This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
No shit. Now do Amazon, apple, meta, Microsoft, Disney and all the food conglomerates. Then it will have been a good start.
Walmart and telecom too.
Too big to fail financial industry should go first.
oil, pharma... most of all critical aspects of every day life is controlled by oligopolies
They've got Amazon in the works
Would be nice if we didn't let them kill off so many other businesses first before doing something about it.
Steam...
You can't break up steam and improve the market in any particular way. Since they're not really big on exclusivity agreements, there's also very little a court order would do to make the market more competitive.
If consumers were more evenly spread around different platforms there would be actual competition to determine prices and margins for the developers. Right now Epic takes a smaller share of the revenues but the price is the same to try and compensate for the smaller number of buyers. With their dominant position it's pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more (which would require a ridiculous amount of capita), people have their well established habits and won't move even if the product they're using isn't necessarily the best or they're spending more than they need to.
it’s pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more
(1) Many PC gamers simply wait for games to go on sale. Epic buying exclusive agreements isn't as dominating of a strategy as they think it is; even if it's expensive.
(2) Steam is the incumbent. You have to be better in order to be worth it to switch. As you mentioned, Epic is lacking in features
(3) Valve has not treated the desktop market the way Apple as treated the app store. Look at how far Epic has taken Apple to court; compared to their biggest rival, Valve
(4) Valve has put in alot of work in other layers; such as making open hardware and contributing to AMD GPU drivers on Linux. They work on the whole platform, even parts they do not directly make money off. This is called investment.
(5) What exactly would you break Steam into being? One app for reviews, another for buying, and another for launching games? Break the development studio into a different company? Even if Epic is throwing around money made from its game engine and games?
That's the thing though, with their market share an hypothetical competitor could be better and people still wouldn't switch, Steam is where their games are, it's where their friends play, building everything from scratch elsewhere wouldn't be worth the trouble even if the alternative was better.
Store, development, forums, trading platform, launcher, online gaming services, hardware, streaming integrated into the platform, DRM... Valve has their hands all over the place and there's a single person at the top of that. Wanna wait until they start becoming bad before considering that maybe it's not a good thing that they have a hold on 70% of the market? Hell, just the fact that Newell could decide that they're closing their doors tomorrow and no one has access to their games anymore should be fucking worrying to everyone.
At what seams would you break Steam at? In this day and age those are just app store features. Is there anything you listed Sony, Microsoft or Apple don't have?
I do understand having a Steam library would make it harder to switch but most of us have a few GOG games and collect Epic free games as well (though, I haven't even looked at the free Epic games since Christmas).
People even download a launcher like Hero Launcher on the Steamdeck to run games from other stores. We have the freedom to use Steam in tagent with other stores and we do. You can buy a game off GOG and add it to Steam to launch it.
Steam is simply the better product, hands down.
Edit: To prove that I see your point but just don't agree with it: Here is a quote from an ArsTechnica article about a judge viewing Steam as a monopoly.
Despite those changes, Judge Coughenour once again dismissed Wolfire's argument that Valve had engaged in "illegal tying" between the Steam platform (which provides game library management, social networking, achievement tracking, Steam Workshop mods, etc.) and the Steam game store (i.e., the part that sells the games). Those two sides of Steam form a single market, the judge wrote, because "commercial viability for a platform is possible only when it generates revenue from a linked game store." What's more, the suit has not shown there is any sufficient market demand "for fully functional gaming platforms distinct from game stores."
Does this judge expect me to buy a game from Epic which is missing features and then pay Valve a fee to contact the developer through Steam? Will Epic cheapen their price by 30% so I can "enable Steam features." This would be unprecedented. I cannot go to Amazon to return/complain about a product I bought from Walmart.
Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it's customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call
Funny the things you can do when you don't have to worry about shareholders.
Steam isn't actually a monopoly in a meaningful way
Neither did google. The problem is that this case, from the title stated in another thread, Google are doing anti-competitive shit to make sure they maintain the dominant position. But steam does not practice in anti competitive behaviours (as far as I know anyway). In fact, the competitor can arguably be held to anti competitive behaviour depending on how you spin it.
Steam is currently being sued for anti competitive practices and do we really need to wait until they do bad shit before we start to consider that a single company having good on 70% of the market isn't a good thing?
Isn't that only about the 30% fee?
Steam provides a lot of value for that 30% fee, more than Apple does.
You don't need to have full control of the market to be considered a monopoly, you just need a big enough share that you can make it sway in the direction that you want, which Steam has. Example: Microsoft is considered a monopoly even though there's Apple and Linux that get market shares.
Cable companies too please.
Biggest "so far" they're far from the only.
Clone Teddy Roosevelt.
Mark my words! the outcome of this will be like a mountain giving birth to a mouse.
Microsoft came out of such antitrust lawsuit unscathed and a decade later went back to pushing its browser down everyone's throat.
A mountain giving birth to a mouse? Is that a translation from another language? I'm not being critical, it's just oddly specific and bizarre.
we have so many freaking monopolies now a days. we really need to keep companies from owning so much. bring back the media limits and no company should be able to own multiple areas of healthcare and such.
Will this mean that no one will be able to pay to be the default search, or just that Google will no longer be allowed?
Honestly, Google is still the best free search even though it isn't as good as it used to be... and if this ruling means that no one can pay to be the default then Google will still win based on name recognition and performance. Plus they will save money by not needing to give it to Apple.
The real loser here is Apple who is going to lose a fairly large revenue stream.
I think this may also end up killing their deal with reddit.
I imagine that, if regulators go hard enough, it'll make sweeping changes company-wide. Google does a lot of anti-competitive behaviors that don't involve money and are very sneaky, and as a result, we might see a lot of features be changed in the long term.
FUCK YEAH!!! NOW BREAK THOSE BASTARDS UP!!!!
Ooooooooooh shit. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Will go to SCOTUS, a few bribes will happen, then it will die.
this is why it's silly that people are mad at mozilla for buying a privacy friendly ad company to try and break the monopoly.
Its seriously absurd. I hate ads, but there's realistically not a better option to profit when providing free software and services like Mozilla is doing. Investing into ads that don't violate your privacy is a great decision. I don't know what the hell people want from them.
They want them to meet all of their impossibly high and contradictory standards at the same time. For free. What's so hard about that?? /s
They should do it like Signal: accept donations. Signal is doing just fine. But Mozilla cannot legally do that as they are a for-profit company. And Mozilla Foundation won't do that either because they are funded by Mozilla and under their command.
You can accept donations if you're a for-profit company, there's no rule against that.
I don’t know what the hell people want from them.
these people are probably already using forks anyway
