this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com)
submitted 1 year ago by nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Steam is a natural monopoly, which although still not entirely good but are a wholly different beast from monopolies made by exploiting flaws in the system

[–] nora@slrpnk.net -4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What's a natural monopoly? Valve currently has the freedom to implement anything they want within an extent because they're so popular. If they decided they wanted to charge devs 35% would people stop using it? Probably not. Steam's monopoly is as bad as any other for the same reason any other monopoly is bad.

[–] coltorl@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A natural monopoly is when an industry is difficult to break into, making competition difficult or impossible. This favors incumbents, in fact, a lot of industries are natural monopolies (pharma, aerospace, chip production).

The difficulty of breaking into an industry may be because:

  • new players cannot compete with established scale
  • start up costs require a nearly all-or-nothing approach, high risk
  • regulations tie the hand of new innovators
[–] SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 9 points 1 year ago

Look it up? It's an actual term, not something I made up for whatever reason you assumed to argue against something I didn't even say. I already said it's still not a good thing, it just would have happened regardless of whoever that was able to do it on scale first.