Titanfall is the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years

The reason all the steam competitors have bad vision is that there’s not enough of them. If the barrier to entry were lower, there’d be more competitors and some might have good vision.

Steam doesn’t need to be unique in order for programming a Steam clone to still take a lot of humanhours. A government mandated opening of the source would eliminate most of those humanhours spent programming. A company could have only a handful of developers and sysadmins, and mainly employ customer service representatives, and that would be a business with the potential to compete with Steam.

But only the greedy capitalists have enough money to set up all that e-commerce infrastructure. Making Steam open source would lower the barrier to entering the market. Then small businesses could join the playing field, and those that keep their promises will succeed.

This would probably also require a federated standard for deploying game releases to multiple storefronts. Imagine if releasing your game on Steam is exactly the same amount of effort as releasing it on a dozen different competing storefronts.

Steam is a monopoly because it’s the best.

How should governments deal with a situation in which a monopoly exists and it’s bad for the economy, but it only exists because no competitors come close?

Perhaps the government should have the power to demand Steam be made open source in situations like this. Thereby giving competitors a chance to compete on an even paying field by copying the winning technology.