• woelkchen@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        75% of the units sold or 75% of the overall revemue. Given that the most successful PC games aren’t even on Steam, the latter seems unlikely to me. Roblox alone is a sustained revenue stream in insanely high numbers.

        Do they block the competition in any way? They aren’t the stewards of Windows. Epic buys exclusive rights to games. Does Valve do the same? On Steam Deck, there’s even an entire independent app store (Discover with Flathub) enabled right out of the box. That’s how the community made Minecraft and Heroic Game Launcher available. Official EGS, GamePass, and GOG launchers could be made available via Flathub but MS etc. choose not to.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            It’s not about Valve or Newell being nice or not, it’s about whether Valve has a monopoly and the EU just recently looked at digital markets closely and determined that Valve is not a gatekeeper.

              • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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                2 years ago

                Well, the EU made a list of monopolists in digital markets and decided that Valve is not one of them and that has nothing to do with current behavior.

                  • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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                    2 years ago

                    Find me a source confirming that they actually studied Steam’s position in their market.

                    I found a super recent source that does not list Valve as a monopolist. Maybe you should go and find a credible source other than “Trust me, bro” that Steam is a monopoly.

                    They have specific criterias, including financial and user ones, and Steam doesn’t meet them… oopsy!

                    So Steam does not rake in so much money to hog the market and also does not have enough users to hog the customer base. If anything is an oopsy, it’s you accidentally admitting that Steam is not a monopoly. Good we cleared that up!

    • Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      Yeah, to say a successful business is a monopoly because it is far reaching is absurd.

      Call me when Good-Old-Epic-Steam launches.

      • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        The fact that there are tons of games only available on steam should tell you it’s a monopoly.

        It’s fucking shocking to me that so many people here actually believe that Valve isn’t a monopoly. You must have your head way up your ass.

        • skulkingaround@sh.itjust.works
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          2 years ago

          How many games are actually steam exclusive on PC though, not counting 50 cent shovelware crap? A good chunk of the best selling PC games ever (minecraft for example) are not even available on steam.

          I just went through the top 10 on steam and other than counter strike, which is literally made by valve, all of them are available elsewhere.

    • Zorque@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      One can have a monopoly without directly trying for it. Especially when it comes to services with a lot infrastructure involved. Once you make those investments, it’s hard for anyone to compete against them.

      A monopoly just means you control a significant amount of the market. I think, technically, they would fall under oligopoly. Where a few businesses have control of the market instead of just a single business. But the point is they have a far larger share of the market than most others. This is mostly because they create a product that people want to use, instead of making a service that unfairly captures the market through things like game exclusivity or hostile takeovers.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        But when the EU recently announced service gatekeepers, Valve was not among them. Microsoft is.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            Because they don’t meat the minimum financial and monthly user criterias to be taken into consideration when analyzing the monopoly status of their platform

            So Steam does not meet / meat🥩 the financial and monthly user numbers to count as a monopoly? So Steam is not a monopoly then. Great.

              • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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                2 years ago

                No, the PC videogame market is too small for the European Union to analyse it.

                Then please provide ANY form of facts-based analysis that Steam is a monopoly and no “Trust me, bro” isn’t that.