Steam has locked up the gaming market on PCs and so far it has been all upside. The decline of Netflix and the proliferation of generally worse alternatives has not been a boon for anyone but rent-seekers. This theory of competition is not holding up here.
I think Steam is an anomaly, not the rule for monopolies. Steam is privately owned with long term stable leadership. They are generating a crazy amount of money and are able to be content with that.
If steam went public and had the usual revolving door of MBA CEOs keen to "maximize efficiencies", you can bet that Steam would turn just as malign as the adtech industry.
I concur on all points, though I think there's something else than public ownership at fault per se. Publicly traded corporations were once considered an innovation and improvement over private ownership. Something went awry over the years, and private equity is presently giving a bad name to private ownership too.
Private equity is a type of private ownership, even if it doesn't apply to Steam. In the broader context of business dysfunction, public-vs-private ownership is not telling the full story. Corporate raiding is also just part of the picture; MBA-driven corporate mismanagement, ZIRP and LIRP, principal-agent mismatch, short-term profit maximalism, and a number of other issues are involved too.
A private founder-owner-CEO combination (like Steam) might be the least vulnerable organization to many of those ills, short of a cooperative (not sure it counts as private ownership).
The barrier to entry to compete with steam is a newspaper ad, a CD-R writer (or usb stick) an envelope and a stamp. There are a million ways to deliver software. You can setup a website as a front to an S3 bucket and then just pay per download of the file. You have epic, origin gog, greenman gaming etc they all exist, but people choose to buy their games on steam, and publishers choose to sell their games there despite the 30% cut. I wouldn't call it "locking up", they just provide a Better Service to customers.
The last game I bought that wasn't on steam was probably Kerbal Space Program, in ~2014, and later converted my key to Steam when the option presented itself.
*Epic offers 0% cut for the first year to most indie games
> Steam has locked up the gaming market on PCs and so far it has been all upside.
GoG exists too, and just like what happened with streaming services, gaming companies have pushed out their own shitty platforms full of DRM and spying. Steam is still #1 though.
