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I will try one more time, because I'm stubborn, and surely this time the windmill will be defeated! Plus, you've given me a little more insight on why your error seems reasonable to you.
Your basic problem is your definition of competition. You seem to have acquired some strange definition of competition - and it's wrong. I can tell that it's wrong because of how you are using it, specifically how you think that only being able to buy a product at one outlet means there's no competition going on. This is simply false. You may also be fuzzy on the underlying principles that make anti-competitive practices anti-competitive.
I can tackle this from a number of directions; let's start with definitions and principles. If you disagree, you have to tell me why you think it's wrong, and support your position.
Competition is where companies offering their products to customers at whatever price and let consumers choose what they will buy (or not.) This is good for consumers because it produces pressure on a company to give you the best price for the quality of good they're selling - lest someone else grab their potential customers' money instead.
Anti-competitive practices are those that seek to reduce or eliminate the customer's choices. Practices such as price fixing, dividing territories, and dumping all are anti-competitive because they aim to reduce customers' choices - reducing that downward market pressure and gaining more profit for themselves. The same goes for the two examples you've pursued in this thread: creating barriers for entry, and a vendor contracting to buy only from a certain supplier - which you claim is indistinguishable from a store exclusive.
For the first accusation, it's so groundless that I actually missed it at first; how can simply contracting to go with a single sales platform create a barrier for entry for others? The platform isn't making games development more difficult or expensive for anyone. I literally just glossed over that claim and went into your first link to wikipedia and tried to guess what you could possibly have meant, here.
For the second accusation, based on my aforementioned guess, you're on more solid ground - but you're still very wrong. In order for a store exclusive to be anti-competitive, it has to reduce, or aim to reduce competition - that's pretty much tautological. A vendor contracting to buy only from one supplier is anti-competitive - essentially because the supplier is trying to corner the market. If they can induce all the stores in your area to only sell their products, they've stifled competition - customers' choices have been artificially reduced. (The internet makes this very hard to do for consumer goods, but we're talking principles; anti-competitive behaviors are still wrong if you're not successful.) However, if a supplier contracts to only sell to one vendor, how is a customer's choice reduced? Are they kidnapped? Held at gunpoint? Is Mack the Knife making them an offer they can't refuse? No, they can go down the street and buy something else if they want to - that's exactly what people do now if a store doesn't have what they want. It makes no difference whether the product is unavailable because another vendor contracted the supplier to induce you to come to their store, or because the store doesn't think it will sell well enough. You've still got the choice; this is just the vendors competing with each other.
This brings me to the crux of your error: a bad definition that's so broad as to be essentially meaningless. If a store exclusive is the same as a store only selling one suppliers' products, then just about everything is anti-competitive. Store brands come to mind: Kirkland, Great Value... Trader Joe's tuna. All of these products are contracted to be sold only through those outlets - are you going to boycott Walmart, Costco, Trader Joe's, WinCo, Safeway, Fred Meyer... the list goes on, man. Literally every major chain has their own brand. And there are plenty of games you can only get on Steam; and if you want them, you go to steam.
There's no barrier to you buying games from Steam, or GOG, or Origin. You don't pay any money, you don't pay different prices for the same game unless somebody has a sale; there is nothing interfering with your ability to chose options to trade your money for video games in the market - and there has to be, in order for a practice to be anti-competitive.
The difference between a store exclusive and anti-competitive practices is real, meaningful, and borne out by actual law and current events. Apple recently lost a Supreme Court antitrust case over its charging a commission on its AppStore offerings - but no one has ever even tried to sue the Mac Store down at the mall.
Edited by Void Angel, 03 August 2019 - 09:19 AM.
