're doing though. You're in front of a company that controls 70% of the market, meaning they can do whatever the fuck they want regarding pricing and you're defending them because you don't see any issue with that.
So yeah, let's wait until they start truly acting like shit before thinking "Hey, maybe we shouldn't have let them get such a hold on the market..."
If they hiked prices above what other stores offered, consumers would leave. If they lowered prices to be untenable for developers, developers would leave, and consumers would follow (they'd probably grumble, but they'd go where the games are). There isn't a lock in for future sales on either side. So do you think they can do whatever they want with prices with no consequences?
If you're big enough and people are dependent on your product then no they won't simply leave.
It's not like owning a DVD deciding your next DVD player won't be a Sony because you don't like them. The products that you "own" are dependent on Steam, of you've got thousands of games on there you can't just leave and bring your library with you to another platform.
That's the same for any digital platform, though. Literally, any gaming store except for GOG won't let you take your library with you. You don't own the game as far as any of them are concerned. You're claiming Steam is some kind of monster because their platform for games you don't own is better than other platforms for games you don't own. Because their platform doesn't sucks, it earns them a lot of business. That's it. That's the magic sauce.
With options, if Stream sucked, people would go elsewhere.
If Steam had anything resembling a monopoly they'd do everything they could to remove platforms offering the same games. The number of platforms has only expanded since they started.
If Stream was a monopoly, they'd not only undercut others, they'd pay for exclusivity rights. Steam let's developers sell their own keys from anywhere the developer wants, while taking no cut when that happens, even though Steam still has to front the bandwidth and storage for the game to be played.
If Steam was a monopoly, they'd buy up smaller firms, buy businesses with similar, but competing services, or take another company's product, reverse engineer it, and make their own undercutting the original. They've done the opposite at every turn.
You really don't understand monopolistic tactics. You're not going to understand it, either, since you've continues to conflate good business decisions that earn trust and adoption with anti-consumer practices. Steam makes good business decisions, listens to their customers and developers about ways to make the service or products better, and has more business because of it. They have a better product without stooping to the air a in lot of current businesses are pulling.
That's it. 70% market dominance doesn't fucking matter. They could have 90% and it still wouldn't be a monopoly with their current strategy. Other businesses need to suck less.
You should review your definition of monopoly because it doesn't imply bad behaviour by the party in a monopolistic position, it just means they have enough control over the market to sway it in the direction that they way, may they do it or not doesn't matter and that's exactly the power that Valve has over the PC gaming market, hence why competitors can't succeed and companies end up just closing their platform and making their games available on Steam instead.