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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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I really wish people would stop calling successful companies "monopolies". Mono = 1. As in a single company operating in a market.
Most often it involves anti-competitive practices also, which Steam has absolutely none of.
The competition just sucks. All of them. Which this article articulates beautifully.
If by "broken up" you mean you'd like to see another company actually make an attempt to compete with them by providing value to their customers instead of trying to exploit them like cash cows while simultaneously locking them into their shitty launcher, I absolutely agree.
By broken up I’d like to see the community, workshop, chat system, achievements, and marketplace all be separate companies
That would be better for everyone
Why? All those features already exist as separate companies. Discord for chat, Nexus for workshop, like 5000 places run their own marketplace etc.
How would it be better for everyone if you have to set up 5 separate things? That's currently the issue with Epic's launcher that it does nothing other than let you buy games so it doesn't provide the value Steam does.
Because then they would plug and play with whatever service you use
Oh, you can already do that with Discord with the in-game overlay and anyone else is free to implement stuff like that too. If you mean that there should be a open source alternative for the Steam client then you can check out Lutris, it can be used to launch steam games.
More evidence that there is no reason for steam to have these features
What evidence? If you prefer alternatives, then those are available
It's clear why people prefer Steam: it has good features. But the other launchers should complete by making better features not forcing Steam to remove features.
Other services exist to achieve those things so it’s not necessary for them to do it
Not necessary, no but it adds value to it's users and thus making their platform the most popular.
Like Epic's launcher is the perfect comparison for this: It has the bare minimum features available to sell games and people hate it for it's lack of features. It's not necessary for Epic to add those features but clearly people value those in their choice of platform.
Which they shouldn’t have the option of
It’s like saying Amazon and Walmart are better than a local shop because they offer more/are cheaper
They shouldn’t be allowed to compete at that size
The reason why Amazon is bad is because they undercut their competition to drive them out of business just to then raise prices and create a monopoly. What is happening with Steam and other launchers is the other ones are refusing to compete on features and instead are trying to create monopolies with exclusive games so people would be forced to use an inferior product.
Creating a limitation that X features aren't allowed to exist on a gaming client would solve no issues here as Steam isn't even trying to create a monopoly, they just have the best product currently and everyone is free to out compete them.