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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • More like a democracy with no term limits and a leader with 90+% popularity rate.

    Sure, steam looks powerful, as if they can do whatever they want. But you have to look at why steam is so powerful, it’s because people like steam. If steam uses that power for anticompetitive behavior, people will stop liking steam and it will lose a lot of power.

    Just like if the leader does something that the people don’t like, suddenly the approval rating is no longer at 90+% and he loses the next election.


  • Tbf monopolies are sometimes unavoidable. Like the water company or the energy company (at least the ones that actually own the cables). Usually natural monopolies are nationalized though.

    Even if steam is not a natural Monopoly, competition is possible, we allow it to be a monopoly because we like it, not the other way around. There are plenty of digital stores, you can at any time buy almost any game from an alternative, I’m not aware of steam having any exclusivity agreement with any game (except the ones that valve made).

    Valve also doesn’t use shopping platform monopoly methods such as artificially making process low by selling at a loss, which is the main problem with other monopolies like Amazon.

    It also doesn’t bundle 100 unnecessary services to the subscription. It doesn’t even have a subscription.

    Sure, you can’t move your steam games to another platform, but you can get new ones. It’s not much of a problem having games from different platforms anyway, GoG for example even let’s you launch steam games from the GoG launcher. And you can always go back to good old shortcuts on a folder.

    The moment steam starts enshittifing, it will be very easy to switch to another platform. Compared with other platforms, like any social media or YouTube.