You might be interested in the IBM PC compatible and Wintel wikipedia pages. This is a super high level timeline, but it is more interesting to get into the detail.
At a high level, the IBM PC platform were very well documented & sold well, to the effect of producing tons of software and peripherals add-ons ("PC Compatibles"). This led some other computer companies to reverse engineer the proprietary IBM BIOS, allowing them to run the same software and use the same peripherals. Because these were clean room reimplementations, IBM didn't have a legal case to prevent their sale.
Fast forward a bit, IBM's attempt at a new, closed platform, PS/2, flopped. People wanted their more open hardware. Windows became dominate enough that all the demand was for x86 based hardware that could run Windows. Microsoft was happy to work with many vendors.
The PC is very open today, but Apple survived. Atari ST and Amiga probably survived longer than you think as well.
Or did they just get there first, and stayed first due to network effects? Initially, nobody wanted steam. People definitely don't want a second steam - which in practice means sticking to the first one.
I can see why you might think that but I believe that's actually insurance against Microsoft going the Apple route and hamstringing Steam in the process. They needed a near first class platform that would never be used against them to exist and they needed the switching cost for end users to be near zero. By leveraging pre-existing FOSS projects they managed to avoid the vast majority of the development costs which would otherwise have been prohibitive.
Could say the same thing about AT&T, Bell Labs, etc. There’s a lot of precedent here, but most saliently, how you become a monopoly is not really relevant. They absolutely are one. But I’m being already aggressively downvoted with no counter arguments so the Gaben fanboys are here. (Defending a deca-billionaire is hard work, after all.)
What’s your solution then to them being a monopoly? How would you meaningfully break them up? While they outperform the sales of Epic and Gog I’m not sure how they’re abusing their position or how they’re keeping others from entering?
You could separate the storefront from the distribution platform / client. Valve's ~30% cut is often justified by the visibility being on the Store gives you but you can't opt out of that while still reaching the captured audience that definitely don't want yet another client software bloating up their system.
> Could say the same thing about AT&T, Bell Labs, etc.
No, you cannot. AT&T/Bell Labs was a monopoly - they physically controlled distribution networks that made it so you had to use them.
Valve does not. There is nothing that prevents you from simply selling your game without Steam.
And even if there wasn't, claims that Valve is a monopoly are factually false - there are many other storefronts that exist, and many games are published on more than one storefront at once. And, Steam does not gate an OS or platform like Microsoft and iOS do.
> But I’m being already aggressively downvoted with no counter arguments
Every one of your arguments is being countered (such as the claim that "relevance is anticompetitive" which isn't even false, it's nonsensical). Including this one.
> Defending a deca-billionaire is hard work, after all.
...and there's the emotional manipulation. It's pretty clear you're just a propagandist who has a grudge against Steam (maybe you work for Epic?), given that you're going up and down the thread with emotional non-arguments that try to redefine words, pull at peoples' emotions (like the billionaire comment), or just flat-out lie.
Except they do. They control the Steam distribution network. It may not be physical but you still have to use it to reach a large portion of PC Gamers due to network effects and no one wanting to run multiple clients.
Currently you have to also make use of their other services like the Store, and pay for them with a large sales cut, in order to use the distribution network, no matter if you want those services or not.
Tautologically true and therefore irrelevant. That's exactly the same as saying "Walmart has a monopoly over Walmart's physical stores" - that's not a meaningful statement and it has nothing to do with either monopoly status or consumer harm.
> It may not be physical
...and therefore it's categorically different. Don't be dishonest.
> you still have to use it to reach a large portion of PC Gamers
It's called a "distribution channel". You only "have" to use it, in the sense that most people look for stuff in Steam before they do anywhere else, but it is factually different than a telecom monopoly, where you cannot get internet from more than one provider in your neighborhood. This comparison is irrelevant and highly dishonest.
> due to network effects
No, network effects are secondary. People do not install Steam because their friends are there, they install Steam because they want to buy a game or download the games they already have. That's not "network effects" - that's using the tool.
> no one wanting to run multiple clients
Also untrue - almost every single person that I know uses multiple clients, and I've only ever once heard someone refuse to install an additional client, and it was on principle (Epic Games).
> Currently you have to also make use of their other services like the Store, and pay for them with a large sales cut, in order to use the distribution network, no matter if you want those services or not.
...and because it's one of the largest digital distribution networks in the world, this is entirely fair.
You're very clearly trying to stretch the definition of "monopoly" and manufacture harm, without actually knowing anything about Steam or how people use it.
Disagreeing with someone either ideologically or about the definition of a word or some other criteria does not mean that the other party is being dishonest. It is not reasonable to bandy about such accusations.
