mindbleach comments on The antitrust case against Valve is falling apart after plaintiffs used weak, unreliable sources to counter Valve’s sworn statements

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 8 points 10 months ago (3 children)

... why the fuck would proving Valve's superdupermajority market share hinge on WON?

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 12 points 10 months ago

Because they're trying to prove that Valve has anticompetitive tactics.

If Valve is just the best and everyone prefers them, they aren't doing the part of monopoly where they put their competitors out of business so they can jack up prices

And we're a long way from breaking up companies just because they're too big

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[–] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 8 points 10 months ago (1 child)

Reading about WON is looks like it was at the time the major service for hosting multiplayer servers and Steam was created to compete with it, I don't know why Steam as a service to play multiplayer is more relevant than Steam as a place to buy games in this case.

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[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 8 points 10 months ago*

WON was a multiplayer service that was ALSO a early foray into online game distribution. Somewhat ironically as the platform on which Valve's Half-life was originally published.

The modern era of online games distribution is pretty closely tied to multiplayer hosting because those were the games that were primarily targeted for online distribution in a world where MOST games were offline and physically distributed.

Steam launched its own platform to compete with WON and moved all of its own titles over there. The biggest controversy associated with that was that Valve sent out a patch over the WON servers to move all the existing WON enabled games over to the new Steam platform.

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