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Re:The Steam Deck Is Software-Freedom Friendly by Shacklz on Thursday April 03, 2025 @09:54AM (#43569701)
Unlike other corporations, they actually didn't really do all that much to make it a monopoly though. It's kind of an organic monopoly simply by being better than everything else, by a wide margin.

There's not much "lock-in" apart from the games one owns on the platform; and the social aspects of steam are mostly negligible or niche - sure there's the friendlist, but no gamer I know uses steam voice-chat so the friendlist is mostly replicated in discord and similar anyway.

Re:The Steam Deck Is Software-Freedom Friendly by piyuv on Thursday April 03, 2025 @12:50PM (#43572373)
The library one amasses is a huge lock-in though, you’re downplaying it
Re:The Steam Deck Is Software-Freedom Friendly by ndsipa_pomu on Thursday April 03, 2025 @06:10PM (#43576079)
I don't see it as lock-in as you don't have to keep buying games from Steam - you can just buy games from other places if you want and then have multiple libraries.