Steam is a closed source market place blob that takes 30% middle man tax. Valve however has understood FOSS, and the contributions they are making are immense.

When a true FOSS project is dominating this means the people are in control of it. Not corpos nor is it a monopoly. People have voted by donating work for it to be the most successful thing in its applicable area. Dominating FOSS projects also suck up and integrate a lot of innovation greatly reducing duplicated effort.

FreeBSD is alive and well, and it even benefits from Linux's DRM GPU drivers.

Although the drm gpu drivers are mostly of a corporate effort, we are seeing an occasional interventions by the people "no, not like that" to keep the sometimes shoddy quality up.

/

ow Linux dominates the server space.

Linux is free. Free cannot be monopoly. Bad comparison here.

There is the colloquial definition of monopoly, and a different legal bar for being declared a monopolist under US law.

To be declared a monopolist requires that a company actively seek to destroy other competitors through anti competitive behavior. Even if people mix terms, the general idea is that they’re not doing anything unreasonable and anti-competitive to gain their position in the market.

Or at least, I would argue that the thing they do is something the entire rest of the industry also does, and basically everyone else in the industry rejects the solution out of hand. Allowing radical interoperability between services would prevent network effects and user lock in on any given services. But, those companies who rail against steam the most don’t actually want a healthy market with a number of viable competitors, they just want to take steams place and be make lots of money by being anti consumer.

Yes, an evil ceo could do much harm by turning steam into the companies shooting themselves in the face. However, they are currently one of the only ones not doing that, so that's where gamers will go.

There's a difference between a monopoly that exists because all other options are shit and a monopoly that exists because of anticompetitive practices.

fr

really?

It's not. You can still buy from the others if you want to be treated like shit, excepting GOG, in my opinion. Consoles are true monopolies, because you can only choose if you want to buy a console and marry to its store, now that physical media is becoming a rarity.

They have a big fraction of the market because they are efficient at selling what people want. I don't like it, I believe Newell, specifically, is profiting greedily from Valve's situation, but shit, this is not even a natural monopoly.

The difference was that people pretended like Google ever had an option to “not be evil”. At the end of the day, they were a publicly traded company, and thus, line must go up, or else the collective hive mind of the public market would vote the leadership out and replace them.

Steam is private, thus, the current leaderships can ignore the demands of the public market hive mind. Private companies can be evil, but it depends on who owns them. They’re not guaranteed.

In fairness Google was just becoming evil at that point. It was a fantastic company when the founders ran it.

Google isn't privately owned. It's hard to be on the stock market and not be evil. I think Costco is the only one that has managed it for any appreciable length and that is under threat of death from one of the co-founders.

Will they? Probably. The thing is the others already did, and they even tried to hurt Valve in bad faith. The meme is good, but they take their shots at Valve before shooting themselves in their faces. I just hope GOG wakes the fuck up with Linux support, so I can buy more from them.