Games

I was going to get to this but my last comment ran over the 5000 character limit and had to be trimmed back. I was just going to drop it, but on reflection it is important to drive the distinction home, so here it is:

It is a dead simple fact that Steam’s market share is real fuckin’ high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.

We have a word for that.

Yeah. We do. That word is dominance. It is not monopoly because monopoly has qualifiers beyond dominance.

First things first, you cherry picked the one thing from my link that supports your position intentionally ignoring that it is a single prong in a standard that has several. Second, I'm glad you brought the FTC link, because they also do not agree with your stance if you bring the whole context from your own link into the conversation:

As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.

Your definition only meets one portion of the FTC standard, which is why my comment addressed how Valve fails to meet any of the points of the standard beyond the dominant market position. YES STEAM IS MARKET DOMINANT, BUT NO THEY ARE NOT A MONOPOLY BECAUSE THEY DON'T MEET ANY OTHER PORTION OF THE STANDARD.

But Valve obviously has power.

To do what? PC is an open platform that they don't control.

Valve has the ability to do these things.

To make people raise prices or exclude competitors? Again, how or where?

Their competitors don’t.

Epic is LITERALLY excluding competitors right now for a bunch of titles, other competitors have done likewise until they recognized that customers didn't like it and decided that it wasn't in their best interest to do so.

Steam’s market share is so high, they could do whatever they want, whether or not they ever do.

Not to beat a dead horse, but how? They literally have no control over PC users beyond that which they've earned from being the best of MANY options, so how could they possibly parlay that into a power they could use to exert force over consumers or developers? Unless they did something that made them into not the best option, they have competition from every angle including from their direct competitors at Microsoft whose platform (as of March 2024) houses 96.67% of their customers with Windows being the dominant OS for Steam users by an absurd amount. There's incredible danger for Steam to try and pull anything anti-competitive because they literally live in the house that their competition built.

We are talking about a long-awaited critical darling of a game, and we are talking about how its sales blow, specifically because it’s not on Steam. Yes, it has sales, but it doesn’t have enough sales, unless it goes through this one store. Defending the store’s practices will not change that. Defending the conditions that led here will not change that.

You seem to imply that Steam being a monopoly has caused Remedy to suffer poor sales. However, we have the following problems there:

A) Steam fails to meet the legal definition of a monopoly. Just full stop. You attempt to take singular statements from a legal concept that by design has multiple prongs (specifically because we do not choose to harm companies who do no competitive wrong and come to their dominant position through the art of their craft being superior), but that's just willfully misunderstanding the concept of a monopoly.

and

B) A developer choosing to launch their game on the Evercade Vs and failing to see the sorts of sales numbers they might expect on Sony Playstation/Microsoft Xbox/Nintendo Switch is hardly a justification to claim that the game did poorly because Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are a oligopoly. The dev CHOSE to launch on a shittier platform, one that doesn't offer all the things that the current market expects. The devs are going to see lesser sales as a result, that's just how it works, they weren't harmed by a monopoly effect, they were harmed by their poor market choices.

It is a dead simple fact that Steam’s market share is real fuckin’ high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.

See, I think your problem may be that you think market share aside, all other things are equal, which is simply not the case. By your logic I should be able to offer you a nice shiny and new Evercade Vs in exchange for your Playstation 5 because it's only the market share that makes it so that the Evercade has less games to play? It's only natural where Steam is bringing more to the table, it has more customers as a result. EGS offers a pale shadow of what a consumer gets from Steam, so why should they count as much? Who owes them that? They need to get on that level if they want that credit due. They currently matter about as much as the effort they're putting into competing, which I'll agree isn't much, but is hardly relevant here.