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US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'.
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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If consumers were more evenly spread around different platforms there would be actual competition to determine prices and margins for the developers. Right now Epic takes a smaller share of the revenues but the price is the same to try and compensate for the smaller number of buyers. With their dominant position it's pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more (which would require a ridiculous amount of capital), people have their well established habits and won't move even if the product they're using isn't necessarily the best or they're spending more than they need to.
That's not what a monopoly is.
Epic had all the money in the world and tons of time (and users) to create a viable alternative. They didn't fail because valve squeezed them out, they failed because they refuse to improve their product. In fact, it could be said that Epic wanted to become the monopoly themselves. If they spent half as much effort on their product as they do on lawsuits and exclusivity deals, they would have been a viable competitor. But they didn't. At the end of the day, it sucks to use. Steam does not.
EGS is perfectly usable and in my opinion is better than Steam in some aspects (way less bloat, open the app and your games are right there to launch even if you're on the storefront), your saying they refuse to improve their product just shows you're not using it because it's way better than it was on release.
And yes, Valve has a monopoly, they control enough of the market that it goes where they decide it's going and they're the default solution people turn to when they need the services they offer, they're also working on increasing their reach with streaming on the platform, forums, reviews and so on. If all you need is found on a single platform and it's the platform that a vast majority is using then what do we call that? That's right, a monopoly.
Want a similar example? Microsoft is considered to be in a monopolistic position with Windows, yet they have competitors, same with Office, same with Explorer back in the day. Google is a monopoly even though competitors exist.
Fun fact: You can change which page your Steam client opens up to by default. I haven't seen the store unless I wanted to in years.