I'm always a little hesitant to post anything about Valve, for several reasons. This latest lawsuit has given me some hope that the PC video game business can be a real market again someday. Valve's responses will be interesting, and I hope this gets to discovery.

The market needs to be fixed so it can function again. Right now we have a control-freak monopolist in the center of the business with *enormous* power. There can't be price discovery with the current situation unless the feds step in and apply the laws already on the books.

This same entity has access to large volumes of private real-time Steam sales and usage data. This allows this single private corporation to continue tuning and optimizing their monopoly. It's a bad situation for everybody but a *tiny* handful of fabulously wealthy insiders.

Everybody is being used to keep this scheme going: the customers, the publishers, and especially the crunching video game developers who make the actual products.

I suspect that the lawyers behind this latest federal lawsuit actually sat down and talked to several industry insiders. They are all afraid to say anything in public or they can be denied Steam access, destroying their business.

I've been threatened myself by a Valve employee (who is now an ex-employee), so I get it. I don't believe it's an illegal monopoly - I *know* it's an illegal monopoly.