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Nexus Mods acquires the popular community site SteamDB
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
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This site being bought does nothing to prevent another from being started.
In practice it does. There's a big, entrenched competitor out there already, so that puts a damper on any motivation. If the site just closed down, that wouldn't be the case.
Even if SteamDB is gradually enshittified, there will still be that competitor that does a "good enough" job for a lot of people, meaning the bar for a new player to come along is higher.
Why would network externalities not apply here?
They’re a very common and well demonstrated pattern that plays out with this sort of site; e.g. it’s taken almost a decade for many gaming wikis to get off fandom after they were locked in. There’s a finite pool of user attention and contribution that these projects can pull from, and splitting that pool worsens the commons.