Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
No, that’s not how that works at all. Monopolies are bad (and indeed unlawful) even if people think you got them by being super cool.
Google didn’t get a monopoly on advertising and search by sucking at it. They had the best search engine and design in a crowded market and that’s why you don’t say you “Altavista’d” something. But that’s still a bad thing and they still should get broken up into manageable chunks, as current regulators are trying to do. Ditto for Apple and all these other oligopolistic online companies.
And… you know, Valve. Maybe. At some point. Not quite there yet. But that’s bad even if you like Steam or if they have the better feature set. Which they do. Especially if they have the better feature set, in fact, because like all these other oligopolistic companies, the more time they have to establish dominance and get people to sink further into their ecosystem the harder it is to break it up later. That’s true of kebabs AND software platforms.