There has never been any sort of DRM launcher. As in a PC game vendor that markets itself by attaching it's entire store to video games by DRM. Even if you take a look at DRM alone. Any other PC game DRM has been veritably locked out of the PC game market because of Steam's dominance.

In a normal capitalistic system, price of goods from a vendor are based on supply/demand as well as competition with other vendors.

In a monopoly, competition based on other vendors doesn't exist. Therefore, prices can be set solely on the demand for the product.

I for one am absolutely against DRM, but nobody can deny the demand for it from devs in PC gaming. Many to the point of moving exclusively to console for no other reason than piracy alone. Aside from that and going DRM free, there's only one option for anybody in mainstream PC games for selling games with DRM copy protection - Steam.

You complain about Steam having a monopoly in the forum of one of many competitors. I don't know what else to say.

oh FFS this crap again.

go have that discussion there instead - been done to death here.

Yet I haven't complained about anything. It's a simple question. If you don't have an answer, then feel free to not respond.

EGS, Origin, UPlay, Bethesda

All say hello with their gaming storefronts.

No and no

Don't worry, some insignificant European Country will smack an anti trust suit on them sooner or later, its just a matter of Steam waiting in line for its turn.

By now i think all the big American tech giants are hanging those anti trust suits on the wall as a badge of honor!! lol

Steam is not a Monopoly by the word's proper economic definition, it's a Monopsony instead; to whit "a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers".

Steam may meet either the legal definition or common language definition of being a monopoly as well, but they're more subjective. So investigations involving Google being labelled a 'monopoly' search engine for example aren't about it being literally the only option, just distorting the market and (potentially) illegal cross promotion of its own products using search.

Nope. I even think Steam is actually less of a monopoly compared to, say, 10 years ago.

It's not an "official" monopoly for all PC games because other stores exist where you can buy a lot of Indie's elsewhere. Nor is it illegal. But Steam does have the same "de facto" like monopoly / monopsony market effect over distribution of most non EA / Ubisoft AAA's and there are more types of monopoly than just the single "absolute zero competition" purist definition. Eg, high market barrier to entry + no substitute goods (per game) + anti-competitive technological barriers (locking in formerly open 3rd party mods into itself, compulsory client + "all my games in one place" = the first store has a massive coercive unfair market dominance advantage in a market where store vs store competing on price efficiency doesn't actually happen due to end user prices being set flat and dictated by publishers) + consumer price inelasticity ("even if Epic are $10 cheaper I'll still buy the Steam version due to being part of a captive audience"), etc, are all characteristics of a monopoly, and a company doesn't have to meet every single one or have nothing less than a 100.0% market share (see Microsoft Windows) to be labelled as such under the common definition. Phasmid's explanation of a "Monopsony" is more accurate though.

Even if we're assuming that this description applies, and I can kind of see the point, I think anyone who's been following the gaming industry over the last half decade or so should see the market itself has been deconstructing that monopsony for a while already, without regulation needed from outside sources. More and more companies that used to sell on Steam are going their own without steam, using their own clients. Twitch/Epic introduced their own storesEpic is literally spending money for companies to *not* sell on Steam. Streaming services have come and gone but keep coming, eventually they'll get a hold.

You know what the "mono" in monopoly stands for?

With GOG, UPlay, Origin, EPIC and all the consoles out there - we're not even talking about a "de facto" monopoly here.

Edit: typo