If you grow tomatoes and sell them in a small grocery but barely manage to sell any because they don't have that many clients because there's a Walmart across the street and you decide to start selling your tomatoes at Walmart as well, is it because the grocery sucks or because Walmart is in a monopolistic position?

Once a distributor gets big enough that they become the default solution for clients and selling through an alternative distributor means forgoing profit simply because clients won't bother buying from the alternative no matter how good it is, you're in a monopolistic system.

Let's be clear here, no matter how good EGS gets or no matter how good a new alternative made their launcher, the vast majority of people won't do the switch for the simple reason that their library is centralized in a single place and that place is Steam.

What's funny is that I'm sure most people who don't care about how big Steam gets must be pissed whenever there's centralization in other markets. Hell, what platform are we on and why did it suddenly become popular? Because the giant that had cornered the market decided to turn to shit. Well, why wait until that happens with Valve instead of taking preventive measures and helping the competition? "Competition is good, it forces innovation!" Well that doesn't happen if even the customers are automatically turning against the competitors and never giving them a chance to improve.

[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The fact that the launcher isn't as good isn't the point.

It absolutely is the point, because the store and launcher being shit is why they have no market share. You're basically saying that it's not their fault that customers don't want to use their product.

The whole rest of your argument about physical distribution is a non-sequitor which doesn't map to digital distribution. And again, you keep alleging monopolistic tactics that don't exist in the real world. Epic being shit and not even remotely close to the same usable product does not make steam a monopoly.

Let's be clear here, no matter how good EGS gets or no matter how good a new alternative made their launcher, the vast majority of people won't do the switch for the simple reason that their library is centralized in a single place and that place is Steam.

You have no evidence of this, because no one has tried to offer a competitive service. And in fact, there is evidence against you with people choosing other stores like GoG and itch.io for games they want from those platforms even with the lower feature set. I use both platforms frequently for indie games or stuff I want DRM free, even though my main library is steam.

But again, those platforms aren't nearly as popular because they don't offer the same feature set. It's not steam forcing out competition, it's no one being willing to make a product to actually compete. Again, this is a service issue, not a tactics issue.

Also, L.O.L. at comparing a free service chasing cash to something you have to pay for.

But I'm done with this argument, have a good day.