this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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Pointing out which meaning applies is how definitions work. One is enough.
Cherry-picking is highlighting part of a paragraph, and ignoring that it begins: As a first step, courts ask if the firm has “monopoly power” in any market. The documents you picked are telling you, being a monopoly and doing harm are separate questions. The ability comes first, and that ability comes directly from market dominance.
... a monopoly is not about who carries one specific game. It's about the market. The market you know Steam dominates.
When Steam excludes a game, for any reason, that game usually sells a lot less. Orders of magnitude, sometimes. That is the power they wield over all games, as a game market. The fact they don't abuse it is a defense against legal action - but we're discussing legal actions that can only apply to monopolies. Determining whether they have that power comes first.
Those sales figures do not respond to price changes, either. Epic can offer whatever sale they like - for most sales, the price on Steam is the price. Y'know. Like in the definition I pointed out. The one that is the way that things are.
'Poor sales are your own fault for not selling through the one store that matters,' says monopoly understander.
Nothing sensible ever follows these words.
So which is it? Because the only one that might apply is the last and that one has a complicated legal meaning that is multiple parts of which you only seem to care about a single part: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly
It's the definition given by your own fucking source. The one you called "cherry-picking."
It's not "a single prong in a standard that has several," there's a list of meanings, and one of them applies.
That page even reminds you: not all monopolies are illegal. Maybe you should re-read it?
Here, it's easy:
Does not in fact say:
The standard has multiple prongs. You might have "monopoly power" without in fact being a monopoly because being a monopoly requires meeting a legal standard where being the in the leading position of a market is not the singular qualifier.
You're quoting a sentence that defines anticompetitive practices, not a sentence that defines a monopoly.
Here is a sentence from the same page that defines a monopoly:
Which you seem to take for a granted, but won't provide even a theoretical for how that might have happened here?
Ability means "they can," not "they did."
This is not at all what those documents say, they state unequivocally that a monopoly has to create unfair conditions for competition AND they have to be dominant in their market. A company that creates unfair conditions for competition in their market is not a monopoly, a company that is dominant in their market is not a monopoly, it is both conditions combined that make a monopoly.
Yeah, you're right, it was unfair of Steam to exclude Alan Wake 2 and cause them to lose all those sales. ಠ_ಠ
The entirety of the isthereanydeal.com website and their history for almost every game in the database proves that this is false, are we not going to require facts in this discussion any longer?
YES!!! FUCKING YES! If you choose to exclude the premier dominant platform that your product might appeal to, that is YOUR FAULT! Nobody owes you sales when you choose to do dumb things.
In your case you couldn't be more correct. Touché sir.
The document says in black and white that looking for monopoly power comes first.
Conditions and competition come after. Identifying a monopoly comes before any judgement of that situation.
Read your own goddamn sources.
Amount to a teensy fraction of what Steam sells all on their own.
The existence of one premier dominant platform is called a fucking monopoly.
Read the first sentence of the Cornell Law Legal Dictionary:
Restraint of Competition links to the FTC doc that defines what that is in a page titled "Monopolization defined" and it offers a two pronged test which is exactly what I've been saying all this time, they have to be the leader in their market which they have to have "gained or maintained through improper conduct."
Your lay interpretation informed by feelings that it's bad we have a market leader (and even there I'm giving you a huge gimmie because Google Play, GOG, EGS, Xbox, UPlay, and Amazon Games all exist and sell PC games in a digital storefront entirely absent Steam, and for stores that aren't absent Steam, as I noted before even games sold for use on Steam may not net Valve any revenue thanks to the ability of devs to sell their keys directly) is just not the correct interpretation for whether Steam is a monopoly. EA alone made almost as much revenue in 2023 as Valve did, which isn't an apples to apples comparison since EA does business a lot of places, but they're just one of a lot of big fish who don't always put money in Valve's pockets in the Digital PC Games Distribution market. Many devs sell their games as Steam keys on Amazon, GameStop, Newegg, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and all the others I linked before and Valve gets nothing (Excepting maybe a freeloading user) from those sales.
Out of curiosity I went to check out my account to see what I had bought "from Valve" vs "not from Valve" on Steam and it turns out that I own 1724 games on Steam. We can break that down in the transaction history, but I'm not going to go line by line to figure out which are DLC and which are games so this next part won't add up to 1724, but I'm providing the number to give some context for the remaining numbers so it doesn't just look like most of my transactions are MTX or something silly where Steam is actually getting something. I think it is illuminating to show that I have only made 718 purchases through Steam, I have been gifted 70 games, and I have 209 transactions which were indicated to be "Complimentary" where most seem to be DLC but there are a few games in that mix, so let's be charitable and give Valve the whole lot those as sales even though they were likely nothing of the sort. I have in my transaction history 1152 transactions that are listed as "Retail" which is Steam's way of showing that I didn't get the game or DLC from them. In 16 years of using Steam, Valve has charitably gotten a cut of 997 interactions, while I have given Steam 0% of a transaction 1152 times. That means that Valve has gotten a cut for only 47% of the content that they provide me at the absolutely most charitable interpretation of the data. So far as my account is concerned, if they're monopolizing the market, they're doing a terrible job of it by letting everyone else out there take the majority of the money while bearing none of the costs for Steam's infrastructure and development.
You can dismiss the fact that there is a historical record of Steam often not being the cheapest place to buy a game, or you can claim that just because there is a dominant player we defacto have a monopoly, or any of the other insane claims you've made but the fact is that there isn't a finding of law anywhere stating that Steam is a monopoly and it's unlikely there ever will be because they just don't meet the standard defined even if you cut down the market to the slimmest possible framing.
Unfortunately, we have clearly reached an impasse where you refuse to acknowledge statements of fact as written and will just "blah blah blah" away inconvenient facts, so I suppose this is where we part ways. Hopefully the next time we meet will bear better fruit.
Restraint of competition defines anticompetitive behavior by a monopoly... not whether a business is a monopoly. You keep saying "two prongs" when it's two separate things. Some monopolies are legal. Some monopolies commit restraint.
This is abuse sprinkled with lies. Like following up 'Steam can be beaten on price,' which is irrelevant or worse, with 'it's insane to claim monopoly is about market power!' when that's the definition on these pages you fucking chose. Earlier you were screaming that Steam has market dominance. Now that you've figured out that's all we're talking about, you're trying to haggle down how dominant they really are.
This wall of text is the only way you can disguise how you gave it away and can't accept being mistaken.