Let me ask you this. What are steam doing to try to be a monopoly?

Because the way I see it, Nintendo at one time took distinctive actions to ENSURE they remained a monopoly. Then Sega threatened that.

Then Sega a few years later shot themselves in the foot with confusing console stratagy. 32X, and the SegaCD were absolute failures because everyone knew the Saturn was around the corner. Then they shot themselves in the foot AGAIN by just dumping the Saturn on retailers doorsteps, in some cases at 3AM when nobody was even at the stores, with no prior warning. Just dump it at their door and hope for the best. Well, CONSUMERS didn't even know they were in stores. And even people with preorders didn't know. This was just in the early days of the internet, and long before social media. So it's not like if this happened today, everyone would know when they check their social media. Nope. It was said that some customers just didn't know for months, simply because if you weren't physically in the store, you didn't know. Some stores took phone numbers for the preorders, the majority did not. A lot of pre-orders were cancelled over this.

Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by partering up with Sony to create the Nintendo Play Station. (Two words). It was to use Sonys CD technology, and be a massive upgrade in storage. Well after reading the contract, Nintendo lawyers discovered that Sony could not only create their own games, but they could liscense the technology to other 3rd parties with zero control over who gets to release software for it. Worst of all, Sony, not Nintendo, would recieve all money from software sold on the Nintendo Play Station. So they backstabbed Sony, and tried again with Phillips. Phillips was to create a Super Nintendo addon. Sega had the SegaCD, and Nintendo felt left out. So they tried creating the Super Nintendo version of the SegaCD. It went very poorly. The end result of this ended up being the Phillips CD-i, which was less of a Nintendo console, and more of a Phillips console liscensing Nintendo characters. To this day, Nintendo has never reclaimed their monopoly, due to trying to kill Sega, they created Sony's Playstation.

Sony created a monopoly by including a dvd player in the PS2 during a time nobody had a dvd player. It worked. But that was the only thing they did to create the monopoly. It's not like Nintendo in the 80s, when they told 3rd parties they could either put a game on Atari, or they could put one on the NES. Sony lost their dominance with the PS3 by charging $700, at a time the Xbox360 was charging $400.

And Microsoft lost their dominance by just not having anything exclusive worth playing. Then they had the "everything is an xbox" campaign, which totally backfired.

But Steam? I don't see them as doing anything to create a monopoly. I see them as a simple software store that sells all PC games. They've entered the console space in recent years with the steamdeck. But it's nothing that creates a monopoly. Personally I find the steamdeck to be overpriced. The thing that gives them a monopoly is that they offer crazy deep sales, but publishers have to agree to those sales. Steam can't mark Factorio down to $2.00 without the publishers consent (which in that case they do NOT consent to sales).

All I see Steam doing is offering quality products, at reasonable prices, without bullshit.

Epic games is FULL of bullshit in their customer service.

And GOG isn't full of bullshit, but their library is limited, and always will be limited to publishers who consent to them selling drm-free games. For this reason alone, gog can never compete with steam.

So, yes, Steam HAS a monopoly, but I see it as a result of two things.

1. Everybody else keeps shooting themselves in the foot.

2. On consoles you keep the game for that console. When a new console comes out, MAYBE you get backwards compatibility for 1-2 generations. Usually 1 more. With Steam, you could have bought a game 20 years ago, and bought 20 new PC's since then. Your purchases will still work.

In either event, I don't see this as Valve being malicious at any point to create a monopoly. It can easily be taken away from them by someone else doing the same things they did. Offer a generous library, complete with modern releases, regular sales, and supurb customer service. It just so happens that everybody else is too greedy and/or stupid to attempt this.

So in your words, what is Valve doing wrong that makes you think they're creating an unfair monopoly?

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”.

Absolutely this. I'm glad you were able to convey it in a way people understand.

Steam is a blackhole for PC gaming/gamers from a marketing perspective. They've capitalized on so much of the market, that once a person buys a game on Steam they are unlikely to buy the same game and/or even future games from a different but similar platform. It is in a sense, locking the consumer in and so many consumers are locked in. Nobody competed with Steam in the PC gaming market for an eternity and it's not Steams fault at all.

Even if Steam went to absolute shit in the next 20 odd years they've pretty much guaranteed that I'll be coming back to play all the games I've ever bought on there. Even if EGS or GoG improves their interface to compete with Steam, I've no reason to buy elsewhere (though do support GoG please).

Now to pose a question: How does a competitor even compete with Steam to capture even a % of the market?

Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given. That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform. Everybody like free market and availability, but to compete against the goliath that is Steams marketbase, you gotta be the only place where to get some things. It sucks, but that's what I can't think of a better, to the point method for anyone to capture a similar market for growth, but what do you think?

The reason I'm not crazy worried about steam, and I don't even think it's a monopoly per-se (although I'm not referring to any definition, just a vibe) is that steam has a lot of the "market share" of video game purchases, sure, but if steam shut down tomorrow, or did something heinous enough to warrant a boycott, I am able to move. The epic games store and GoG both exist at the very least.

It would be a pain for me because I have a lot of money poured into steam, but not for anyone just getting into gaming who doesn't have cache with steam. I didn't pour it into steam because it was the only place for me to go, it was the best place for me to go. Idk, a big difference in Steam's "monopoly" is that they don't own a scarce physical commodity like oil or land, and they don't have anything exclusive except maybe Valve games. Also unlike a monopoly there are many similarly functional competitors easily accessible on the Internet that offer an almost identical service.

Steam "locks you in" to their ecosystem. But only for each individual game you choose to buy on their platform. If you didn't want to hitch all your games to Steam for fear that they shut down or break bad Steam does not mind if you install GoG and buy physical copies of games to diversify your portfolio so to speak.

I think the point is they're not trying to be a monopoly. It just ended up that way naturally because all their competitors killed themselves.