Steam lawsuits in a nutshell
These comments…
Some day, Steam is going to enshittify fast, eat game devs for breakfast, and people will ask how they could have possibly seen this coming.
Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.
Submitted 2 weeks ago by RickyRigatoni@piefed.zip to [deleted]
https://media.piefed.zip/posts/yp/MU/ypMUrBmqLkHNC28.png
Comments
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
vapeloki@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hearing those arguments for how many years now? Right …
The day Gabe is bo longer there things may get ugly, may.
But, Valve is not publicly traded, or has to cater to shareholders in any way. That is the reason they are still who they are.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
They run a good service platform and aren’t as greedy as they could be, but they’re still not safe.
Use them, but no fangirling. They’re a business.
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
They already take 30% on each game. It’s huge, considering they didn’t spent a dime on these games. That means they will take most of the profit margin on a game, if any, while a studio has to pay for dozens or hundreds of employees, tons of hardware, workspaces, etc.
vapeloki@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Also, valve is giving massive contributions to open source from those 30%
carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There definitely is some amount of expenditure by valve. I don’t know if its 30% worth. For multiplayer games they provide a server/client DDOS protection and traffic optomization service though it is opt in by the developer through an api. The opther option for this tends to be a “contact sales” priced option from cloudflare. There is also some of proton’s development, some linux graphics driber work, and workshop support though I suspect hosting and content moderation expenditure there is fairly minimal.
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contribution of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Brick and mortar stores take 50% of revenue usually. The profit margin for the manufacturer applies after that
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Those studios are paying Valve how much for tailored marketing throughout the game’s lifespan?
architect@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
They spend money on each game uploaded to their store. How could you seriously think they aren’t spending any money?
You’re more making an argument that games are too cheap now.
You don’t think valve has employees and hardware to maintain?
AeonFelis@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
So… what? Hate them in advance, so that if they ever turn evil we’d be prepared?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Be prepared.
Don’t hate, but don’t trust Valve. Treat your Steam library like you don’t own it, and it could be enshittified at any time, because you don’t, and it could.
In practice, prioritize DRM-free stores when convenient. Or better yet, 1st party game dev stores. Archive any games or saves you actually want to go back to, just in case.
ClamDrinker@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Exactly. And unlike many other companies there isn’t even any indication they would want to enshittify anyways. Why would they destroy the foundation of their platform? They have actual paying customers paying the bills, not some force-feed ad slop machine.
metakrakalaka@lemmychan.org 2 weeks ago
It really puts into perspective the importance of supporting free software. Even after Valve goes to shit, their contributions to the ecosystem will live on.
It’s why the average sheep can never see the value in free software; it keeps them dependent on corporations.
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
Amazon was toxic from day one, anticompetitive, borderline illegal, definitely corrupt as hell. It is what Epic Games Store would have been if it had been long before steam lol. The amount of shit that they bankrupted into the ground with cheap Chinese copies off the backs of VC funds while making tons of loss and then removing their storefronts…
But as soon as GabeN dies, steam will become shit probably as the vultures close in.
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Amazon was always publicly traded, so it was always going to get worse. Steam is privately owned by Gabe, and is therefore more resistant to enshittification. Unless Gabe sells or dies, Steam’s pretty safe.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I got bad news for you. Gabe is human and barring a miracle in medical science; he will die. He’s 63, the tables on Age Cohort death aren’t kind after 60. (They’re brutal after 70) Only 1/3rd of men reach 80.
This is something we need to be thinking about now. It could easily 5-10 years to get competitors working.
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Gabe still owns Valve not shareholders. It’s after he dies that gets me worried.
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Amazon enshittified with their one-click-shopping patent, though. They were never good.
architect@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
That online bookstore literally started this rule of not being allowed to sell your products cheaper offsite and they will be god damned if gamers think they can fix that through Steam.
They pay the fucking president off.
They are literally the problem yall are complaining about in this thread! Fix that and you fix steam!
cogman@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.
They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.
It’s the most nothing of nothings.
To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they’d constantly try to switch you back to IE.
exu@feditown.com 2 weeks ago
*steam price the same as external price only if the external sale is for steam keys. And you have some time to offer an equivalent sale on steam.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
This is the point everyone tends to gloss over. Glad to see someone has actually read the friggin’ Steam TOS.
Saapas@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
That doesn’t sound as bad
cheat700000007@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
But sweeny mad no one lieks epic store
Serinus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Any of those places charging 30% on a product they’re only publishing electronically is using walled gardens and monopolistic practices to do so.
