this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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'They have all the sales so they must be the only reason anyone buys things.'
'Stop calling them a monopoly! It's not like they have all the sales.'
It is impossible to address nonsense like this in a forum with enforced politeness.
They have all the PC sales because they created the entire market and are constantly driving it forward. They have the whole indie market because they made indie development possible. The entire console indie market is the product of Steam making it possible for them to make money on a product long enough to port it to console. Most PC ports are exclusively because they have a single high quality market to handle distribution. Digital distribution across 200 countries is a huge pain in the ass, especially when the console competition has a whole bunch of features you'd have to build by hand that Steam handles for you. And the whole Linux market is because Steam built and invested heavily in the Steam deck and the tech to make it viable.
Market share doesn't matter. They are entitled to have the whole market if it's because the entire consumer base chooses them organically, because nobody else can be bothered to make a product that isn't dogshit.
Gish gallop of post-hoc nonsense. This is how things are - so it must be the only way it'd happen.
Market share is literally the only factor in what defines a monopoly. But people can't even bring themselves to say they have a monopoly, even as they defend that monopoly, because that sounds bad and Steam good therefore nuh uh. Let's go round and round and insist that buying games online in 1999 didn't exist, and then Steam happened, so literally everything since then is thanks to Valve. Nothing else changed! No outside factors!
All of the things I'm talking about are hard prerequisites to those markets existing at all, they're things no one else ever tried to do, and they're things that PC gaming would be in far worse shape if someone like Epic had done first, because unlike Steam, it's a literal certainty that they'd abuse them.
Check.