So how's much did Sweeney at Epic pay for this?

I'm mad about their massive gambling profits. Otherwise they've been pretty great for consumers. Though it's likely they won't always be.

its not monopoly if competition doesnt want to compete and isnt prevented from doing so. steam provides better service, which makes it de facto choice. should i be mad that only option i have is good? it just makes me worried that what if valve goes bad one day, but can't do much about that.

Monopoly is when you purchase other actors of the industry to extinction, and annihilatr competition this way. It has never been about having big market share due to superior service.

The fact that valve has competitors means its not a monopoly. They aren't anti competitive. They just make a good product and treat their customers better than their competitors.

If all "monopolies" acted like Valve, most people wouldn't hate monopolies.

If all billionaires acted like GabeN, far fewer people would be calling for the guillotines.

I still think billionaires shouldn't exist. Just saying hes probably at the bottom of the list of shitty billionaire behavior.

Because they gained their monopoly by, yes, being first, but also by continuously being the best. And they don't exploit their monopoly. They don't do anything that could be construed as anti-competitive, despite certainly having every opportunity. They're an intermediary between publishers and consumers, and generally speaking they are good stewards of that intermediary, generally operating in favor of the consumer, rather than the big game publishers.

Good leader good.

Bad leader bad.

Because “gaming” is bigger than PCs. Steam has their own hardware and it sell like 1/100th of a PS5 or a Switch.

So Valve has a lot of room to compete with.

Because the other options pictured suck ass and having a million launchers is so god damned tiresome

I’m “mad”. Their business model should be illegal. If you buy a game you shouldn’t be chained to their platform.

The other options are shit

To my knowledge, Valve isn't the only PC game distributor out there, so it's not a monopoly, for now they're just better than the competition. Maybe the competition should get better and inovative as Valve does (they even do linux and hardware, FFS), or maybe they should just stop whining.

Which of the other launchers have or are compatible with proton/wine?