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megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.

Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)

The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.

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Teppa@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I do buy games off other platforms and import them into Steam all the time.

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- megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  When you “add a game” to the steam library, you’re just creating a link to another file on your system, not really shifting the management of it over to steam (so no updates or the like), and if you logged in on another machine you wouldn’t be able to download the game through steam.
  
  more importantly you can’t take a steam game and move over your license to use it, or ability to install/update it to some other platform. If you decided you never wanted to use steam again, that you liked some other platform better, you would still have to use steam to access those games.
  
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Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

monopoly laws they violate

A monopoly is holding a large marketshare. It is a label determined by courts. That the marketshare is from consumers picking the product is irrelevant to being declared a monopoly.

In the late 90’s Windows was the overwhelming market leader for OS’s because the alternatives weren’t good. Linux didn’t have good consumer focused distros and was therefore used on servers. MacOS at the time was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from almost 20 years earlier. So Microsoft was declared a monopoly and had restrictions placed on what it could do despite all other competitors already doing what Microsoft did (like including a web browser). That’s why years later Apple was able to make Safari the ONLY web browser (all “alternatives” were just reskins of Safari) whereas Microsoft was forced to include support so that you could switch the default web browser.

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- megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space.
  
  They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive to use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
  
  Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that.
  
  If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.
  
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Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This kind of lock in is even less relevant now with cross platform play and similar options becoming a common game feature. Take a game I play, Dead by Daylight; people can add friends on PlayStation and Xbox through BHVR (the dev) ID. It takes some work on the developer’s part, but they can provide their own tools to break that Steam lock-in.

So let’s say some public corporate emergency prompts a Valve exodus (eg, Gabe eats babies) - people would need to buy new copies of their most played games, but in many cases their account progress is on a movable ID, so it wouldn’t even be a huge blocker.

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- megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Buying a new copy of the games I play regaurly (say 2-10 hours every 6 months) would be nearly a months rent for me.
  
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