Steam does control the vast share of desktop gaming. But has no influence on console (Xbox, playstation, switch) or mobile (android, ios). They are a monopoly.
But they don’t abuse their monopoly so they haven’t broken any laws.
Your partitioning between those two things is good, but I still don't think that either label applies to them:
> Steam does control the vast share of desktop gaming.
Between the Epic Games Store, GOG, Humble Bundle, Xbox, Origin, Itch, and a few others, I don't believe their control is anywhere close to the fraction needed for Steam to be a "monopoly", either legally or in casual speak.
> Steam does control
...and, what's more, they don't "control" anything - what prevents you from either using multiple clients (on the player side) or selling on multiple storefronts (on the developer side)?
A monopoly has to monopolize some limited resource or market - you can't really have a monopoly if there's no limiting or exclusivity. That's like saying that Fortnite is "monopolizing" the battle royale genre because it's the most popular - it is the most popular, but there's no exclusivity because you can always play another battle royale in addition to Fortnite.
Monopolies need pie charts (limited resources that are taken by a single actor), but Steam is a bar in a bar chart.
Google controls 90% of the search market and the browser market. There is nothing preventing anyone from searching on Bing. Yet, the correct terminology is control of the market.
Google has a monopoly on search. Have they abused that monopoly? That’s a legal question that’s currently in court.
Steams share is somewhere in the 70s and it is far stickier than Google. A gamer can’t abandon their steam library easily. Have they abused this monopoly position? IMO no, but my knowledge is limited.
You're being downvoted because you're pushing punishing a company for having a better product. They do not engage in anticompetitive practices, there is no enforced barrier to entry in the market nor do they gate entry like the companies you have listed. They are only a monopoly because they have the best product.
The fact they were able to strike a deal in the first place hours after Anthropic was declared a supply chain risk should make this obvious. Their employees are smart people, the only way they can reason past this is their compensation.
No amount of legislation can stop subpoenas, wiretapping and other extrajudicial means the US has used for data surveillance since the inception of the Patriot Act. With data privacy increasingly becoming a critical matter of national security, strengthening data sovereignty laws and holding corporations accountable was always the way forward.
This is untrue. Subpoenas, wiretapping, and other extrajudicial means can be stopped by legislation that bans them. You can't say in one breath that legislation that enables it (Patriot Act) cannot be undone by more legislation. There are many hurdles required to produce the required legislation, which may not even be broadly supported by the public, but it isn't correct to say "no amount of legislation can stop existing legislation".
If they could be stopped by legislation that bans them, they would have been stopped by the legislation that banned them prior to the legislation that authorised them, but we know this is not the case. They were being done on a wide scale long before they were legal.
That would require to repeal the FISA and the Patriot acts. That won't happen.
More fundamentally, however, the US constitution only protects Americans and American companies. Europeans would be foolish to trust the US with their data given this lack of basic protection and oversight.
Extrajudicial means something not legally authorized. The surveillance apparatus in the US for decades has operated outside the confines of legality. By definition, they cannot be stopped by legislation that bans them.
Driving towards a solution of "imprisoning more people" as punishment rather than other punishment have never succeeded. Many states already have first time drug offender and strike programs, people are already imprisoned over a weekend for things even as simple as misdemeanor possession until they can get a bail set. Rehabilitative forms of punishments such as severe fines, community service or mandatory classes and broadcasting them is much more effective in actually driving down rates of impaired drivers.
Whats more, police officers already have a wide authority of judgement when considering these factors around marijuana impairment currently. Relying on subjective evaluation from FST and physical presentation will only result in a higher rate of non impaired drivers being imprisoned.
What you're doing is fine for a homelab, or learning. But barring any very specific reason other than just not liking Kafka, its bad. The second that pattern needs to be fanned out to support even 50+ producers/consumers, the overhead and complexity needed to manage already-solved problems becomes a very bad design choice.
Kafka already solves this problem and gives me message durability, near infinite scale out, sharding, delivery guarantees, etc out of the box. I do not care to develop, reshard databases or production-alize this myself.
Some people don't and won't need 50+ producers/consumers for a long while, if ever. Rewriting the code at that point may be less costly than operating Kafka in the interim. Kafka is also has a higher potential for failure than sqlite.
Ofc, and not everybody needs or cares for all the features Kafka has. Then use another known and tested messaging system. Use NATS or ZMQ. Or any cloud native pubsub system
My main point is, I have zero interest in creating novel solutions to a solved problem. It just artificially increases the complexity of my work and the learning curve for contributors.
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