In general I agree that Big Tech is too big or is in some way anticompetitive; In this case however there is no threat in my opinion. Video games are not a utility and have no control over utilities unlike eg. Amazon (where we can debate what control Amazon has). That to me is the most important factor. Besides that point, there is no inherent anticompetitive element to one company owning a large portion of the video game market because it does not prevent others from competing. Anyone can make their own game, and indie games succeed year after year, even if 99% fail.
The real issue is tying computers to software. Computers and software need to be considered two markets. Computers are a utility, whereas software is sometimes a utility. But by tying software and computers, these tying companies use their software to be anticompetitive in the hardware market. That is, any software which does not run on an untied hardware system is anticompetitive even if it has procompetitive effects. All this is to say that we need the Open App Markets Act to pass.
(This is all ignoring the OS market and the hardware and software tying that exists in it, which is more difficult to discus, but in my opinion system calls are anticompetitive as well by nature with the exception of a theoretical standardized set of system calls.)
> Video games are not a utility and have no control over utilities
This is true, but the laws around this don't only apply to utilities. In fact, they don't fully apply there at all (but I'll circle back to that).
As a big example, look at movie production companies and theater chains. Way back when, lots of the most popular chains were owned by production companies. So if you wanted to see certain movies, they were only available at the theaters owned by the companies that produced the film.
Sounds a lot like what we've seen in video games for years now, where lots of AAA games are exclusive on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo (biggest example), or PC. And let's not forget MacOS and even Linux. Pretty much only the roughly equivalent spread of so many platforms has forced the big publishers to largely do multi-platform releases of popular titles. Let Microsoft own Activision-Blizzard and we could be seeing lots of existing titles and new ones be PC and Xbox only.
In regards to the big utilities, the last major one of those to be broken up was AT&T in the 80's. But beyond that, most of the major utilities can't really be "broken up" because of what they do. Power generation, water, and sewage. Those all require shared public infrastructure for the most part. Because of that, small pure commercial enterprises aren't possible. But for the most part the companies that provide those services are still commercial entities, but they have a few extra layers of government oversight that notionally should be monitoring them for good governance and civic oversight. Sadly we see where that falls apart like in Flint, MI.
Only didn't mention trash/recycling pickup because that's a lot more flexible. Much easier to have competing services, although in places like SF we only have Recology.
Anti-competition bodies are designed to regulate more than just utilities.
Are you really saying that Microsoft can't exert undue influence on all other games and software studios to unfairly compete in the gaming segment... even though they would be controlling the operating system developed on and targetted to... let alone their extensive cloud and console providings that they could simply deny to the competition?
In such a landscape, indie devs would be powerless.
>Anti-competition bodies are designed to regulate more than just utilities.
I was looking for a better word than "utility" but couldn't think of one. What I mean is that games are unimportant. Grain is a "utility" for me as are computers ect. And I don't think it matters what Anti-competition bodies are "designed" to regulated as I am already giving my own opinion on what I think they should do so for me this isn't a such an important point.
>even though they would be controlling the operating system developed on and targetted to...
That is the issue exactly, which was my whole point. It's an issue irrespective of whether they have 1% or 99% of the video game market. They are the hardware/syscall railraod by which developers ship their software oil. But large marketshare alone is not an issue, and can be assured to be a non issue with something like the Open App Markets Act whereas in something like grain or computers it is almost impossible to show whether a dominant company has used their monopoly to hurt competition. If we just give some basic rules as to allowing users to decide how to use their computers we won't need to care about how large any video game company is.
The real issue is tying computers to software. Computers and software need to be considered two markets. Computers are a utility, whereas software is sometimes a utility. But by tying software and computers, these tying companies use their software to be anticompetitive in the hardware market. That is, any software which does not run on an untied hardware system is anticompetitive even if it has procompetitive effects. All this is to say that we need the Open App Markets Act to pass.
(This is all ignoring the OS market and the hardware and software tying that exists in it, which is more difficult to discus, but in my opinion system calls are anticompetitive as well by nature with the exception of a theoretical standardized set of system calls.)