I’d rather they go after Steam last, but Steam belongs in that group with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It’s extraordinarily difficult to sell your PC game without Steam. A few large studios can do it, but not many others.
Still notas egregious as Apple, and now Android with their restrictions on side loading.
catsarebadpeople@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
What do you propose Steam changes instead of 30%?
paultimate14@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Even if Valve’s offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven’t seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.
Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don’t love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.
hakase@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
How do we tax Gabe that much without necessarily watering down his share in the company and ensuring that outside investors enshittify it in the process? Genuine question.
paultimate14@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
- Taxing those outside investors too
- Taxing Valve as a corporation more, making them less profitable and less attractive to said investors.
- I’m not even convinced this would be an issue at all really. Remember Valve is not publicly traded. I suspect Gabe would hold on to controlling ownership as long as it was profitable, and remember that taxes are usually on profits.
- Even if outside investors move in and enshittify, the moment they start doing anticompetitive you hit them with antitrust suits. Not to mention the industry can also be regulated even before all this: a lot of governments are cracking down on lootboxes already.
CoyoteFacts@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.
I wonder if there’s a future where every game marketplace uses open standards/APIs that 3rd-party launchers (like Heroic) can consume for downloading games, checking DRM status, tracking achievements, friends, and so on. DRM is probably the hardest part of that, though maybe there could be closed-source blobs downloadable to enable a store’s DRM. It’s obviously not in the interest of companies solely focused on profit and dark patterns, but I wonder if Steam would ever consider using its weight to do it anyway.
Zagorath@quokk.au 2 weeks ago
Being anticompetitive is far from the only way a company can be shitty.
Steam had to be sued by the Australian government into following the law regarding refunds for faulty products.
They have always been at the forefront of shitty gambling mechanics in video games, with their random loot boxes and tradeable skins.
And until recently, the hyper-consumerist FOKO-inducing structure of Steam sales was pretty awful.
wpb@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Mandatory preface to prevent angry fanboys stinking up the replies: I like Steam. I use Steam.
Some folks in this thread are using American case law to argue that Steam is not a monopoly, or that Steam is a good (??@#!?!?) monopoly. They look at other cases, like Microsoft, and point out how far Microsoft had to go before it was considered a monopoly by American judges, and then point out that Steam is not as bad. There are two problems with that line of reasoning.
The first is that monopoly law has been absolutely gutted by Reagan, and worsened by every administration (dem and rep alike) up until Biden. In the Biden admin, Lina Khan has made some very small steps to tighten up monopoly laws a bit, but obviously Trump happened (although Harris was pretty much the same as the dems before Biden, so not much hope there either). The bar for being a monopoly is unreasonably high, and American monopoly law is an absolute joke.
Secondly, this line of thinking conflates legality with morality, or being good (enough) for society. I hope I don’t need to convince you that this idea is false. Slavery was legal.
The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.
Note that “they’re not currently doing harm” is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won’t be satisfied by “don’t worry I’m not currently using it”.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Let me ask you this. What are steam doing to try to be a monopoly?
Because the way I see it, Nintendo at one time took distinctive actions to ENSURE they remained a monopoly. Then Sega threatened that.
Then Sega a few years later shot themselves in the foot with confusing console stratagy. 32X, and the SegaCD were absolute failures because everyone knew the Saturn was around the corner. Then they shot themselves in the foot AGAIN by just dumping the Saturn on retailers doorsteps, in some cases at 3AM when nobody was even at the stores, with no prior warning. Just dump it at their door and hope for the best. Well, CONSUMERS didn’t even know they were in stores. And even people with preorders didn’t know. This was just in the early days of the internet, and long before social media. So it’s not like if this happened today, everyone would know when they check their social media. Nope. It was said that some customers just didn’t know for months, simply because if you weren’t physically in the store, you didn’t know. Some stores took phone numbers for the preorders, the majority did not. A lot of pre-orders were cancelled over this.
Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by partering up with Sony to create the Nintendo Play Station. (Two words). It was to use Sonys CD technology, and be a massive upgrade in storage. Well after reading the contract, Nintendo lawyers discovered that Sony could not only create their own games, but they could liscense the technology to other 3rd parties with zero control over who gets to release software for it. Worst of all, Sony, not Nintendo, would recieve all money from software sold on the Nintendo Play Station. So they backstabbed Sony, and tried again with Phillips. Phillips was to create a Super Nintendo addon. Sega had the SegaCD, and Nintendo felt left out. So they tried creating the Super Nintendo version of the SegaCD. It went very poorly. The end result of this ended up being the Phillips CD-i, which was less of a Nintendo console, and more of a Phillips console liscensing Nintendo characters. To this day, Nintendo has never reclaimed their monopoly, due to trying to kill Sega, they created Sony’s Playstation.
