• maynarkh@feddit.nl
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    2 months ago

    The point is that you can say no to selling it, but for that to work you need to:

    • Actually own a deciding majority of the thing
    • Have a good enough product to resist your business partners (eg. game developers) being paid with investor money to switch over to you, sapping value from your product.

    The point is that if Steam wasn’t so much over the competition, Epic could have taken market share over with the exclusive deal shenanigans, or publishers could have started up their own marketplaces. The biggest reason for that is that Steam was early to the party and could get to a good product before others tried to enter the market.

    If Steam didn’t have that, people would have switched over to Epic and publisher stores, and we’d be bitching over Steam not having any good games on it because of backroom deals.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Yes, when you own the thing you can say no to selling it. Why is this point so hard to understand? Even if you don’t have a monopoly or even if your product sucks you get to say no.

      • daltotron@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Why is this point so hard to understand?

        It’s not, they’re making a separate but contiguous point about how the market naturally incentivizes shittier tactics from it’s participants, and how Steam, Valve, and Gaben are exceptions to the rule.