Mandatory preface to prevent angry fanboys stinking up the replies: I like Steam. I use Steam. And just to be sure, democrats and republicans are not the same.

Some folks in this thread are using American case law to argue that Steam is not a monopoly, or that Steam is a good (??@#!?!?) monopoly. They look at other cases, like Microsoft, and point out how far Microsoft had to go before it was considered a monopoly by American judges, and then point out that Steam is not as bad. There are two problems with that line of reasoning.

The first is that monopoly law has been absolutely gutted by Reagan, and worsened by every administration (dem and rep alike) up until Biden. In the Biden admin, Lina Khan has made some very small steps to tighten up monopoly laws a bit, but obviously Trump happened (although Harris was pretty much the same as the dems before Biden, so not much hope there either). The bar for being a monopoly is unreasonably high, and American monopoly law is an absolute joke.

Secondly, this line of thinking conflates legality with morality, or being good (enough) for society. I hope I don't need to convince you that this idea is false. Slavery was legal.

The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.

Note that "they're not currently doing harm" is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won't be satisfied by "don't worry I'm not currently using it".

Here's what I don't understand... Say we all agree they are a monopoly, what do you do about it?

It doesn't seem feasible to break them up into smaller companies, how would that even work? What are the dividing lines between what portion of the company goes where? Does that even solve anything?

Force them to charge less money? Okay, now they charge the same as Epic (or even less). Basically every other store is now being undercut by the biggest player on the scene. There is now even less reason to use a storefront that isn't Steam. It doesn't feel like that solves the problem either.

It seems like all the courts have tried to do so far is charge them money for existing, not get them to change what they do, which seems a lot less like the government trying to stop the big bad monopoly and more like the government wanting to get their cut. What does "stopping the monopoly" even mean? Are we happier and better off as consumers if Valve is forced to shut down Steam entirely? Is that the goal?

Only beef I have with steam off the top of my head.

1. Make it so I OWN my games if a dev isn't okay with that they can sell somewhere else.

2. Reverse you decision on steam account not being transferreable/inheritable

Probably others but those are the two I think of.

Many things can be true at once. Is it true that Steam controls a dominating share of the PC gaming market? Yes. Is it true that when a company enters such a market position, that they can use that position to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer behaviour? Yes. Has Valve actually engaged in such behaviour? No.

These comments…

Some day, Steam is going to enshittify, eat game devs for breakfast, and all these Steam fans will wonder how anyone could have possibly seen this coming.

Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.

Not that I don’t enjoy Steam. But I trust them as much as any corporation: not at all.

Remember that you are on Lemmy: a decentralized and open source platform owned by the community.

Steam is a proprietary, closed source, for profit third party software launcher owned by a billionaire.