PC Gaming

That would mean exclusives everywhere. Everyone would try to force some game pass on us, until our only choice to get an OK selection would be having 4 subscriptions. Or piracy.

With Steam, I get a well integrated platform for buying, updating and launching everything with the correct compatibility layer.

That's more convenient than piracy, so I use it.

And while many like our Steam benevolent (almost) monopoly, I do wonder how would the market look like if we had 20 competing companies that cannot gain more than 5% of the market share. Can you imagine the competition between them and how would that benefit us, the consumer?

More comptetion wouldn't just benefit consumers, it would benefit devs. A dev could shop their game around go with a store front that suits their needs better.

It would likely result in endless corporate backstabbing, exclusive deals, contracts fights, and patent trolling

Which would likely result in horrid quality of life for the end user. Having to maintain countless accounts and subscriptions to have even fractional access to games.

It would likely also fuck over the studios and indie developers who would be shoved aside or relentlessly bought up in a ever growing attempt to grow.

More competition does not always mean things are better for the consumer. You can see the exact same thing played out with the recent rise and now slow descent to streaming services. As we went from one good one that turned into a horrible one as the sharehold is demanded it, then more rows and then things only became worse.

When you start operating at the sort of scale that the internet does, true, the whole competition thing being better for the consumer rarely works out.

You more frequently just end up with a bunch of greedy companies endlessly trying to one-up each other f****** over everyone in their attempts resulting in no one-winning, not the company, not the developers creators or middlemen nor and definitely not least the consumer.

True competition benefiting the consumer also requires there to be a connection to the consumer in a reason to actually service them. The companies need to be fighting for the consumer and not just each other. But that is all capitalism is turned into. The consumer is no longer the end goal. They're just fighting each other to stomp them out so that all that's left is themselves.

It's been shown time and time again for decades now at at sufficient size competition just by itself does not help. The only thing that is repeatedly shown to be helpful is private companies with a good person at their home. Not trying to be a greedy f***.

And it's showing time and time again. Every time that person retires the company sold their holders. Found public offerings made things just get worse.

The problem is not monopolies are bad. It's not. The competition is good. It's at public companies are a problem in the law forcing companies to do everything in their power to please. The shareholders is killing everything.

"Not being a total bastard" is a weird way to describe overhauling the gaming on linux experience at no additional cost to the end user, among many other incredibly pro consumer choices they've pushed in the last twenty odd years.