• nora@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    What’s a natural monopoly? Valve currently has the freedom to implement anything they want within an extent because they’re so popular. If they decided they wanted to charge devs 35% would people stop using it? Probably not. Steam’s monopoly is as bad as any other for the same reason any other monopoly is bad.

    • coltorl@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      A natural monopoly is when an industry is difficult to break into, making competition difficult or impossible. This favors incumbents, in fact, a lot of industries are natural monopolies (pharma, aerospace, chip production).

      The difficulty of breaking into an industry may be because:

      • new players cannot compete with established scale
      • start up costs require a nearly all-or-nothing approach, high risk
      • regulations tie the hand of new innovators
    • SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      Look it up? It’s an actual term, not something I made up for whatever reason you assumed to argue against something I didn’t even say. I already said it’s still not a good thing, it just would have happened regardless of whoever that was able to do it on scale first.