this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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The weirdest thing is that steam doesn't have a natural or self reinforcing monopoly. It wouldn't take much for another company to copy their business model, and provide a competitor. In practice, however, they all fall flat on their faces.
Steam's model is to give up short term gain for a smaller long term gain. Over time, this has snowballed into what we see now. Gabe is happy to get ever richer from his golden goose laying away. The competitors get started, then try and gut the goose for a quick buck.
It kind of does.
You get user lock-in as users buy more games, making it so Steam is always a store to buy from. You can't deplatform from Steam. At that point, you can't replace Steam with another DRM platform to pay existing games. That creates a large customer base which becomes a must add for vending new games.
It isn't a hard monopoly, but it helps create a soft monopoly.
Compounding interest is the most powerful force in the universe
Much like the nuclear forces, it only works within a certain range. Not enough principle and the economy collapses before you can snowball. Too much and the economy collapses because you snowball.
I don't think this tracks. Steam's model is developing software to automate or crowdsource expensive effort. Now, anyways. It originally was to fix PC piracy, but they achieved that ages ago.
And hell yeah they have a natural self-reinforcing monopoly. Even ignoring the mass of captive users with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars committed to the platform, Valve has been doing feature work on that storefront for decades. When others try to compete people immediately bring up the expansive value added features. They make their own controller drivers. They make their own compatibility layers. They make their own OS, FFS. In what world bringing a PC storefront to that level would "not take much"? It's an Apple-style ecosystem model, and much as it terrifies me that it's an ever growing monopoly, it's still impresive that they managed to build it within Microsoft's own.
That would be true only if a company recreating the same product and improving on it would actually have a chance to compete, which isn't the case. People refuse to have multiple launchers out of principle, having all your games in one place makes it so you don't want to split your library so you keep buying from the same store (sometimes people even brag about paying more just to have a game on Steam instead of an alternative).
The only way to break that monopoly would be for a competitor to come and offer to recognize purchases made on Steam for games they offer on their own platform and to start with, at the minimum, everything that Steam offers and I'm sure I don't have to tell you that's completely unrealistic.