There is mild vendor lock-in. If all my games are on steam, why would I buy my games elsewhere. Not to mention the steam client contains the steam store and advertisements for games in said store, so anybody in the steam ecosystem is incentivized to stay there. Games bought in Steam aren’t trivially launched without launching Steam.
All of that is true, but I still think “monopoly” is not the right word. It’s a bit of a unique situation. Ideally we’d have laws that make Steam provide a downloadable copy of the game that can work without Steam… but we’re so far from that.
![Steam competitors be like. [Extended?]](https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/8d2d46eb-234c-41bd-b7c1-fb9c4c9f2508.webp){kind=link}
There is mild vendor lock-in. If all my games are on steam, why would I buy my games elsewhere. Not to mention the steam client contains the steam store and advertisements for games in said store, so anybody in the steam ecosystem is incentivized to stay there. Games bought in Steam aren’t trivially launched without launching Steam.
All of that is true, but I still think “monopoly” is not the right word. It’s a bit of a unique situation. Ideally we’d have laws that make Steam provide a downloadable copy of the game that can work without Steam… but we’re so far from that.
fair enough, no point arguing about definitions anyway
True