It would likely result in endless corporate backstabbing, exclusive deals, contracts fights, and patent trolling

Which would likely result in horrid quality of life for the end user. Having to maintain countless accounts and subscriptions to have even fractional access to games.

It would likely also fuck over the studios and indie developers who would be shoved aside or relentlessly bought up in a ever growing attempt to grow.

More competition does not always mean things are better for the consumer. You can see the exact same thing played out with the recent rise and now slow descent to streaming services. As we went from one good one that turned into a horrible one as the sharehold is demanded it, then more rows and then things only became worse.

When you start operating at the sort of scale that the internet does, true, the whole competition thing being better for the consumer rarely works out.

You more frequently just end up with a bunch of greedy companies endlessly trying to one-up each other f****** over everyone in their attempts resulting in no one-winning, not the company, not the developers creators or middlemen nor and definitely not least the consumer.

True competition benefiting the consumer also requires there to be a connection to the consumer in a reason to actually service them. The companies need to be fighting for the consumer and not just each other. But that is all capitalism is turned into. The consumer is no longer the end goal. They’re just fighting each other to stomp them out so that all that’s left is themselves.

It’s been shown time and time again for decades now at at sufficient size competition just by itself does not help. The only thing that is repeatedly shown to be helpful is private companies with a good person at their home. Not trying to be a greedy f***.

And it’s showing time and time again. Every time that person retires the company sold their holders. Found public offerings made things just get worse.

The problem is not monopolies are bad. It’s not. The competition is good. It’s at public companies are a problem in the law forcing companies to do everything in their power to please. The shareholders is killing everything.

I’m the opposite, I find user assigned tags to be far more accurate. Otherwise every game would be put into the most generic categories. From my experience the tags are generally accurate.

I still need the client once (RIP Windows 7), and installations are not guaranteed to be portable.

Devs complain thats it hard and feels like a lottery but thats just because there are so many good games on steam its so hard to standout. Game making is very competitive, very work intensive and very unpredictable.

“Not being a total bastard” is a weird way to describe overhauling the gaming on linux experience at no additional cost to the end user, among many other incredibly pro consumer choices they’ve pushed in the last twenty odd years.

I provided the example of Krita in another comment.

You’re only required to match deals outside Steam if you sold Steam keys. I haven’t found any other clause online.

Your lemonade stand would be more like if there was a stand on every block: By virtue of the scale of their business they could afford to undercut any competition that tried to start up. If they did that they could be slapped on the wrist for being anti-competitive.

Cough Walmart cough

Walmart has been accused of selling merchandise at such low costs that competitors have tried to sue for predatory pricing (intentionally selling a product at low cost in order to drive competitors out of the market).

In 2000, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection accused Walmart of selling butter, milk, laundry detergent, and other staple goods at low cost, with the intention of forcing competitors out of business and gaining a monopoly in local markets.

Crest Foods filed a similar lawsuit in Oklahoma, accusing Walmart of predatory pricing on several of its products, in an effort to drive Crest Foods’s own company-owned store in Edmond, Oklahoma, out of business.

However, in 2003, Germany’s High Court ruled that Walmart’s low cost pricing strategy “undermined competition” and ordered Walmart and two other supermarkets to raise their prices. Walmart won appeal of the ruling, then the German Supreme Court overturned the appeal.

Walmart has been accused of using monopoly power to force its suppliers into self-defeating practices. In 2006, Barry C. Lynn, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation (a think tank), said that Walmart’s constant demand for lower prices caused Kraft Foods to “shut down thirty-nine plants, to let go [of] 13,500 workers, and to eliminate a quarter of its products.”

And while many like our Steam benevolent (almost) monopoly, I do wonder how would the market look like if we had 20 competing companies that cannot gain more than 5% of the market share. Can you imagine the competition between them and how would that benefit us, the consumer?

More comptetion wouldn’t just benefit consumers, it would benefit devs. A dev could shop their game around go with a store front that suits their needs better.

Is there a place that highlights these bad terms in the ToS?

The bottom line on what I’m trying to say, is that valve isn’t doing anything to correct. The only way to make them less competitive would be to actively make the user experience worse.

Is it a potential problem that valve could go anti consumer and fuck everyone over? Absolutely. But until that happens, there’s nothing to actually do beyond point out that it has a monopoly. Which… I mean, doesn’t actually do much more than trigger the “monopoly = bad” thought in people’s minds.

They started supporting and cooperating with heroic launcher.

Thus heroic is the defacto official GOG launcher on linux.

More competition does not always mean things are better for the consumer [cut], e.g. streaming services

I don’t believe this oligopoly is competing with each other?

(I’m not arguing with the rest of your post because capitalism bad )

I still don’t feel like it’s a monopoly when there is nothing stopping developers from selling the game as a paid download off their own site. Players can even add that game as a non-Steam game and still get a mostly complete experience as if they brought the game from Steam. Companies selling their game on Steam was always a option and not a necessity.

That would mean exclusives everywhere. Everyone would try to force some game pass on us, until our only choice to get an OK selection would be having 4 subscriptions. Or piracy.

With Steam, I get a well integrated platform for buying, updating and launching everything with the correct compatibility layer.

That’s more convenient than piracy, so I use it.

What type of support and cooperation? And where it is documented, so I can read about it?

I’m curious what you mean by this.

Netflix only went the way it did because they were liscensing shows and movies from other publishers/studios who could have, and finally did, take their shit back and start their own subscription service.

It’s not just Netflix that sucks now; it’s the whole of legit streaming video services becoming what cable was that got Netflix popular to begin with.

This is unlikely to happen with Steam, given that competitors are already trying to do what they can similarly and it has yet to actually do anything.

I think valve has the absolute worst skins market out there but their store is really good.

I bought Anno 1800 through uPlay and, to be fair, the app is not too bad, but now that I’m on Linux idk if I’d be able to get it working again. Not that I necessarily have interest to play again.

Yeah streaming has an assumption of an exclusivity deal whereas in gaming it’s unpopular and financially not worthwhile (though subscriptions would rapidly change that).

If Netflix and HBO and everyone else all were equally able to buy content and no service was the primary sponsor of content you’d get services competing on price, quality, and selection rather than each of them aiming to always have something worth the subscription price coming out.

Steam had been one of the good companies so far. Until they showed clear signs of enshitiffication, I will patronise Steam.