Comment on Valve Announces New Steam Machine, Steam Controller & Steam Frame
Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 4 days agoYet
Yet, unlike other sectors yet.
High chances that this changes. Monopolies are built friendly and get enshitificated later, one baby step at a time.
Market will get harder and harder to join as studios optimise their processes for releases on steam and users get even more trained Games -> Steam.
Especially when Steam manages to kill PS and Xbox, where I see big potential that this happens.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
That’s always a possibility, but if it was going to happen, it would have already by now.
It’s very obvious to me that Valves leadership cares about the end goal of making gaming accessible and as easy as possible for everyone.
If they ever become evil, I feel it’s guaranteed to be because of leadership change to someone who is secretly corrupt, we just have to hope the reigns are handed down to someone good.
And if they do become evil and their product suffert as a result, they are going to create an opening for the others to fill.
The market gets harder to join as Steam makes their platform better and better. This is very very good compared to other companies that get to the top and then add physical and legal barries to others to stop them becoming competition.
Xbox has killed itself and I can’t see Playstation going anywhere anytime soon. Steam machines could take some tiny % of Playstation users, but if they do, the users stolen might have been people who wanted to swap to PC anyway. + you can access other stores on a steam machine
Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
But it is exactly the same as with monarchies:
There are some good ones, until there is one evil, and then you can’t do really something against it except whining.
Allowing monopolies is like allowing a dictator to rule in my eyes.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
The difference is that a monarchy usually rules over everything and has the last say.
Steam is a monopoly only because every competitor has tried but failed to make a new compelling service.
Steam does have the last say within their platform (usually it’s the correct say), but they don’t disallow competition by lobbying or with other anti-competitive practices.
Some company just has to make a better service.
It’s not impossible, just no one wants to do it because they can’t make bajillions like they usually do in their other sectors where they can freely abuse the customer because there isn’t someone like Steam looking out for them.
Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Monarchy only works because every competitor who tries to change something has failed.
Monarchies would as well not have been established, if they where not making better services than competitors, and when they reached power the got out of control.
Same will happen to steam, it is just how things are, it is just a matter of time, until centralised power gets abused.
Our legal framework does not protect us from this, most monopolies are not illegal in current law.
The current state of capitalism is that companies try to get good brand recognition to get support and establish their monopol position, ant then, the enshitification starts slowly.
Back to the monarchy similarity: Most monarchs had great support at the beginning or even for generations until that power gets abused.
If we have no tools against an entity that can abuse power, we have to establish those tools while we don’t need them, or it gets very hard to do something against it when it happens.