Often the way a monopoly works is that it seems just great while it's still building its market share, taking advantage of a big one to offer great discounts and service.
That's still the phase of offering such good service and such low prices as to put the competition out of business. The bad stuff comes later after they have dominance.
Right now I'm feeling sorry for any other digital game distributor except Amazon, and doubt they can compete that well with Steam either. If a customer wanted to buy a new title today at full price, why would they pick any other vendor over Steam? Would you rather have your download with gamespot, Greenmangaming, Gameersgate and so on over Steam? LIkely not - you are very likely to get it on Steam I suspect. Leaving those other vendors only scraps - a sale here and there if they offer a really great sale price.
And that's not much of a way to stay in business.
I'm always concerned about monopolistic things that might limit choice, limit innovation, allow gouging.
I wonder what might lie down the road with Steam after the market-gaining phase, when they have even more dominance. Will they remain benevolant?
How do competitors compete with Steam to keep a competitive marketplace?
This isn't like normal retail where you just buy an item at whatever store you like each time. You get invested with Steam. Your whole libary is there, adding a strong bias to buy everything there instead of having games spread out all over, among other pressures to buy on Steam instead of it just being a fair competition.
I don't have a great solution. I just see these other sites I'm betting are struggling more and more to compete.
An analogy a little bit is Amazon's Prime. Amazon already competes with advantage from its size on quality of shipping and price. But once they get you to buy prime, it creates a big incentive to take advantage of the free 2 day shipping you already paid for, making it not an even playing field with other merchants.
We saw a somewhat similar situation when merchants 'had to' sell through Wal-Mart because of their size. Wal-Mart started making all kinds of demands, slashing the merchant's profits, putting many out of business, ordering them to run their business and products the way Wal-Mart wanted - remember the bands who had to offer censored versions of their music they didn't want to.
But we all love the Steam sales, so there seems to be no slowing it down.
Ideally, there would be some cross-vendor platform where it didn't matter which merchant you buy it from, it all goes into one library, but that's not the case.
That's still the phase of offering such good service and such low prices as to put the competition out of business. The bad stuff comes later after they have dominance.
Right now I'm feeling sorry for any other digital game distributor except Amazon, and doubt they can compete that well with Steam either. If a customer wanted to buy a new title today at full price, why would they pick any other vendor over Steam? Would you rather have your download with gamespot, Greenmangaming, Gameersgate and so on over Steam? LIkely not - you are very likely to get it on Steam I suspect. Leaving those other vendors only scraps - a sale here and there if they offer a really great sale price.
And that's not much of a way to stay in business.
I'm always concerned about monopolistic things that might limit choice, limit innovation, allow gouging.
I wonder what might lie down the road with Steam after the market-gaining phase, when they have even more dominance. Will they remain benevolant?
How do competitors compete with Steam to keep a competitive marketplace?
This isn't like normal retail where you just buy an item at whatever store you like each time. You get invested with Steam. Your whole libary is there, adding a strong bias to buy everything there instead of having games spread out all over, among other pressures to buy on Steam instead of it just being a fair competition.
I don't have a great solution. I just see these other sites I'm betting are struggling more and more to compete.
An analogy a little bit is Amazon's Prime. Amazon already competes with advantage from its size on quality of shipping and price. But once they get you to buy prime, it creates a big incentive to take advantage of the free 2 day shipping you already paid for, making it not an even playing field with other merchants.
We saw a somewhat similar situation when merchants 'had to' sell through Wal-Mart because of their size. Wal-Mart started making all kinds of demands, slashing the merchant's profits, putting many out of business, ordering them to run their business and products the way Wal-Mart wanted - remember the bands who had to offer censored versions of their music they didn't want to.
But we all love the Steam sales, so there seems to be no slowing it down.
Ideally, there would be some cross-vendor platform where it didn't matter which merchant you buy it from, it all goes into one library, but that's not the case.