Topevoli wrote on Jul 18, 2011, 09:54:
Why is dominance such a bad thing? Its not like steam strong armed consumers into using it. They chose to use it. If thats what they chose to use, then publishers should meet the consumers needs a little.
Well for starters generally what happens is a service starts out great, on that basis grows into a dominant position and then starts really screwing over customers.
Secondly, even if Steam continues to be a great service for consumers, they might be really dicking over developers. This in turn is bad for consumers but the reason why is not obvious.
Competition is a basic necessity for a market economy.
That said, Origin and Live are certainly not the competition required. I think ideally there should be ~3 Steam-type services all highly interlinked (mandated by the EU or whatever), but that seems rather optimistic so a Steam and a no-frills download service or two will do.