A new lawsuit was filed earlier this month in the UK that alleges Valve, owner of Steam, has been overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position in the UK.
Stop defending them, monopolies are never good to consumers.
By your logic they shouldn’t be broken because it’s the competitors’ fault if people don’t do business with them instead.
Well no, if your company is big enough that it doesn’t make sense to go for the competition then no matter what the competition does you are so far ahead that they’ll never catch up and you can sway the market as you please.
Monopolies are often great for consumers… When they’re nationalized. Obviously that’s not going to happen with Valve any time soon.
What would the benefit be to breaking up Valve? How would you even go about doing that? The obvious choice is to break out different business units- break things like the hardware sales and game development into separate companies. But that still doesn’t address the issue of them having too much market share for software sales.
The next beat thing I can think of would be to have some sort of regulatory body just to place restrictions on the industry. Which, of course, would vary from country to country, and would probably have to include all of their competitors: Epic, GoG, and the various publisher-specific stores, maybe even other storefronts like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It would be hard not to also hit the mobile games industry too (which, to be fair, might be a good thing). But this kind of thing is usually reserved for things like utilities, communications, financial markets, etc. Such an organization for a luxury recreationak market… I have to wonder how much political appetite there really would be for that? Is that really what people want their governments to be focusing on?
A monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly.
Stop defending them, monopolies are never good to consumers.
By your logic they shouldn’t be broken because it’s the competitors’ fault if people don’t do business with them instead.
Well no, if your company is big enough that it doesn’t make sense to go for the competition then no matter what the competition does you are so far ahead that they’ll never catch up and you can sway the market as you please.
Monopolies are often great for consumers… When they’re nationalized. Obviously that’s not going to happen with Valve any time soon.
What would the benefit be to breaking up Valve? How would you even go about doing that? The obvious choice is to break out different business units- break things like the hardware sales and game development into separate companies. But that still doesn’t address the issue of them having too much market share for software sales.
The next beat thing I can think of would be to have some sort of regulatory body just to place restrictions on the industry. Which, of course, would vary from country to country, and would probably have to include all of their competitors: Epic, GoG, and the various publisher-specific stores, maybe even other storefronts like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It would be hard not to also hit the mobile games industry too (which, to be fair, might be a good thing). But this kind of thing is usually reserved for things like utilities, communications, financial markets, etc. Such an organization for a luxury recreationak market… I have to wonder how much political appetite there really would be for that? Is that really what people want their governments to be focusing on?
Do you have a better solution to propose?