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Valve faces a £656 million lawsuit in the UK for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers'
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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It's amazing how folks support valves monopoly while screaming bloody murder at every other tech company.
So... What do you suggest be done about it?
Break them up
They don’t need to be a store, a launcher, a community, a mod database, etc
Break them up... How?
You can split off business units like their hardware sales or dev studios, but that isn't going to reduce their storefront market share at all.
Are you suggesting that they just split users up randomly? That would be probably worse for consumers- suddenly the friends and communities people have built up through Steam would be fractured, and users would look to find ways to get around it.
Split up by what publishers they have deals with? Well then those new companies would only be indirect competitors, not to mention that would also be worse for consumers as I'd have to suddenly make a new account with each new platform just to keep accessing my current library.
Like... How do you want to split them up in a way that doesn't hurt consumers and publishers more than it helps?
Read the second line, I already answered that
But the store piece is the only problem.
For community, there's tons of different communities for every game and Steam is usually one of the least active anyways.
For mods, as far as I know there's no exclusivity there. In fact, it's kind of a pain to mod Bethesda games because they don't go through Steam. It's similar to DLC in that it's just a better experience to have mod support included in the launcher.
For the launcher, that seems like once again a huge blow to consumers to have a separate steam store vs steam launcher. You can already add non-Steam games to the steam launcher or launch games without the steam launcher.
The problems identified in the article, and what they are getting sued for, are solely related to the store. So I don't see how breaking out these supplemental features would solve that.
How do you download and launch steam games without the steam launcher?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2553040199
But how do you get into the library without it?