The Gaben worship is just PR for a monopoly.

I don’t really think steam is anti competitive, their product is just so much better than the competition that they’ve earned a monopoly position. Whenever another company has tried to dethrone steam, it’s lacked features or didn’t allow refunds or didn’t run on Linux or didn’t work as well with controllers - valve is just so far ahead on steam, it’d be monumentally difficult to catch up.

Just because they haven’t used the power they have doesn’t mean they should have it. A benevolent monopoly is still a monopoly, and we’re essentially just betting that a billionaire’s interests will always align with ours.

What’s your proposed solution? Open source can’t really fix this - distribution of proprietary games isn’t really geared towards FOSS. If all competing products are worse, why would anyone switch? Valve isn’t using any underhanded tricks to keep users on Steam, they don’t need to. Their competitors actually could catch up, theoretically, valve hasn’t pulled up the ladder. It’s just a matter of, y’know, making a product nearly as good as Steam, which is a monumental undertaking.