• Harvey656@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it’s customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      So because they’re treating you right it’s ok to put 70% of the market in the hands of a single person?

      • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Just having a high market share isn’t the issue. It’s abusing that dominant market position that is.

        Valve has been smart enough not to do that. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the like haven’t. In fact, Valve’s competitors have been more anti-competitive than Valve.

        ASML, who make EUV machines and other semiconductor tooling, is also in a dominant market position (way more dominant actually). Do you ever see calls to break them up? No. Because they haven’t been abusing their power. They know that if they put a toe out of line, they’ll be in trouble with regulators.

        Google and the like have been able to act with impunity because the US protects them, to the detriment of their smaller companies and their citizens.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          Really? Because they’re part of the giants that determine game prices, pricing is based on everyone that takes a cut along the way, they take 30%, that’s calculated into what games need to sell for, 30% is enough to make them billions in profit, billions in profit is money that came out of our pockets to go in Newell’s pockets so he can own six yachts.

          I swear if it was a public company people would be flipping out because their numbers would be public and the profit would be going to investors, but they’re private and they only have one investor the profit goes to do that’s perfectly fine I guess???

          • patatahooligan@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Antitrust is not about preventing big companies making money. It’s about preventing specific practices by monopolies to restrict the free market and to abuse their users. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton I find morally objectionable with companies as big as Valve and people as rich as Gabe. We might agree on those issues. But this particular Google thing is about something else. And Valve is indeed different to most tech companies in that regard.

            • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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              1 month ago

              If you don’t consider that a company taking billions out of our pockets and putting it in the pockets of a single person abuse then I don’t know what to say.

        • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
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          1 month ago

          ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West’s economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn’t be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.