Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)
Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.
The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors
Yeah, I don’t disagree with anything said here. Steam has an effective monopoly, but not because of mergers or violating antitrust laws. They’ve mostly focused on being a good value for consumers and have invested more heavily in their platform compared to competitors.
While Gabe is not perfect, I do worry when someone finally takes his place. If it’s someone with a sole profit motive…we’re fucked.
Personally, I think one of the major reasons to also not subsidize the steam machine is that it would then be an incredibly attractive choice as a simple workstation pc for businesses. It would be the cheapest choice in comparison to standard dell, ibm, hp, etc workstations and could simply be flashed with whatever workstation OS they wanted to put on it. This would drive a lot of buyers out of the steam ecosystem, defeating the purpose of subsidizing. This is one reason for consoles locking down their, essentially nowadays, pc hardware ecosystems.
Though, groups did recently unlock the ps5 bootloader and put Linux on it. Dunno how the performance lines up yet though
Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she’s not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)
Despite this, I have no doubt that we’d see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.
The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors
Yeah, I don’t disagree with anything said here. Steam has an effective monopoly, but not because of mergers or violating antitrust laws. They’ve mostly focused on being a good value for consumers and have invested more heavily in their platform compared to competitors.
While Gabe is not perfect, I do worry when someone finally takes his place. If it’s someone with a sole profit motive…we’re fucked.
Personally, I think one of the major reasons to also not subsidize the steam machine is that it would then be an incredibly attractive choice as a simple workstation pc for businesses. It would be the cheapest choice in comparison to standard dell, ibm, hp, etc workstations and could simply be flashed with whatever workstation OS they wanted to put on it. This would drive a lot of buyers out of the steam ecosystem, defeating the purpose of subsidizing. This is one reason for consoles locking down their, essentially nowadays, pc hardware ecosystems.
Though, groups did recently unlock the ps5 bootloader and put Linux on it. Dunno how the performance lines up yet though