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Amazon's previous VP of Prime Gaming said they "tried everything" to disrupt Steam
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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I’m not saying competition is bad, but as a consumer, managing a pile of clients sucks.
I'll say it: competition can be bad sometimes. If Valve ever starts to conduct business unethically, the solution will be government regulation, not competition.
More detail below, but while this is not... wrong and government intervention is needed, it is clearly not deployed effectively in this space (presumably governments would catch up with Meta, Apple and Google first).
A more competitive landscape could solve that issue before it got to that. Especially if the big blocker is fanboyism.
Competition has failed. Repeatedly. The history of the post-industrial world is full of examples. There used to be a ton of competitive general stores in America before the Walton family destroyed them all. Competition is the most common way monopolies are created.
The problems the regulatory capture and the government's lack of teeth. Which are issues for sure, but not ones solved by increasing competition.
That's a weirdly lopsided argument. You seem to be saying that competition has failed and will yield a monopoly and the answer is regulation, which will fix the problem the second it gets over having failed at the exact same task.
Again, you're not wrong, you need to course-correct the market through regulatory oversight. But that oversight is meant to both guarantee quality standards and re-enable competition in places where it has dried out.
For the purposes of the conversation we're having, the regulation solution here is to fine or break up Steam so that other players can compete with them, ultimately. Well, and potentially to see if they should cut it out with the CounterStrike loot boxes and whatnot, but that's not what we're debating here.
So I'm not sure what your point is. Sure, eventually in a world where Steam is the only player in PC game distribution someone should step in and fix that problem. But before we get to that, as a user, I am not going to be here cheerleading for Steam to secure its monopoly first.
I think that's our fundamental misunderstanding here, because that's not the regulatory solution I had in mind. I would look to other heavily regulated (or even nationalized) monopolies. Forcing Valve to split Steam up into either competing horizontal segments or disparate vertical segments would only make the service worse for the consumer AND the publishers (maybe you could make stronger arguments for some segments than others maybe hardware and game development could be split off from the store with little impact, but I don't see the benefit there).
If you break the store up into competing units... Then what? Eventually one beats out the others and we are right back to where we started. Or worse, an equilibrium is reached between a small handful creating an oligopoly, like we see in so many other industries today.
Instead, I would leave Steam mostly as a single entity, subject to regulation about how it conducts business. From pricing to what it does with user data, to making sure that quasi competitors like Amazon, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo are all able to have fair access to distribute their games on the platform too. Create a regulatory board in charge of effectively managing the monopoly.
This whole "just add more competition" has led to a dystopian capitalist hellscape. It doesn't work for more than a couple decades before the government needs to step in anyways.
What regulation determines how a videogame storefront operates?
I mean, I'm all for managed markets, but that's absurd. In no world is there a nationalized videogame outlet, in no world is there fine grain regulation telling Steam what percentage of a cut they can take. That not a realistic outcome. If you were putting things on a gradient of necessity for a nationally managed monopoly "videogame digital distribution" would be at the very bottom of that list.
What is a realistic outcome is having some number of competitors providing competing feature sets to users and deals to game makers. Regulation needs to be in place for data management, for safety, for customer rights. But for everything else that's nowhere near a reasonable option.
It's not that bad. There are solutions to consolidate your game libraries, but frankly I have too many games for them to be practical (I do pay for Launchbox and then don't use it).
Still, even if you primarily use Steam those alternatives are pretty functional to consolidate your other libraries, which does take the edge off quite a bit. That's kind of the default for Linux gamers, where Steam+Heroic/Lutris is the de facto standard, and it works just fine without preventing Epic or GOG from being viable options.