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Comment on Me when Valve releases a phone

These types of posts worry me because I can’t tell how much of it is a joke, and how much of it is sincere. It’s starting to feel like the healthy skepticism towards Valve that existed before is now mutating into Apple fanboy shit.

Valve is a monopolist. Maybe you happen to like them, but they’re still a monopolist. They have a monopoly on PC gaming, and you’re cheering for them to have a monopoly on smartphones? Maybe you think they’ll be “better” monopolists than Apple or Google, but they’re still fucking monopolists. Monopolization is the root cause of the enshittification epidemic, and a lot of the inequality and just obviously-broken shit in the economy. It’s no coincidence the Trump admin is so eagerly supporting consolidation, and his FTC has stopped absolutely zero mergers.

This is the non-political version of the “leopards ate my face party” joke.

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marcos@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Well, if they get any market share in phones, that will mean the phone market will be less of a monopoly, not more.

And yes, they are a monopoly in gaming. They haven’t exploited that monopoly yet, but as companies go, it’s just a matter of time until something happens and changes that. That doesn’t make them getting into phones bad.

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- woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  And yes, they are a monopoly in gaming.
  
  The biggest PC games aren’t on Steam. Minecraft isn’t, Fortnite isn’t, Roblox isn’t. Because of Fortnite alone, the installed base of EGS is massive, the people just choose to buy their non-Epic games somewhere else.
  
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  - Electricd@lemmybefree.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Two F2P games? Most sales happen on Steam, except those few rare examples.
    
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    woelkchen@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    Most sales happen on Steam
    
    I literally already wrote that.
    
    except those few rare examples.
    
    Those “rare examples” combine to a massive revenue. In case of EGS and Fortnite, it’s very clear that EGS is installed and actively used on a giant number of PCs, so the installed base is there. It’s not a Steam monopoly if the user base signed up to and uses EGS for Fortnine and such.
    
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bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
They are the only monopolist selling completely open devices and heavily investing into open source software. As it stands now the console, VR and phone market is dominated by locked down devices that depend on the benevolence of their manufacturers.

If they made a phone that was as open as the Steam Deck and then went power hungry and wanted to use their position to fuck everyone up you could still put another OS on the phone and use it without a single piece of Valve influence.

I want them to make more hardware because they can not dictate how I use it.

My Steam Deck is not running SteamOS but OpenSUSE. I am mainly playing games from other stores. This would is possible with an Xbox, PlayStation or Switch.

So yes, I can very much live with that kind of monopoly in the hardware space. And when they enshittify like every big corporations does I won’t cry but enjoy my awesome devices that will remain usable forever.

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- Electricd@lemmybefree.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yet they also are the ones who pushed gambling and the whole skins economy
  
  They’re also the ones that are accused of abusing they monopolist position regarding store prices (if you sell on Steam, you can’t sell cheaper elsewhere)
  
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