

It’s a free market, right? Customers choosing what they prefer and all that? And then eventually the one that provides the best price-for-service ratio comes out on top? Something like that, right?
Yeah, that’s lead to monopolies before numerous times. That does not change the fact that a monopoly is still a bad thing as as soon as there’s no competitors, the monopoly can jack up it’s prices or keep them artificially high.
Assuming there’s up front costs you have to pay to be able to compete with that monopoly (infrastructure, marketing, etc), then you’re looking at losing a lot of money trying to break into a market where everyone defaults to your competitor. And in that time, your monopolistic competitor can afford to lose even more money to bleed you out of the market and then go back to high prices.
And that’s just the financial barrier, that doesn’t count networks effects and platform lock in that can prevent customers from leaving.
Monopolies are always a bad thing, and inherently need to be heavily regulated as they structurally break capitalism. Quite frankly any industry that creates walled-garden or relies on network effects needs to be heavily regulated as well, and steam checks all three of those boxes. There’s a reason that they are THE most profitable tech company per employee, and that’s not because they’re charging fair prices.




Lol, they didn’t try to kill used games on console, when they announced the Xbox One they also announced that you would be able to digitally sell and transfer your games licenses and share you digital library with friends.
Gamers didn’t hear that though, and then those plans got scrapped when they had to rework everything before launch.