Sony created a monopoly by including a dvd player in the PS2 during a time nobody had a dvd player. It worked. But that was the only thing they did to create the monopoly. It’s not like Nintendo in the 80s, when they told 3rd parties they could either put a game on Atari, or they could put one on the NES. Sony lost their dominance with the PS3 by charging $700, at a time the Xbox360 was charging $400.
And Microsoft lost their dominance by just not having anything exclusive worth playing. Then they had the “everything is an xbox” campaign, which totally backfired.
But Steam? I don’t see them as doing anything to create a monopoly. I see them as a simple software store that sells all PC games. They’ve entered the console space in recent years with the steamdeck. But it’s nothing that creates a monopoly. Personally I find the steamdeck to be overpriced. The thing that gives them a monopoly is that they offer crazy deep sales, but publishers have to agree to those sales. Steam can’t mark Factorio down to $2.00 without the publishers consent (which in that case they do NOT consent to sales).
All I see Steam doing is offering quality products, at reasonable prices, without bullshit.
Epic games is FULL of bullshit in their customer service.
And GOG isn’t full of bullshit, but their library is limited, and always will be limited to publishers who consent to them selling drm-free games. For this reason alone, gog can never compete with steam.
So, yes, Steam HAS a monopoly, but I see it as a result of two things.
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Everybody else keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
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On consoles you keep the game for that console. When a new console comes out, MAYBE you get backwards compatibility for 1-2 generations. Usually 1 more. With Steam, you could have bought a game 20 years ago, and bought 20 new PC’s since then. Your purchases will still work.
In either event, I don’t see this as Valve being malicious at any point to create a monopoly. It can easily be taken away from them by someone else doing the same things they did. Offer a generous library, complete with modern releases, regular sales, and supurb customer service. It just so happens that everybody else is too greedy and/or stupid to attempt this.
So in your words, what is Valve doing wrong that makes you think they’re creating an unfair monopoly?
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
There have been reports of Valve telling developers they can’t sell their game cheaper elsewhere (such as on a platform with a smaller cut than Steam’s 30%). But I think that was refuted.
wpb@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Let me ask you this: does it matter? Whether my neighbor buys or just happens upon a bazooka, he has a bazooka, and I don’t feel safe.
bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
In practice having a game on Steam is even superior to having a DRM free copy. My DRM free copies of games are on some old hard drive in a drawer. My steam library is right there. Removing and installing games is super straightforward.
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MortUS@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.
Note that “they’re not currently doing harm” is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won’t be satisfied by “don’t worry I’m not currently using it”.
Absolutely this. I’m glad you were able to convey it in a way people understand.
Steam is a blackhole for PC gaming/gamers from a marketing perspective. They’ve capitalized on so much of the market, that once a person buys a game on Steam they are unlikely to buy the same game and/or even future games from a different but similar platform. It is in a sense, locking the consumer in and so many consumers are locked in. Nobody competed with Steam in the PC gaming market for an eternity and it’s not Steams fault at all.
Even if Steam went to absolute shit in the next 20 odd years they’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be coming back to play all the games I’ve ever bought on there. Even if EGS or GoG improves their interface to compete with Steam, I’ve no reason to buy elsewhere (though do support GoG please).
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given.
OK. With you, there.
That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route
…and, you lost me.
I work in UI, outside the game industry. It’s plain to me very, very few publishers care about developing good UI or community tools. Epic is no exception. Perhaps that wasn’t what you meant, but if it’s a venue they intentionally ignore, it fits the OP picture perfectly.
I also think there are other features on which Steam has failed to compete, and an inventive competitor could investigate. Things like better game integration, better curation, promises against censorship to publishers of adult content, or creative uses of AI to improve player experiences, are all options. But I think that between the attempts of Google, Amazon, and Epic, it’s seemed that simply throwing money at the game industry without knowledge of what’s valuable to gamers, has not worked well.
tomkatt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform.
I strongly disagree. I quit consoles because of the exclusivity nonsense, and EGS guaranteed I will never buy anything from them by doing that shit. I won’t even redeem free games on their platform via Prime Gaming, just on principle.
