this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can't transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you're used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn't mean it's not.
Not being able to transfer purchases seems like an other-platforms problem. Steam has authenticated API for users' game libraries.
Is it a form of lock in or not?
No.
Anyone is free to access purchases given the user chooses to give that info, they just don't. Skill izzue
It literally is if you have a monopoly.
While I disagree with the other commenter's approach and attitude, he/she/they are partially correct with the comment they left next to this one.
There is no legal obligation for a company to fund or assist its competition, even if it holds a significant marketshare. The companies that do help their competition, like Microsoft with Apple in 1997 or Google with Mozilla today, begrugingly choose to do it so their lawyers can make the argument that they are not a monopoly because they still have competition.
https://wccftech.com/microsoft-invested-150-million-in-apple-27-years-ago-today-on-august-6/
Google has multiple ventures: advertising, search engine, email, web browser, cloud storage, cloud infrastructure, etc.
I'm not saying they don't get any other benefit from paying Mozilla. I'm saying that one of the reasons Google shovels money in their direction is to stop regulators from having a reason to take a closer look at Chrome's dominance.
In terms of browser engines, we have: Blink (Chromium), WebKit2 (Safari), and Gecko (Firefox). WebKit2 is exclusive to Apple devices, which leaves Blink and Gecko as the only two browser engines available on Windows and Linux. If Mozilla went bankrupt and stopped developing Gecko, Google's Blink engine would have no competition on non-Apple platforms, which would invite some regulatory scrutiny.
No it's not. In fact, GNOME's default browser uses WebKit, which is also FOSS since it was forked from the LGPL KHTML.
WebKit, or WebKit2? Last I checked, which was a year or so after WebKit was transitioned to a multi-process architecture, smaller FOSS browsers were stuck with the older single-process WebKit.
That must have changed since then, but if not, I can't imagine a forked single-process WebKit has successfully kept up with new web features introduced since.
Both, since WebKit2 was renamed to WebKit the same year iOS Safari started using WebKit2, while WebKit1 was renamed to something something legacy. As an LGPL project, there's no reason WebKit2 would be restricted to Apple.
And anyways, we do have proof: GNOME Web uses https://webkitgtk.org/, which has clear evidence of using WebKit 2.
That is excellent news to hear. The more usable alternatives for browser engines than Blink, the more the opportunity for people to jump ship to something better every time Google shows how little they care about the consumer (like they did with Manifest V3).
No, yeah. We both agree here. Zero obligation for a company to help it's competition, and the likely reason they would ever do it is either to profit or avoid regulatory scrutiny.
They literally, objectively, have, monopolistic anti-competitive power, largely thanks to blind corporate dick riding gamers like you.
And yes, in literally every single western democracy you have special obligations to actually further competition beyond normal if you're in a situation without competition, because competition is inherently beneficial.
Lock-in != Monopoly.
This is ridiculously unrealistic in a capitalist society.
It costs the platform money whenever a user downloads a game, and a user who didn't buy from their store isn't a user that they make money from. No other platform would voluntarily accept a recurring cost like that unless they profit from user data.
Also, it's not like they stop publishers from doing that themselves. Ubisoft and EA use the cd-key generated by steam to associate the game with your U-Play and Origin accounts.
They asked if they did anything anti-competitive. Lock-in is inherently anti-competitive.