Ha, no. As I have said many times before, I am a left-leaning libertarian. Burn the system, eat the rich and all that jazz :)

But as part of that, I also place a very high value on personal integrity and virtue ethics. You started this whole thing with a lie, and then simply refused to respond to what I actually said, except with this second rant. So that tells me pretty much everything I need to know about where your morals lie.

Where is the lie? That you refuse to believe someone still cares about privacy? I know the UK is so dystopian you probably don't even have an idea of what that is anymore.

I did all my purchases with a gift card for years, I've been waiting for the Steam Frame for years as the only Linux supported and non-facebook VR headset thats gonna be available here.

"Burn the system but you should still have to ask the government to play a video game, I can't even believe someone uses cash still" So predictable with the fake rebellious bs, every time.

Indeed. So then tell me, the question I actually asked - why do you say the lawsuits are fake? And which three are you talking about? Steam has had several over the years, for several reasons and in different countries.

Well at least some of the lawsuits against Steam are fake, specifically the ones arguing Steam is a monopoly which is absolute nonsense. NO competition is a monopoly. Far as I have seen there is itch.io, EGS and GOG to name a few for competitors. Far as I know the UK and a number of others haven't actively gone after consoles with these accusations under the closed ecosystem and it's because Steam refuses to fall in line with Face ID or other similar doxxing methods. It's really disgusting...the politicians hate that gamers are largely apolitical and aren't always at each other's throats and refuse to fall for their brainwashing to hate someone else because they are a Republican or Democrat or a Tori or Labour respectively. They also can't stand many of us would push back against them and question them, they want to silence and throw in prison any new Snowden they might discover with these doxxing measures. Ffs they want to rip away people's ability to just use a PC, NOT even go online by implementing age verification. They say it's for the k ids, hey where are those files and their names again?
They have largely ignored GOG because of how small they are in the scheme of things versus how huge Steam is.

Two things.

Firstly, if you sue someone over something that you know has no reasonable legal basis or can not be success, that is not a "fake lawsuit", that is a frivolous lawsuit. Broadly speaking, a lawsuit without legal merit. A "fake lawsuit" would more mean a lawsuit that doesn not actually exist, something someone has simply made up or pretended exists. So suing Valve on the basis that it has monopoly, even though it does not have a true monopoly, does not make the lawsuit "fake". The lawsuit actually exists. Whether it has merit is an entirely different question.

Secondly, a company does not need to be a true monopoly (as in, the only company operating in a market) to fall foul of competition or antitrust law. Rather the term used is here is monopoly power or market power. Broadly speaking, this is about whether a company has sufficient power within a defined market to behave to a significant extent independently of normal competitive constraints. Having competitors does not automatically mean that it lacks that power.

There are no hard and fast rules on what monopoly power is, it needs to be established in a case to case basis as markets are different. You would have to define the relevant market and look at things such as the number and strength of competitors, barriers to entry, the company's ability to control prices or exclude competition, and how persistent its market position is. So there is no magical market-share percentage where you go from "not a monopoly" at 49.9% to "monopoly" at 50.0%. In the UK, the CMA says that dominance is generally unlikely below a 40% market share. In the US it usually kick in with a share between 50%-70%. And if it is above it provide much stronger grounds for inferring monopoly power. Establishing monopoly power would be part of such a lawsuit, and it would not be determend before it has been argued in court.

Look even EGS could be a legitimate competitor but I agree with what Gabe says about piracy and it being a service problem. EGS made no active effort to be a true competitor, they just threw money at the problem by giving away free games and having exclusives but not ones that they paid to have developed so they are new games that wouldn't exist. There were existing games and Epic offered to wave the Unreal Engine fee if EGS got timed exclusives.
They never fixed all the flaws people talked about EGS having in the meantime versus Steam.
Steam is a superior product to EGS and I think many here will agree with me there much as we may not like Steam.

I legitimately think others could slowly and surely chip away at Steam's lead IF it was competitive featurewise. I think having the free games and if they drastically improved the feature set to be comparable to Steam, especially with the reduced percentage take on sales versus Steam, they would have definitely grabbed a percentage away, this is on Epic for not doing a good enough job improving it.

I assume this is about the lawsuit? And that you mean the one in the Western District of Washington? (There are others. For example, there is also litigation against Valve in the UK, but that is not as well known.) If so, then all of this is actually somewhat beside the point. The US case is not based simply on the argument that "Steam is a monopoly, therefore Steam is illegal".

What the specifically case challenges is Valve's price-parity requirement. Valve take a 30% commission on Steam sales, and the plaintiffs argue that Valve used its market power to prevent developers and publishers from selling their games more cheaply on competing stores. The argument is essentially that if another store charges a lower cut, a publisher should theoretically be able to sell the game more cheaply there. But if Valve can effectively require price parity across competing stores, then those competing stores can not use their lower commissions to compete with Steam by offering consumers lower prices. The argument is that Valve is able to impose this because of Steam's monopoly power, and that the result is reduced price competition across the PC games market.

And, just to be clear, this is not a frivolous lawsuit. The case has already survived attempts to dismiss it, and the court has certified a publisher class. This does not mean Valve has been found liable, it has not, nor does it mean the plaintiffs will ultimately win. What it means is that the case has passed the first test, and it is set for a trial. The date is not set yet, either later this year or in the next year.

When I look at one of the people who brought one of these lawsuits, Letitita James and there was a Rothschild who brought another one...it is hard for me to take it entirely seriously and not seem to me for an attempt to bring Valve to heel and force disgusting age attestation to dox people, follow them around the Internet to sell them disgusting, predatory ads and to get people to shut up.
I hope Internet Cafe's come back around, we need them now more than ever to thwart these types trying to spy on people who want to whistle blow or even just offer substantive criticisms.

I think you are mistaken on several points.

First, regarding monopolies, it just requires on player in the market to have a significant market share over the industry to the point where others cant compete even if they enter the market. The monopolistic entity is a price maker, able to set the price and force consumers to trust that the monopoly operates ethically. With an estimate 75% of PC market share, Steam is close to a monopoly.

And Steam is being sued because of its practices that reinforce that monopoly, namely price parity and 30% commission. Steam is being sued because it enforces price parity, forcing publishers to sell their games on all storefronts (including their own) for the same price as they list on Steam. This means that storefronts have to find other ways to draw customers instead of the easiest and obvious way, lower prices (such as since Rockstar saves 30% by selling through their own storefront, they can list their games for 20% cheaper than Steam for example). This price parity reinforces Steam's monopoly (because if the prices are the same everywhere, why not just buy on Steam where all my games are already) which allows Steam to continue to enforce their 30% cut when a more competitive market would allow for lower game prices + lower cuts on storefronts. Hence why this court case has legs.

ESG has tried to be a competitor. Lower cut (15%), waive Unreal engine license if on Epic, giveaways. If anything, Epic's lack of failure kind of shows how strong Steam's monopolistic hold over its users is. Is Steam's storefront really that much better of an offering than GOG or Epic? Alot of comments I read is that people accidentally buy Steam versions of games they got for free from Epic because they spend all their time on Steam.