jazir5 t1_ix22a2j wrote on November 20, 2022 at 3:32 AM

Reply to comment by mil24havoc in Epic lawsuit claims Google paid Activision Blizzard $360 million to prevent Play Store rival by Sorin61

>Epic isn't the victim, consumers are. You (the victim) prefer a single app store because it's all you know -- you haven't observed the counterfactual competitive app market

This is a bad example in this specific instance IMO, because the Epic Games store on PC vs Steam is an extremely comparable situation. Most people very much so dislike Epic Games on PC and it's userbase is much smaller. Competition with Steam has produced absolutely no results, and the prices on Steam are often better than epics. Steam does not base their pricing vs epics, Valve has pretty much ignored Epic since they opened their store.

Now I don't know if the exact same would hold true on mobile, but I really don't see it playing out much differently.

That's not to say they shouldn't be given the chance though. If Epic wants to compete, let them.

mil24havoc t1_ix28che wrote on November 20, 2022 at 4:26 AM

... Except that you don't know what the situation would be like if Epic wasn't able to open an app store -- because steam didn't prevent them from doing so. I get what you're saying, but the fact that steam has better deals than Epic is fairly weak evidence against a competitive market.

Furthermore, steam never had close to a monopoly like the phone app stores have. Steam has always competed with direct sales, publisher stores, brick and mortar, and the windows store, among others. The fact that one more store didn't make a huge difference isn't surprising because the market was already operating properly.