It's not a monopoly. Monopolies are when a single company controls a market AND prevents others from competing. Nothing stops EA or UbiSoft from supporting Linux or making their client not shit. Yet they don't.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yup. Epic tossed huge amounts of money into their Steam competitor, and it's still flailing around. Valve's market position is based on customer trust, and it took a long time to get there. There are a couple of other companies that could throw money at it like Epic did, but they can't buy their way into customer trust.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

and it took a long time to get there

True. I don't think many people here had to deal with Steam pre 2010, when game updates could fail for no apparent reason, so you had to redownload everything.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 1 points 8 months ago

I had HL2 loaded up for release day. I don't remember having problems myself, but it was a cluster fuck for a lot of people. Steam was not well liked for a long time.