• @[email protected]
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    11 months ago

    I really wish people would stop calling successful companies “monopolies”. Mono = 1. As in a single company operating in a market.

    Most often it involves anti-competitive practices also, which Steam has absolutely none of.

    The competition just sucks. All of them. Which this article articulates beautifully.

    If by “broken up” you mean you’d like to see another company actually make an attempt to compete with them by providing value to their customers instead of trying to exploit them like cash cows while simultaneously locking them into their shitty launcher, I absolutely agree.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      By broken up I’d like to see the community, workshop, chat system, achievements, and marketplace all be separate companies

      That would be better for everyone

      • @[email protected]
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        1311 months ago

        Why? All those features already exist as separate companies. Discord for chat, Nexus for workshop, like 5000 places run their own marketplace etc.

        How would it be better for everyone if you have to set up 5 separate things? That’s currently the issue with Epic’s launcher that it does nothing other than let you buy games so it doesn’t provide the value Steam does.

          • @[email protected]
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            511 months ago

            Oh, you can already do that with Discord with the in-game overlay and anyone else is free to implement stuff like that too. If you mean that there should be a open source alternative for the Steam client then you can check out Lutris, it can be used to launch steam games.

              • @[email protected]
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                611 months ago

                What evidence? If you prefer alternatives, then those are available

                It’s clear why people prefer Steam: it has good features. But the other launchers should complete by making better features not forcing Steam to remove features.

                  • @[email protected]
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                    111 months ago

                    Not necessary, no but it adds value to it’s users and thus making their platform the most popular.

                    Like Epic’s launcher is the perfect comparison for this: It has the bare minimum features available to sell games and people hate it for it’s lack of features. It’s not necessary for Epic to add those features but clearly people value those in their choice of platform.