121
Valve "played capitalism so well they broke it" and now Steam can't be replaced
(www.gamesradar.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
121 points (98.4% liked)
Hacker News
5692 readers
697 users here now
NOTICE: The bot occasionally has downtime, sorry about that. I'm working on adding better monitoring and error recovery so I can get notified faster.
Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.
The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is actually one of those cases where the dictionary definition isn't really helpful or applicable. Because that definition is based on a literal meaning of the word and not the actual economic implications. Economically speaking once a market is dominated to the point where you cannot compete economically that is what we call an effective monopoly or actual monopoly. Basically a real life monopoly.
Think back to when Bell was broken up. It wasn't the only, exclusive, competitor in the market. However they owned such a massive market share that they had to be broken up because no one could effectively compete. You'll see how using the literal and ineffective definition of monopoly would be extremely easy to defeat for companies exercising actual monopolies.
So basically the other guy is right, albeit expressing himself rather dickishly.
The issue with that is that Steam still isn't a monopoly by that definition either. Epic can't compete because they provide an absolute dogshit service. Not because Steam has some unassailable institutional advantage. When the epic storefront launched a ton of people were hoping it would be good, and would have happily bought games there. It was garbage, and they refuse to listen to customers on how to improve.
There are other options both for devs and customers.
The reality is Steam isn't muscling out Epic because of being a monopoly. Epic muscled themselves out by being out of touch, greedy, shitsticks. And that has largely been the same story for about every failed game storefront.