this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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It's not stupid. Monopoly does not mean there's no competition. Google has been legally declared a monopoly and they have tons of competition.
Yeah, that difference in market share could be used to declare Steam a monopoly. For devs it means they have to publish their games there and accept that Steam will take 30% ofthe revenue.
Technically a monopoly means that a singular entity has or produces all of something. So to meet the definition of a monopoly they would have to have 100% market share.
Google was declared a monopoly in practice because they were using their market dominance to negatively impact other companies despite not having 100% market share like Microsoft and a bunch of other companies before them. That was about being so dominant and abusing it that action will be taken to keep them from becoming a literal monopoly.
alright then Valve uses their market dominance to negatively impact other companies, much better
They literally never went a millimeter out of their way to negatively impact another competing storefront.
Valve's success can be almost summed up as "does nothing, wins" because the competition to steam has been piss poor.
That is not true. Valve requires that you do not sell your games cheaper on other platforms, hindering competition.
That has never been true.
You can even "buy" open source software on Steam that is available free from the home website.
You're referring to the case with the developers of Lugaru, and they've been doing a great job of painting their fuckup as Valve barring platform competition.
That applies if you're selling steam keys, it does not mean that steam has to be the cheapest platform at all times
Competition like GOG or itch isn't "piss poor", they offer exactly the features their customers expect.
What does valve do to prevent itch and gog from having a fair shot at competiting if they scrounged up the investors to develop up a competing platform? They offer the features their customers expect and that customer base has so far proven to be a much smaller market
The others have been improving for a bit but GOG and itch have been focused on niche markets while Steam has grown broadly using the money from valve's early successes. If they want to step up to the kind of scale steam operates at, it will take a lot to overcome the innate loyalty of 'I already have 1000 games worth of time and money invested in the steam system,' and grow their repertoire outside their niches. Epic and Ubisoft also have tried, but they're still trying to catch up to where steam has been plugging along for ages. Epic has tried to build out their own version of the '1000 games' moat by giving out constant free games but their moat still isn't that big, and ubisoft has been relying mostly on having a few exclusives, but that hasn't really been a winning plan either because it's not enough to get people to think 'I want a game,' means 'go to origin,' instead of 'check to see if i already have it on steam.'
They're not competing with Steam. They're offering different services.
Competition is like EA Origins or the Epic store.
Except they don't do that, which is what separates valve from nearly every other comparable company with a massive market share.
Maybe "technically", but not practice or in law. Google was not being prevented from becoming a monopoly, they were declared a monopoly.
Technically but not technically...
Depends on the context.