Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)
Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.
The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors
Yes, they have a pretty dominant position, but they’re not abusing it, at least not like many other companies, and that makes the difference. For example, they don’t make anything exclusive to their own hardware or their own OS, their software can run on any distro, and their OS can be installed on any adequate hardware. And they don’t lock the Steam Machine to run only games sold on Steam. And a lot of work they do under the hood is made open source (Proton DXVK, SDL, GameScope, driver work etc). It’s mainly Steam itself and stuff part of it that’s kept proprietary (and that’s been relatively resistant to enshittification).
Of course, the thought of Valve starting to abuse their dominance is every PC gamer’s nightmare.
Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)
Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.
The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors
Removed by mod
Yes, they have a pretty dominant position, but they’re not abusing it, at least not like many other companies, and that makes the difference. For example, they don’t make anything exclusive to their own hardware or their own OS, their software can run on any distro, and their OS can be installed on any adequate hardware. And they don’t lock the Steam Machine to run only games sold on Steam. And a lot of work they do under the hood is made open source (Proton DXVK, SDL, GameScope, driver work etc). It’s mainly Steam itself and stuff part of it that’s kept proprietary (and that’s been relatively resistant to enshittification).
Of course, the thought of Valve starting to abuse their dominance is every PC gamer’s nightmare.