3 ms·

Competition is very nearly worthless as far as ensuring consumer choice. The market tends to trend towards a small number of players who all act collectively wi

Competition is very nearly worthless as far as ensuring consumer choice. The market tends to trend towards a small number of players who all act collectively with or without the benefit of collaboration to serve their own interests. The customer may have preferences along n dimensions where n is a very large number of choices and a small number of choices wherein their ability to effect the distribution of characteristics is limited to avoiding choices which make massive strides along multiple axis away from desirable areas. Regulations force all players into a reasonable space in the game board and let them compete within that space. It is the only practical way to achieve this.

pdonis 5y ago
> Competition is very nearly worthless as far as ensuring consumer choice. It is if the consumers don't demand choice, yes. Which, as a number of other responses in this thread have shown, appears to be the case in this market. The people who are willing to not buy games distributed on terms unfavorable to them are statistical outliers (at least one such person has posted elsewhere in this thread) and don't have any significant effect on the incentives faced by the distributors. > Regulations force all players into a reasonable space Into what some unelected government bureaucrats decide is a "reasonable space", perhaps. But any such regulation is far more likely to make things worse, not better, for consumers. Look up "regulatory capture". The game distributors have much deeper pockets and a much more concentrated incentive to simply buy the regulations they want.