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Valve faces a £656 million lawsuit in the UK for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers' (www.gamingonlinux.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It's so crazy how Valve gets called a monopoly because of how their competition refuses to make anything of equivalent quality. It literally took the epic games store years before they had a shopping cart to check out in. Valve is the only one with good customer service, a solid refund policy, and no 3rd party exclusives in the platform. Valve is basically the only one that's not a publically traded company, so it's not responsible to shareholders and going through enshittification like everything else.

Its like imagine five barbers in town. One gets all the business and is rich, but he's nothing amazing, just a reliable barber. The other four barbers are constantly using rusty razors and punch customers in the throat right before they leave. No matter what anyone tells them, they won't stop. New razors cost money they don't want to spend, and your hair gets cut mostly the same in the end so why bother?

So they sue the first guy for having a monopoly.

[+] [email protected] -26 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

By your logic they shouldn't be broken because it's the competitors' fault if people don't do business with them instead.

Yes exactly, that's why they shouldn't be broken.

They're consumer friendly and are not taking specific action to BE a monopoly, contrary to many other companies.

There's also enough competition and it's exactly their fault that they fail/refuse to implement what makes Steam so popular.

I'm definitely against monopolies, but mindlessly slapping rules on them just because they're labeled monopolies is some of the dumbest shit I've heard