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Why Steam can be considered a monopolistic platform? (fedia.io)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here.

I agree with the sentiment of this... MTX/lootbox shenanigans are a bad, harmful practice that should be much more heavily restrained...

But that has nothing to do with being a monopoly.

At this point, its a widespread industry problem.

You'd address that with regulation, but not on the basis of Steam being a de facto monopoly, instead based on some kind of consumer protection regulation.

... But Trump and Elon are blowing all of that up, so, probably not gonna happen anytime soon.

Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard.

10 - 30 % really isn't that unreasonable compared to a lot of existing comptetitors... though I guess we'll see how their ongoing lawsuit around that ends up.

relevant infographic

Either way, this also doesn't make or not make them a monopoly, unless you or the ongoing lawsuit can prove that a 30% is functionally an outsized monopoly rent, wildly out of step with the rest of the industry.

If this is instead roughly in line with the rest of the industry, you'd again need to address this with some other legislation that spans the whole industry, not specifically targeting Steam as a monopoly.