• Zorque@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    One can have a monopoly without directly trying for it. Especially when it comes to services with a lot infrastructure involved. Once you make those investments, it’s hard for anyone to compete against them.

    A monopoly just means you control a significant amount of the market. I think, technically, they would fall under oligopoly. Where a few businesses have control of the market instead of just a single business. But the point is they have a far larger share of the market than most others. This is mostly because they create a product that people want to use, instead of making a service that unfairly captures the market through things like game exclusivity or hostile takeovers.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      But when the EU recently announced service gatekeepers, Valve was not among them. Microsoft is.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        *Because they don’t meat the minimum financial and monthly user criterias to be taken into consideration when analyzing the monopoly status of their platform

        You forgot to add that part 👍

        • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Because they don’t meat the minimum financial and monthly user criterias to be taken into consideration when analyzing the monopoly status of their platform

          So Steam does not meet / meat🥩 the financial and monthly user numbers to count as a monopoly? So Steam is not a monopoly then. Great.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            No, the PC videogame market is too small for the European Union to analyse it.

            If the local hardware store is the only one selling screws for 100km around and it doesn’t show up on their list, does it means they don’t have a monopoly or it simply means that they don’t bother checking that because the hardware store doesn’t:

            Make 6.5B a year/doesn’t have a market capitalization of 65B

            Doesn’t have 45m monthly users in the union AND 10k business users in the union

            Meets those criterias three years in a row

            Because these are the criterias required for the EU to take the time to analyze a companies’ position in their market.

            • woelkchen@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              No, the PC videogame market is too small for the European Union to analyse it.

              Then please provide ANY form of facts-based analysis that Steam is a monopoly and no “Trust me, bro” isn’t that.

              • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                The European Union considers some companies to be a monopoly with a smaller market presence than Steam has in the PC video games sales market. That comes from your own source buddy.