I think it’s not that difficult to be monopoly when you’re competing with guys like on the left /s

The problem is Valve is still a business where their income comes from providing products and services. The rest are no longer business in that sense anymore and are really just scams that make their money from convincing investors on the Perception that they have a sure fire way to milk their customer for even more money in the future to convince new investors to invest to pump up the stock to make the most money for the old investors or more so the ones with stock options.

As a gamer, I love Valve. Problem is, I’m not their customer. Their customers are publishers and independent devs. Their main product is digital shelf space in the one of, if not the, most visited digital game store.

This is the lens through which any discussion of Valve’s business practices has to be viewed. None of the companies in this meme compete with Valve in this arena, except perhaps Epic Games. They are for the better part Valve’s customers, and they probably don’t like that. They might create their own stores to try to claw back some of their sales, but their core business model is not reliant on those stores.

As another commenter said, if this is a monopoly, it doesn’t seem like one created through anticompetetive behavior. You can watch Gaben on YouTube talk about how he just wanted to make a distribution platform for Half life that wasn’t clunky like Microsoft. Steam was just one of the first, imo.

(This isnt necessarily me condoning their business model though. Still feels like digital feudalism if you ask me.)

Valve is going to have to pull an intel/amd thing and start licensing tech from gog just to keep them from folding.

At the moment, I can’t say I really care that Steam and GoG are the only two major platforms on PC.

Eventually a CEO will take over at Valve and get too greedy and ruin it.

Stop bending over backwards to defend corporations. There are no good corporations. Corporations are not your friend. They will never be. They have only their interests in mind. They don’t care about you.

I’ve never seen it put so well. Yes it’s a monopoly, but unlike most bad monopolies it didn’t get there from being predatory, or anti competitive. Ironically with the Deck I’d argue by allowing other launchers and stores they’re surprisingly pro-competition.

It’s that every single other store (except GOG) has done everything in their power to be as anti-consumer pro-business as they can and just have destroyed themselves. EA’s Origin from the start was a buggy mess with bad DLC. Ubisoft was just an Assassin’s Creed store and pissed everyone off by forcing it and not giving a single reason to be over there except “You can’t buy Valhalla anywhere else”, proving how little PC players needed to play Valhalla. Microsoft had a strict 5-install limit of installing games over the lifetime of the purchase, and you had to use their shitty “I solidly work 15% of the time” microsoft store. Everything other store was just hot garbage made up by MBAs who had zero interest of serving the consumer.

But now “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”