Using your dominance in one market to gain advantage in another market is anti-competitive. I don’t think it’s cut-and-dry but I think there’s a good argument that they’re using their dominance in games distribution to gain an advantage in microtransaction handling.
I think Google (and Apple) using their app-delivery dominance to force app-makers to pay them a fee for in-app purchases is definitely bullshit. Consumers’ options are more limited there, but that just means the market dominance is greater: the same argument applies in the case of Steam and the question is just how dominant something has to be for this to be a problem.
I’d argue selling games and selling content in those games is the same market though.
And the problem with Google/Apple wasn’t “dominance”, but more “absolute control”, Apple blocked third party stores completely on their hardware, and Google had secret deals with phone manufacturers where they had to include all the Google apps and couldn’t include alternate app stores, and made using third party stores difficult. As long as Valve aren’t blocking third party stores on their OS and not being pre-shipped on the OS of most of Steam’s customers, there’s probably not much of a case.
Name 2 anti-competitive actions steam has done.
Simply having a better product than your competiton does not make you anti-competitive.
Using your dominance in one market to gain advantage in another market is anti-competitive. I don’t think it’s cut-and-dry but I think there’s a good argument that they’re using their dominance in games distribution to gain an advantage in microtransaction handling.
I think Google (and Apple) using their app-delivery dominance to force app-makers to pay them a fee for in-app purchases is definitely bullshit. Consumers’ options are more limited there, but that just means the market dominance is greater: the same argument applies in the case of Steam and the question is just how dominant something has to be for this to be a problem.
I’d argue selling games and selling content in those games is the same market though.
And the problem with Google/Apple wasn’t “dominance”, but more “absolute control”, Apple blocked third party stores completely on their hardware, and Google had secret deals with phone manufacturers where they had to include all the Google apps and couldn’t include alternate app stores, and made using third party stores difficult. As long as Valve aren’t blocking third party stores on their OS and not being pre-shipped on the OS of most of Steam’s customers, there’s probably not much of a case.