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Comment by 0xTJ | Hacker News Reader

I do have some concerns that other companies will manage to take legal actions that harm Valve's user experience without actually helping consumers.

They have a near-monopoly on PC gaming, which sounds bad at face value. But the only reason for that is that they've continually developed an excellent platform that helps connect people with games that they want to play, and then be able to play them. There are very few marketplaces that strike the right balance of presenting you with options you want, while not artificially getting in your way. (In other words, it's not very enshittified.)

There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.

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  There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.

Except for the (large) Steam library of games you already have on Steam.

Sure, but it works on all pc platforms and the runtime is pretty light and can be pretty easily circumvented from what I’ve heard.

Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.

I phrased that as "never buying another game on Steam" because of the existing library aspect. Sure it's nice to just have one launcher, but you can absolutely move to another marketplace while using Steam for the games that you've already bought.

You can keep Steam installed and keep downloading your games through it, but you don't need to give them another penny.

That's a weak form of lock-in though, because you can switch to another platform going forward, and access your previous Steam purchases for free. No ads, no subscription fee. Stay signed out of Steam Chat and the social stuff, and you've basically just got a heavy application launcher.

Compared to PS+ and Xbox Live, which charge subscription fees to continue accessing online content, it's a pretty sweet deal for the consumer.

Eh.. how can you access your steam games on another platform for free?

AFAIK your games are locked to your account, and you'd need to log in at least once a month or something to keep access even in offline mode.

If you close your steam account you lose everything, so I don't see how that's a weak form of lock-in?

GP’s point was that you don’t need to close your Steam account because it doesn’t cost anything: you only pay for the individual games, not Steam itself.

EDIT: I believe GP is incorrect about the nature of subscription fees for PS+ and Xbox Live, though. As far as I know, standalone purchases of games from those services do not ever require a paid subscription - you need to retain your account and connectivity for the license checks, but that's free and does not require a paid subscription on either service, so pretty much the same as Steam. But they are correct that those platforms don't provide other store options. EDIT 2: Ah, I misread GP, they said "online content", and maintaining subscriptions on those services is required for that.

It's not any form of lock-in or anti-competitiveness, and it's not an aspect that's specific to Steam. You actually need to substantiate that instead of just claiming it. Almost all the online digital platforms do this, even non-gaming ones, and it's weird that it's only being argued here because it's about Steam.

This is a digital media rights issue, not a Steam issue.

The other platforms on PC are exactly the same though. If you're against Steam because of this particular aspect, you should be against almost all platforms on PC as well as every console and phone platform. This is how it works on almost every digital media platform. It's not sufficient reason to treat Steam like a monopoly, because in itself it's not anti-competitive behaviour.

It's also not solvable unless you legislate platform agnostic licenses that are valid regardless of platform. Fat chance of that ever happening and I doubt that's actually what you're suggesting.

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