this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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If you're so sure Steam is a monopoly, can you please provide any evidence for that? To be clear, being very successful does not make someone a monopolist.
If Valve were a monopolist, they'd be listed here: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-designates-six-gatekeepers-under-digital-markets-act-2023-09-06_en
They account for about 75% of game sales on PC from what I'm finding, it's a "virtual monopoly", i.e. they have enough reach to control the market even if they have competitors.
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.
They have their own unethical business practice they're getting sued for (preventing sales at a lower price on competing platforms) and just because you agree with what they do now doesn't mean it's not a risk to have such a behemoth in the market, Gaben is nice now, it just needs him changing his mind or retiring/dying and shit could hit the fan real quick.
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.
~~Because of the way they act at the moment, it doesn't mean that they're not in a monopoly position.~~
Turns out it's simply because the EU didn't even study their case because the PC gaming market is too small to bother 🤡
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.
Find me a source confirming that they actually studied Steam's position in their market. They have specific criterias, including financial and user ones, and Steam doesn't meet them... oopsy!
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.
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!
No, what I'm saying is that they didn't check the PC gaming platform market at all because it doesn't fit the criterias necessary for them to pay attention to it, which means that Steam not being on the list doesn't mean they're not a monopoly. You try to use that as proof, yet the European Union just didn't check what's happening in that market at all!
There's tons of monopolies they don't list because the market they're in is too small to bother, it doesn't mean they're not monopolies.
Funny how nobody other random commentators on the internet and their "Trust me, bro" line of evidence sees Steam as a monopoly and you people conveniently keep forgetting that the biggest PC games – Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite – are not on Steam and the combined active user base of those three games dwarf the active Steam user base. So the gatekeeper list by the EU does not count. Great. Where are the antitrust rulings on Steam by the USA, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Kenya, or any other regulatory body on the planet?
"This video game store isn't a monopoly because these video games by three different companies have more daily users when combined together!"
I hope you realise how little sense that makes...
As a video game store they are the biggest one in term of total users and number of games for sale, are you questioning that?
How many users get Fortnite from Epic Games Store and how many get Minecraft from Microsoft Store? What does the “Trust me, bro” line of evidence say about those? None of you provide anything facts-based after all...
They haven't provided a source! They extrapolated from data they don't understand! The criterias for companies to be analysed under the DMA are public and the PC video game market just doesn't fit! The reason Steam isn't on the list isn't because it's not a monopoly, it's they the industry they I operate in isn't taken in consideration by the law.
You could be the only online windmill hat seller, the EU wouldn't put you on the DMA list because you wouldn't sell 6.5B euros worth every year and your market valuation wouldn't be 65B euros. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have a monopoly!
Heck, Valve doesn't even have a market valuation because it's not public! They're evaluated to be worth less than 10B USD and it's purely surveillance, that's a long fucking way to the minimum threshold required be the DMA isn't it? They're still the biggest player in the PC video game sales market.
Frivolous? The judge has accepted new evidence and the lawsuit has been allowed to proceed.
Nintendo is compared to other console manufacturers.
Microsoft is considered to be in a position of monopoly in the OS market, yet they're not the ones building the PC itself.
Holy fuck did I just enter a freaking asylum or something?
Yeah, to say a successful business is a monopoly because it is far reaching is absurd.
Call me when Good-Old-Epic-Steam launches.
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.
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.
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.
But when the EU recently announced service gatekeepers, Valve was not among them. Microsoft is.
*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
You forgot to add that part 👍
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.
No, the PC videogame market is too small for the European Union to analyse it.
If the local hardware store is the only one selling screws for 100km around and it doesn't show up on their list, does it means they don't have a monopoly or it simply means that they don't bother checking that because the hardware store doesn't:
Make 6.5B a year/doesn't have a market capitalization of 65B
Doesn't have 45m monthly users in the union AND 10k business users in the union
Meets those criterias three years in a row
Because these are the criterias required for the EU to take the time to analyze a companies' position in their market.
Then please provide ANY form of facts-based analysis that Steam is a monopoly and no "Trust me, bro" isn't that.
The European Union considers some companies to be a monopoly with a smaller market presence than Steam has in the PC video games sales market. That comes from your own source buddy.
You continue to deflect that you have no proof that Steam is a monopoly.
Your whole argument to show that it isn't is based on ignoring their market dominance and referencing the DMA that hasn't even been used to analyze Steam's position in their market because the PC video game market as a whole isn't big enough to be covered by the DMA.
The proof, that I already mentioned, is the fact that no antitrust agency anywhere convicted Valve of anything related to monopoly.