WolfEisberg: That is not correct at all. A monopoly does not need to abuse their power, nor did they need to be abusive to gain their market power. ...In the EU and the UK...
At a glance... The EU requires abuse (TFEU Article 102). The UK does indeed define companies in a "dominant position" as controlling a certain percentage of the market, but the CMA doesn't seem to really have a problem with that unless those dominant players are abusing their power.
AB2012: Steam is trying to "normalize" doing exactly the equivalent of walking out of a high street store with a shiny new Doom 2 disc only for the manager to yell after you
"Hey, you can play Plutonia but not TNT, this is a feature not a bug! It's our store giving you choice!". Trying to pass that off as some positive is ridiculous, very anti-consumer and the exact opposite in spirit as to what the modding community has been all about for the past 30 years. ... Just stop with these ridiculous false equivalences. Nexus, ModDB, etc, don't need to "integrate" to each store client to get their mods to work
because they don't segregate based on store client in the first place and they already naturally work for everyone.
But that's my point. The mod distribution platforms are currently independent, and mod devs can release wherever they please. Steam is not preventing people from posting mods elsewhere so I don't see the problem. If Steam was restricting distribution outside of Workshop, then I would completely agree with everything you are saying. Most notable mods seem to release on better platforms anyway with Workshop being viewed as an inferior mod platform that isn't very notable. (At least in my experience.)
WolfEisberg: That's a very dumb example given it's the .dll that does the DRM check that actively blocks games from running... Games on GOG that don't work if you delete bundled steam_api.dll, pretty much are the Steam version copy / pasted here with a "loopback wrapper" that fakes having the Steam client running (surprising closer to how cracks work than people would like to admit). It's a lazy release that's literally what people
don't want from a clean DRM-Free build and is not certainly not any kind of positive "competition" at all.
BrianSim: Are you for real? The entire primary point of steam_api.dll is that it's the thing the game's .exe calls to handle the Steam DRM client check then reports back whether
A. The Steam client is running, and
B. That the game is owned on said account. It's literal purpose
is to be a barrier to running a game years before Steam invented achievements in 2008. That it's been shovelled into some lazy GOG / Epic releases as a stub isn't a good thing. If anything it's more proof of an unhealthy market dominance that negatively affects other stores...
But Steam indeed does allow for their API to coexist with other APIs in the same application, it can be bypassed, and Valve will not litigate if it is circumvented for release on other platforms. Steam also does not require their API at all for games released on Steam, and some devs choose that option. Steam also allows for other APIs (EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Epic, etc.) to be used in games hosted on Steam, and they also allow other 3rd-party DRM systems as well. So the devs have a choice when it comes to the Steam API.
So as I said before, I don't necessarily like what Steam does, but I still think it's a stretch to try to call Steam a monopoly at this point based on the textbook definition. Maybe Valve will change some policies and cross a line later though.
Time4Tea: I'm advocating for government regulation to impose an open standard for PC game APIs, which every company would have equal access to, which would remove barriers to entry; create a level playing field and foster competition. In the same way that there has been regulation for decades in many other industries, such as wireless standards, power outlets, light bulbs (and many other examples).
Suggesting that would amount to a government 'monopoly' is ridiculous. Governments are not in the business of producing video games and would not be monopolizing anything through regulation. In fact, it would be the polar opposite of a monopoly - an open standard that would be available for anyone to use.
After all, isn't that the whole point of the concept of a 'free market' in the first place? Free competition between suppliers on a
level playing field, which is supposed to benefit consumers. A market that has been allowed to be captured by a single corporation is not a free market and does not benefit consumers.
I clearly do not view politicians in as benevolent of a light as you do, but government-mandated software APIs of any type will never be a good thing because the government restrictions would get in the way of developers being able create what they want in the free market. And then you have to consider that you're putting biased, non-technical politicians and/or bureaucrats in charge of technical decisions which is not a good idea either. Not to mention that any new feature/change would require that someone lobby some politicians and then wait for legislation to be passed which means that only the largest/wealthiest devs would be able to afford to have this API standard changed.