1249
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
1249 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
59296 readers
4365 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.