898
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
898 points (97.6% liked)
Games
32987 readers
780 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
While I'm no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve's market dominance in PC game sales isn't a good thing for developers or consumers.
Competition in capitalism is always better than a lack thereof. But, we've not busted monopolies in a significant way since Ma Bell. And, even if we were, at 75% of the global market share they'd not warrant any action yet.
There's going to be a dominant organization because late stage capitalism sucks. And, I'd rather it be Valve than some alternative trying to fuck me over at every opportunity.
The thing is, steam's market dominance is one of user choice rather than anticompetitive strategies or lack of alternatives. Steam doesn't do exclusives, they don't charge you for external sales, they don't even prevent you from selling steam keys outside the platform, or users from launching non steam games in the client. The only real restriction is that access to steam services requires a license in the active steam account. Even valve-produced devices like the steam deck can install from other stores.
Sure, dominance is bad in an abstract theoretical way and it'd be nice if Gog, itch.io, etc were more competitive, but Steam is dominant because consumers actively choose it.
Yeah! Other publishers should open their own stores and compete!
.....
Oh wait no fuck oh god oh what have we done