While I agree with you, it's something not to be said out loud. De-humanising a group is literally the first thing the Nazis actually did, so it's kind of funny to see you call them Nazis while applying some of their playbook.

Unfortunately modern politics has devolved into name calling. People don't like being called names, and as such they don't like the people who call them names and call them names back. Rinse repeat from the other side. It results in people who may not be too different getting more extreme from opposite sides of the camp.

How are EV's a bubble? They make up a tiny portion of the market and are following a standard technological growth trend. The only bubble in the EV world is Tesla's over inflated share-price.

How is that a problem? ${Country} has been subsidizing ${Local_Industry} since governments were first formed. I find it disingenious for Americans to complain about China subsidizing EV production. Specifically Americans. The American whose taxes bailed out Ford and GM. The only reason they survived is government support.

The bigger problem is Western governments have been insanely fucking shortsighted and *not* subsidised EV production enough, leaving it open to someone with more resources to start cornering the market. By the way the EU analysed the level of subsidy provided by the Chinese government and applied tariffs appropriately. The effect isn't as big as you make it out.

And go look at the ones which aren't fake-sold. It seems like your view of the industry is based on shock news stories from the Daily Mail. If we all followed that it stands to reason that no one ever bought a Cybertruck, after all they were being abandoned in shopping mall lots as well. The reality is the stories about fake-sale EVs were not different than any story about cars when certain government deadlines hit. They were little more than a curious blip intended to meet short term numbers. Yes there's Chinese EVs which were fake-sold, and they are a tiny minority of the total production.

You say dump as if it's trash as opposed to what they actually are: very nice competently manufactured cars with great bang for buck. There's a reason why Ford's CEO drives a Chinese made EV, and then proceeded to publicly praise it. And it's not because his bonus is tied to tanking his share price.

Disclosure: I drive a Chinese made EV. A friend owns a Geely directly. Both are cars that I would buy again in a heartbeat. They are cars I chose over Audi, VW, Toyota, Tesla and Renault, all which were I test drove at the time. And while it wasn't a testdrive I dare say I'm absolutely shocked at the one time I had the true horrendous displeasure of driving a Mustang Mach-e, talk about "dump".

Exactly. You're 100% right on the definition and seem to have a lack of understanding about Steam itself. There are *NO* substitutes in the PC gaming. Substitute doesn't mean "build your own" or just "do something else", it means "achieve the outcome" in the economic sense.

There are other PC gaming stores, stores like Epic. And developers who have made Epic an exclusive have to date universally lost money and sales on their games until the point where they released on Steam at which point their sales recovered. By definition a substitute that is not viable for your business is not a substitute.

For developers Steam literally ticks every box you mentioned. They are a single seller (the alternatives lack customers, lack platform market share, and lack the APIs and options provided), there are no substitutes, price is inelastic (Steam set the entire industry price, they are often cited in the Google / Apple antitrust suits), and there's a high barrier to entry (Epic has so far spent $4bn without providing a viable substitute, EA, has abandoned its attempt at an App store).

It actually is, because market power is the one thing that underpins literally every characteristic you mentioned. Without market power you don't get the characteristics. Without those characteristics you don't have market power.

My friend, I think you massively misread the parent's post.

Literally everyone uses their own servers, those who do well and those who do poorly. Steam does not provide servers for gaming, period. The only thing they offer is data holding for delivering game binaries.

For multiplayer they have an API for matchmaking, and that's it. The only server service they offer is a place for users to connect before they are immediately offloaded to a developer's own server, and it's those which make or break a game.

There is no such thing as a law in the US that labels something a monopoly. Monopoly is an economic term. It doesn't come into the legal system in the USA. The USA legal system considers market dominance in wide reaching conditions and the act of monopolizing. You can very much fall afoul of antitrust law without being a monopoly, or even a duopoly or oligopoly for that matter.

Actions and power matter, not some label.

Monopoly is not a legal criteria for anything in the USA. Monopoly is an economic term defining the market dominance, and it is completely irrelevant. You're talking about anti-trust laws and the abuse of market dominance. The word you're looking for is "monopolize" the act of "monopolizing" is illegal, the state of being a monopoly is not.

You can be a monopoly (an economic definition of an entity with complete market dominance, which Steam is in PC gaming) without monopolizing (a legal term meaning abusing power to gain share).

One of the funny things about Sweeney saying Steam is bad for PC gaming is that if he actually had the market power that Steam had with his platform then his very actions would see his company get fucked into the ground by competition regulators around the world.

The action of using profits from one business to prop up another for the purposes of market manipulation becomes incredibly illegal if you actually have enough market dominance to pull it off.

I'm curious who modded this down. Please read an economics textbook.

The problem with Epic is they focused all their resources on trying to force players or bribe players to use their store rather than ... making a functioning store that works.

To this day it's not even available in many markets. That's like ... the one basic thing you should do. It's been a long time since I used it but also the store didn't have a shopping cart so you got hit with credit card transaction fees on every single thing you wanted to buy. I hope they fixed that. I mean my wife had a shopping cart on her little hobby website she setup in an hour.

It was a joke, but not a funny one.

Whether they produce something you like or want or not is irrelevant. Monopoly comes in the form of market power, market power comes in the form of market share. Steam has a monopoly precisely because create an online experience that most people want. They have near dominance over the PC market.

Whether they are good or bad doesn't come into the question of being a monopoly or not.

Also monopolies are not bad or illegal. What is illegal is engaging in the action of monopolising - i.e. using your market power nefariously to build more market power.

Your ability to install something in a different way does not come into the definition of a monopoly. You do you, it doesn't change the fact that Steam has total market dominance over PC gaming, and that's the only thing required for the monopoly definition.

Monopolies themselves aren't actually a bad thing. They aren't illegal. The question is, what do you do with market power.

Microsoft isn't just theoretically a monopoly both on desktops as well as corporate groupware, they have been literally ruled as such by judges whose job it is to determine this status in the execution of various cases brought against them.

You being able to buy something is irrelevant. The question of whether Steam is a monopoly depends on the market share that Amazon, GOG, and the Microsoft store have. That market share is fuck all.

And I wanted to call out this one in particular because they engage in exclusivity behaviour. This means there are some games released only on Epic games. What is a demonstrable fact is that all these exclusive games have failed in the market, in many cases failing to make any profit at all *until* they were released on Steam after the exclusivity period was over. This is one of the direct effects of Steam having a market monopoly.

Steam absolutely and literally meets the definition of a monopoly. They have close to 100% of the PC gaming market to the point where not releasing a PC game on Steam virtually guarantees the game looses money and is deemed a market failure.

Who said anything about anti-trust? We're talking about monopolies, not the act of monopolising. You can definitely have monopolies without anti-trust issues or market abuse. You're right about number 2) but that doesn't change that you're wrong about number 1). Steam is a monopoly, ... and that's okay.

Please specify which urban area you are talking about. I've used Google maps to travel through country roads in India, I used Google to navigate through the Australian desert including crossing private ranches in the process because the "highway" (dirt road that looks like someone put gravel on at some point) was flooded. Literally no problem. I did once end up stuck, but it wasn't Google's fault that the bridge was washed away only minutes prior.

I'm generally curious which areas you know that is underserved by Google because I simply cannot agree with your comment based on my experience in the slightest.

Driving in the Caribbean, Google did try to take me the wrong way down a newly changed one-way street. There's a little button on Google Maps which allows you to give feedback on the route, and it automatically askes about the location where you deviated from the route along with a few options such as "road was blocked" or "not legal to drive here" or something to that effect. It was literally fixed within 2 days.

You did report the problem you clearly knew about right?