this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
186 points (90.8% liked)
PC Gaming
12645 readers
368 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Unlike yourself apparently, I learned that in school: Monopoly is made up of two greek words "monos", meaning single, kinda like mono and "polein", meaning sell. It's a market where there is a single seller. But unlike what you think, it is not possible to simply "create better competition". A monopoly is controlled by a single entity. You can not enter a market controlled by a singular entity without ludicrous amounts of luck or wealth. There is a reason why even the US, the country with the most, largest monopolies in the world, has antitrust laws.
I had a reason to call you out, you didn't even get any insight to my thought.
Steam isnt a single seller though. There is GOG, there is Microsoft store, and other wasys to purchase games.
Right, and everybody buys their games over microsoft store. I don't even know what the hell GOG is supposed to be. A monopoly is not characterized by no other players, it's chracterized by a lack of seriously competing players. There is a serious difference. Chrome isn't the only player. It's still a monopoly with 70% of market share. It can move the market at will with little meaningful resistance.
If I go and sell lemonade, that doesn't do anything to CocaCola.
Chrome/google is a monopoly because they actually pay to keep Firefox and apple Browsers running. Firefoxes major funder is google. This is so Google can claim they aren't a monopoly.
Gog is the games store most people use if they don't want steam. https://www.gog.com/en/games
There is also Safari, Gnome Web, Falkon (don't know the spelling), ladybird, then you got the web browsers that are not fully web compliant... the point is there is a lot. And even if Mozilla wasn't paid large sums of miney by Google, Firefox as code wouldn't vanish all of a sudden. It would likely be picked up by the FOSS community (again).
Very smart. You learned how to repeat words written in books. You're probably very proud of yourself.
You still don't know what a monopoly is, however, considering this is a discussion about Valve and Steam.
But keep trying.
I don't need to keep trying, as this isn't about me convincing you, but simply about me showing that you are wrong, which according to our like/dislike ratio I successfully did. You do not matter here. The academic truth does.
You put value in a like-dislike ratio and you think you can educate me?
You haven't proven me wrong, you're just another brainlet preaching to a choir of people who seem to be adamant at painting Valve as having a monopoly.
I mean, everyone has their preferred little dillusions, I guess, but an argument of popularity fallacy doesn't make you right.
You're absolutely right, it doesn't make me right. But that's not what I said anyways, so I don't think you did what you think you did with that.
You little radlib you, always confusing being a fan of a thing with that thing being good <3.
If you want an actual breakdown of the points where Valve uses its monopoly to manipulate the market. But I'm not sure you're interested in that, since you haven't even explained a single aspect of economy, but only been telling me ho wrong I am. Shows incompetency.