1251
US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'.
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
1251 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
58303 readers
14 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Steam isn't actually a monopoly in a meaningful way
Neither did google. The problem is that this case, from the title stated in another thread, Google are doing anti-competitive shit to make sure they maintain the dominant position. But steam does not practice in anti competitive behaviours (as far as I know anyway). In fact, the competitor can arguably be held to anti competitive behaviour depending on how you spin it.
Steam is currently being sued for anti competitive practices and do we really need to wait until they do bad shit before we start to consider that a single company having a good on 70% of the market isn't a good thing?
Isn't that only about the 30% fee?
Steam provides a lot of value for that 30% fee, more than Apple does.
Wtf is with people deciding a monopoly is good because the company hasn't started enshittifying it yet. It will happen. It's what monopolies do. Healthy competition is an important part of preventing enshittification.
Steam has no competitors because nobody is competing with them, not because they are forcing nobody to compete with them.
Steam isn't abusing their dominant position to prevent competition. Other companies could make their own storefront and compete with steam. Nobody does in a way that's actually comparable to steam.
Steam has a monopoly, but it's not because steam is actively keeping it that way.
If you have enough control on the market you don't have to actively try and stop competitors, you're just the default solution and people automatically turn to you. Walmart doesn't need to use dirty tactics to compete against mom and pop shops, the day they open people just start going to Walmart instead because they have everything in a single place.
That wasn't always the case, and I don't know if it's currently the case. At least at one point, they would intentionally lose money by dropping their prices below profitability just to get mom and pop shops to shut down, and then raise prices back up to profitability. Or they'd force suppliers to cut costs only for them to the point where the supplier wasn't making a profit, but by then they had stopped selling to competitors.
There's a lot more evidence for Walmart committing anti-trust than Valve.
What does this have to do with Valve?
Point is, they don't need to do that now because they're dominant, they just have to come in with their big boots, sit at the table and wait until everybody leaves, they have unlimited money, they just need to offer the same prices as anywhere else, the convenience will kill the competition.
I'm failing to see where the anti-competitiveness comes in.
Nobody can because of Steam's monopoly. You can try to create your own store but you won't have nearly the same selection of games. Monopolies are bad. Even when they're companies you like. To be clear, I'm not saying Steam should be broken up, I'm not saying they should lose games to other stores. I'm saying they're a monopoly, and that is bad because it enables Steam to stagnate or even get worse.
It's also pretty inarguable imo that Steam has been getting worse. Steam sales used to be events. You'd get multiple huge discounts on AAA games. Now you're lucky to get 40% off a 6 year old game. And don't get me started on the UI, which, while fine, hasn't changed meaningfully in like a decade. There simply is no incentive for Steam to be better. So they're not. We should consider ourselves lucky that they're still as good as they are, because they won't be forever.
The day Newell leaves people will be eating their words.
Doubt it. Stay mad though, this shit is hilarious.
Gonna go buy a few dozen steam games to help pad Gabe's wallet for making such a great platform.
Nope, about including price fixing clauses.
The 30% fee is another issue entirely.
The price fixing clauses are about steam keys being sold off-platform
Ah, gotcha. Thanks.
And that practice is what? Providing value to the consumer? The thing that MAYBE can be used against them is the clause for selling STEAM KEYS outside of steam. But that is it. Take a look at mindustry, the game is free everywhere else but steam. But that did not violate steam ToS since they didn't sell the steam keys for less than what is listed on steam.
It's in front of a judge right now and information is public if you want to know more, and no they're not getting sued for providing value to the consumer (but don't worry, they charge you enough that they can provide value AND make Newell a billionaire... so maybe you should be angry about that if you don't care about the rest.)
Have you read the filings? The complaints are that steam listings for a game have to match the lowest price for the game, that keys can't be sold for less than the steam listing (I'm not really sure how this is a different thing from the low pricing), and that steam takes too big a cut of the proceeds. That last one is particularly hilarious, in that they are bringing this lawsuit to a court that respects USA business laws, which pointedly do not hold that 'being too greedy' is a problem (outside of price-gouging laws, which are not relevant here...)
This is an issue because of Steam's 30% cut.
Other retailers take a smaller cut. But because Steam mandates that the Steam storefront always gets the lowest price, publishers can't take advantage of that lower cut to offer lower prices. They can only lower the price to something that doesn't torpedo them with a 30% cut on Steam.
The fuck are you talking about? I already gave an example of mindustry being free anywhere but steam. As long as they don't distribute the steam keys for free somewhere else, they are safe. Steam mandates that you put the lowest/price parity for the steam keys you sold outside of steam. If for example a game is being sold on steam priced at $15 with a 30% cut, the publishers are free to distribute the steam keys on their storefront for the same $15 without any cut. OR they could sell it cheaper BUT they cannot sell the steam keys. Maybe other storefront keys/drm. But the problem is, will the publisher sell it for a lower price knowing that they could sell it for the same price across the board with a higher profit margin?
If you wanted to argue that it is steam's fault for taking the 30% cut in the first place so we get where we are now, then I don't know what to tell you anymore. The problem is not steam but greed. Back to my example mindustry, that is a valid strategy to sell it for free everywhere but steam and is perfectly legal. It's just no one wanted to follow that model (instead of free, offer a cheaper price).
Sure, but that's not a monopolistic practice. That's just a MAP, which is an incredibly common agreement. Hell, its better than most MAP contracts because they only take a 30% cut of sales thru steam, even if the dev is selling steam keys thru an alternate storefront.
You know anyone can be sued for anything right?
Being sued doesn't mean a damn thing, the case judgement is what matters.
You don't need to have full control of the market to be considered a monopoly, you just need a big enough share that you can make it sway in the direction that you want, which Steam has. Example: Microsoft is considered a monopoly even though there's Apple and Linux that get market shares.
I always find it funny how defensive people get when I bring this up about Steam on Lemmy of all places, suddenly people are perfectly ok with the centralization of power in the hands of a single person.
It's not about market share, it's about actually using that market share to negatively impact competition. Steam doesn't have any sort of exclusivity agreements with anyone, nor do they get paid if a customer buys a key on another platform or on the dev's own website. There's no anti-competitive behavior here at all, people use Steam because they like the experience more.
There's a massive difference between anti-competitive behavior and just being a really good option. You don't get broken up because you're successful, you get broken up because you're abusing your dominant market position. I have yet to see any evidence that Valve does this.
Game pricing is still based on then taking a 30% cut so it's negatively impacting consumers because that's billions in profit that they make and with their dominance they don't need to actively take anti competitive measures, they're the default choice.
It's like Walmart, they don't need to actively push mom and pop shops out of the way, they just need to open their doors and wait them out. In theory all they did was offer something great (everything you want in the same place!) but the end result is competition closing their doors.
And we shouldn't be shutting down/breakup up either if that's all they're doing. Being successful isn't a crime.
Walmart has had multiple cases of predatory pricing accusations and has completely pulled out of Germany due to it. Criticism of Valve is: their service is too good? I'm really not seeing the anti-trust w/ Valve (here's a related Wikipedia article for Valve), but I am seeing it for Walmart.
Perhaps we simply disagree?