Comment by Shacklz
3 days ago
Unlike other corporations, they actually didn't really do all that much to make it a monopoly though. It's kind of an organic monopoly simply by being better than everything else, by a wide margin.
There's not much "lock-in" apart from the games one owns on the platform; and the social aspects of steam are mostly negligible or niche - sure there's the friendlist, but no gamer I know uses steam voice-chat so the friendlist is mostly replicated in discord and similar anyway.
The library one amasses is a huge lock-in though, you’re downplaying it
I don't see it as lock-in as you don't have to keep buying games from Steam - you can just buy games from other places if you want and then have multiple libraries.