You forced it on people by demanding it for a must-have game… which came on discs. To some extent, even now, fuck you.
Other comments talk about great sale prices, which is often an anticompetitive practice called “dumping.”
I’d be less blunt if people could admit it’s a monopoly. ‘Oh I never even consider other stores.’ Uh-huh. ‘I mean there’s competitors, but they hardly matter. Even billion-dollar companies can’t make theirs relevant.’ You don’t say. ‘Valve can even afford to let devs sell keys wherever, and the customers still get their ecosystem!’ Yeah, wow. We have a word for that. ‘How dare you.’
Steam is a monopoly surely, but it’s a rare case, or maybe the only case, where it became a monopoly both because it is actually a good service that is not enshittified, and because the competitors kept shooting themselves in the foot.
I guess that’s what you get when you don’t have any obligation to shareholders.
Netflix was also a preferable monopoly, because this warring fiefdom bullshit is not competition. You wanna watch a show? Fuck you, $20/mo and another password to lose.
Netflix was always bound to the shareholders desires, Valve was never and as far as Gabe and his successor are concerned, it won’t. This and Valve’s unique hierarchy are big factors into why they haven’t enshittified.
Netflix didn’t do anything wrong. They got fucked over by everyone they licensed from deciding they’d steal Netflix’s business model, and then they would be the biggest fish in the pond. All of them. At the same time.
You forced it on people by demanding it for a must-have game… which came on discs. To some extent, even now, fuck you.
Other comments talk about great sale prices, which is often an anticompetitive practice called “dumping.”
I’d be less blunt if people could admit it’s a monopoly. ‘Oh I never even consider other stores.’ Uh-huh. ‘I mean there’s competitors, but they hardly matter. Even billion-dollar companies can’t make theirs relevant.’ You don’t say. ‘Valve can even afford to let devs sell keys wherever, and the customers still get their ecosystem!’ Yeah, wow. We have a word for that. ‘How dare you.’
Steam is a monopoly surely, but it’s a rare case, or maybe the only case, where it became a monopoly both because it is actually a good service that is not enshittified, and because the competitors kept shooting themselves in the foot.
I guess that’s what you get when you don’t have any obligation to shareholders.
Netflix was also a preferable monopoly, because this warring fiefdom bullshit is not competition. You wanna watch a show? Fuck you, $20/mo and another password to lose.
We broke up movie theaters for that shit.
Netflix was always bound to the shareholders desires, Valve was never and as far as Gabe and his successor are concerned, it won’t. This and Valve’s unique hierarchy are big factors into why they haven’t enshittified.
Netflix didn’t do anything wrong. They got fucked over by everyone they licensed from deciding they’d steal Netflix’s business model, and then they would be the biggest fish in the pond. All of them. At the same time.
Steam is a monopoly, it’s just not cartoonishly evil and the bar for a good company is super low these days.
The problem is everyone who tries to do what Steam does does it incompetently so it’s not viable.
GOG Galaxy is the closest I’ve seen to a viable competitor though and I respect the work they put into making older games run on newer hardware.