Well then no monopolies exist if we look on a global scale for everything, thank you for fixing all of the world’s market!
You only have a single option for an internet provider where you live? Well they don’t have a monopoly because in the next town over they have another option!
Steam as a game store has a monopoly, just like Google as a search engine has a monopoly, other options exist but their reach is small enough that Valve and Alphabet can decide what happens with the market.
“They have a very limited presence in Asia”… Yeah, just like Google, we’re not talking about Asia.
EGS is perfectly fine and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks it’s Steam that’s bloated and has a load of useless stuff that’s only there to monetize whales (cards, tradeable items…)
They were sued in the EU for violating anti trust laws, lost and decided not to cooperate.
They’re currently getting sued for forcing devs to not sell their games at a lower price on other platforms.
Their marketshare is more than enough to consider them a monopoly, you don’t need 100% of the market to be one, you just need to be so implanted that you become the default solution. Google doesn’t have 100% of the market, it still is considered a monopoly for search engines
That’s an issue with the cost of storage back then meaning that people needed external hosts, but these days if Reddit and Lemmy can self host then an equivalent forum could do it too.
Even with logs they’re still a pain because without threads it’s just questions getting repeated again and again and again without being able to refer the person to a previous part of the discussion where they could find all answers they need…
Funny how if it was any other company you would call bs and tell them to fuck off with their “trust me bro” attitude.
To me it’s much worse what Valve did, they have no business looking at my browsing history, that’s much more private than the games I own on Steam or the three friends I’ve got on both platforms anyway.
They got paid for the exclusivity, after that if they don’t sell as much then so be it, but just releasing on Steam is like choosing to play the lottery as a retirement plan and signing an exclusivity deal is like having a job, one might pay tens of millions or nothing, the other you’re sure will let you buy food for the next couple of years.
There’s tons of games on Steam that the devs have put everything they had in it only to never see any success and then you’ve got games like Vampire Survivors where nothing happened for months until suddenly a YouTuber started playing it and it became a major success. And I mean, good for Luca (and eventually for his team), but for every successful small dev there’s tens of unsuccessful ones…
The opinions shared in gaming media and on gaming social media doesn’t matter to the vast majority of gamers that doesn’t look at them. Fortnite is one of the biggest video games success story ever, these players don’t care about the opinion of a minority that’s mad that a company is trying to break the Steam monopoly.
Yeah and it sucked for archival purposes then and it still sucks now and forums took its place and that’s still where serious people go to talk about their field. Want a custom ROM for your phone? You’re going on a forum. Want to know how to repair a specific thing on a car? You’re going on a forum. Want to talk about your new patchwork passion? You’re going on a forum.
But somehow there’s some fields (crypto, some parts of gaming…) where people have forgotten that or simply have never spent time on forums to see the difference in quality of info having an ongoing discussion makes.
Why not say fuck the developers instead? They’re the ones accepting guaranteed income in exchange for exclusivity, maybe you should be mad at then for not taking a chance at the “influencer making your game popular enough that you recoup your cost” lottery.