A good contrast is something like Outer Worlds, where there is usually multiple possible outcomes. I think it comes from their Fallout lessons learned and GURPS background. Love the game design. (Dislike the combat, but that is a separate thing.)
Same, I really enjoyed Veilgaurd and actually finished the damn thing, which is rare for me these days. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good, breezy arpg.
For them to be prosecuted as a monopoly, or be considered one legally, it would have to be shown that they achieved or maintain their dominant market position by preventing or undermining competition. Say by having a bunch of exclusivity deals to keep big name titles only on their storefront, or by buying out any competitor that gained traction.
Monopoly isn’t about being the biggest seller in a market, it’s about being the biggest player in the market by undermining competition and restricting commerce.
Edit: want to clarify there is a distinction between the legal meaning of monopoly (see the Sherman anti trust act and other subsequent laws and rulings) and the colloquial usage (Only seller in the market). Steam is nether.
A lot of people seem to think that a monopoly has a much, much more direct and literal definition than it actually does.
The definition the FTC uses is:
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power.
Courts look at the firm’s market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.
Some courts have required much higher percentages.
(Well, at least untill Elon and Trump put the fucking Shark Tank guy in charge, or something like that.)
Generally speaking, a monopolist is a single entity that has captured a huge chunk of an otherwise varying and well differentiated market, if your market is closer to the theoretical (ie, not real) idea of perfect competition, or if you’re talking about a consolidated market with only a few major players, the monopolist has at least 50% of the market, though, depending on other factors, that line may be drawn at up to 75% ish.
Different specific situations, regions, laws, etc. establish differing specific criteria… but the idea is not that a monopolist is defined by being literally 100% of the market.
That situation would specifically be referred to as a ‘perfect monopoly’, and like ‘perfect competition’, is basically theoretical only, or a situation where you’re looking at something like a local public utility or some kind of government/state entity.
In actual mainstream academic and legal usage though, a monopoly is a single entity in the market has a very outsized market share when compared to any other market participant, such that its actions alone can very significantly affect all other market participants.
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Now… when it comes to Steam… a whole lot of the arguement is ‘what is and is not the market, what constitutes its boundaries?’
If you define it as just ‘PC video games’, then sure Steam likely is an effective monopoly.
But if you define it as ‘all digital games’, then no, not even close, the Google Play Store and Apple Store are responsible for far more digital game downloads than Steam, way waaay more games are mobile games than PC games, if you go by yearly or monthly downloads, or market share.
It gets even more complicated with cross platform games.
Ultimately, it would be up to a lawsuit, lawyers, judges, industry experts, to argue all of the specifics of exactly whether or not its legally valid to formally classify Steam as a monopoly that would need to be broken up or penalized or regulated in some way, and a huge part of that legal battle would be based around differing definitions of what exactly Steam is a monopoly if, and whether those precise definitions are valid.
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‘Other options exist for consumers’ or ‘they don’t have a perfect monopoly’ is not a valid arguement against Steam being a monopoly if Steam facilitates 85% of PC game sales, and the other 15% is split up between 10 or so other digital store fronts.
If that is your rubric for ‘what is the market’, then yeah, Steam is a monopoly.
But, if your rubric is ‘all digital games’, then no, Steam is just a large player in a market with other larger players, other slightly smaller players, and many other very small players.
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Beyond that, a huge part of legally being determined to be a monopoly is unethical/illegal behavior of the ‘monopolist’ being used to obtain or maintain their monopoly.
In Steam’s case… I think that would be pretty hard to substantiate, its more so just that Steam had the idea first, expanded upon it quite a lot, and no one really bothered to try to compete with them on the same level untill basically the Epic store, fairly recently.
I’ll ignore the market share question and talk a little about history. The compatibility layer is what killed OS/2 back in the day.
See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially. Windows was the new kid on the block, and MS was allowing IBM to make a windows application compatibility layer on OS/2 in the early days. Think Windows 2.x/3.x. This was a brilliant stroke on behalf of MS, since the application developers would choose the Windows API and develop against that API only. Soon, there were no real native OS/2 apps being sold in any stores. Once MS Office came about, OS/2 was effectively a dead commercial product, outside of the server space.
The parallel here is that wine allows developers to target only the Windows API (again). This means you don’t have to bother with linux support at all and just hope that Proton or whatever will do the work for you.
There are some modern differences though. First: Linux didn’t start as a major competitor to Windows in the desktop/gaming space. We’d all love the Linux marketshare to increase, but largely there isn’t a huge economic driver behind it. So Linux will increase or not and the world will keep on turning. We’re not risking being delegated to history like OS/2. The second: the compatibility layer is being made as an open source project, and this isn’t MS trying to embrace-extend-extinguish in the same way that their assistance to IBM implementing that layer was. (We could quibble about .Net and Mono and others though.)
So I don’t think it’ll play out the same way. Linux will be okay. It’s already a vast improvement from prior years.
Historically, there was nothing like a killer hardware situation for OS/2 – no equivalent of the Steam Deck – that was driving wide hardware adoption to encourage additional native apps. Valve has done more for linux desktop adoption in the last few years than anyone that came prior.
I remember it well. I think the biggest difference between OS/2 then and Linux today is that OS/2 wasn't all that much better than Windows in any easily understood way for the average non-technical user.
Some games lend themselves better to modding. Some are much more complicated to mod. Some games need a mod manager to do conflict checks and some games can just have mods piled on top of each other endlessly without issues.
Mods within certain game engines can pretty much be moved between games ofln the same engine often with very little adjustment.
I would say in modern modding it is usually fairly straightforward, but some games and some older mods definitely require some deep computer fuckery.
Stick to things you’re comfortable with and skip the ones you aren’t.
It also depends where you get the mod from as different sites offers different amount of help. On some sites you need to download, un zip, drag and drop files in different places and change files both in the mod and outside it, and other sites you just press a button and your good to go. Even when it is the same or similar mods.
It got a lot of flak back then, mostly because people were sick to shit of Peter Molyneux promising THE WORLD and delivering, like, JUST A GAME.
But here’s the thing. I didn’t follow gaming news. I didn’t know what a Peter molyneux was. I just know I got a fun little action RPG where I get to be royalty, and that scratched a very specific itch for me.
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