You compete by giving devs and publishers a better cut, or convincing them to do deeper sales on your platform. You compete by providing a better service to users. You do not compete by literally not competing.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 weeks ago
The EGS app is so poorly built that Heroic, a third party app made by volunteers, runs faster, has a nicer UI, and has more features. EGS are not a serious competitor.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think the point is they’re not trying to be a monopoly. It just ended up that way naturally because all their competitors killed themselves.
Donkter@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The reason I’m not crazy worried about steam, and I don’t even think it’s a monopoly per-se (although I’m not referring to any definition, just a vibe) is that steam has a lot of the “market share” of video game purchases, sure, but if steam shut down tomorrow, or did something heinous enough to warrant a boycott, I am able to move. The epic games store and GoG both exist at the very least.
It would be a pain for me because I have a lot of money poured into steam, but not for anyone just getting into gaming who doesn’t have cache with steam. I didn’t pour it into steam because it was the only place for me to go, it was the best place for me to go. Idk, a big difference in Steam’s “monopoly” is that they don’t own a scarce physical commodity like oil or land, and they don’t have anything exclusive except maybe Valve games. Also unlike a monopoly there are many similarly functional competitors easily accessible on the Internet that offer an almost identical service.
Steam “locks you in” to their ecosystem. But only for each individual game you choose to buy on their platform. If you didn’t want to hitch all your games to Steam for fear that they shut down or break bad Steam does not mind if you install GoG and buy physical copies of games to diversify your portfolio so to speak.
architect@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
I mean, they just don’t at all seem like one. When i buy games i rarely use steam to do it. I have one choice for internet. One for power. One for gas. Millions of storefronts for games. I just don’t see it.
SherlockHawk@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I see 2 main points against steam in this comment section.
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Steam is doing price fixing for games: Untrue, this accusation came from Epic Games CEO, but the actual steam policy only blocks the selling of steam keys for a lower price, not the game itself.
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Steam is a monopoly and monopolies are bad: I agree that monopolies are bad, but in my opinion only if they take action to harm the user and the market. From my knowledge steam is pretty known as being pro customer and haven’t taken any monopolistic actions to block other stores from growing.
I am not trying to be a fanboy, I am just trying to look objectively at the facts, if someone can prove me wrong, I am willing to change my mind.
Katana314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The other, less factual observation to make is: With the wealth of frivolous lawsuits against Valve in the past months, as well as pushes against Linux for age verification, it seems very likely that there is a well-funded group conducting lawfare to de-value the company. Whether this is simple retaliation for winning a case against a patent troll, or a long-term strategy to find a way to turn the company public and aggressively take it over, I can only guess.
Other community moderators have reported influxes of bot accounts, and it’d be naive in the age of AI to claim that all forum participants are human. Given the funding behind the attacks on Valve, I’d conclude it’s entirely possible that some proportion (certainly not all) of the accounts responding on the topic of Valve are either paid astroturfers, or complete bot accounts seeking to generate negativity towards them.
ericwdhs@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve’s page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve’s infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.
As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don’t use Steam keys.
Also something I noticed per their guidelines:
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it’s more common than not for a game’s historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what “similar” and “comparable” are on their own terms, I’m not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
With regard to number 2. Just because a company isn’t abusing their dominant market position today, doesn’t mean they won’t tomorrow when ownership changes.
It would be preferable that market competition forced valve to be pro consumer instead of just GabeN’s good will
Maggoty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Monopolies distort markets even when they act in a pro-consumer manner. For example the credit card companies. A basic credit card is really cheap and easy for the average person to use. All of the fees are actually on the business side, which is why you see businesses that still run on cash only or charge a credit card fee. The credit card network operators, (AMEX, Disc, MC, VISA) are the only option for businesses that want to accept credit cards in the US. You don’t see a Debit card fee because it’s actually illegal for them to pass along the Debit card processing fee.
So while the average person with the line of credit is happy about this, the businesses are not. In a normal system you would pay for the service being provided. So the person with the card would be responsible for paying to have that access.
Steam does this by making their product (the storefront) free to the average person and charging the developers money to use it. While they also effectively own your games. In a system with plenty of storefronts it might be much more common to see downloadable installation files. That’s certainly one way in which they’ve distorted the market. That used to be very common. It doesn’t help that EA, GamePass, and some others who’ve tried to start storefronts have repeatedly tripped over their own feet. Epic seems to be doing it but they’re basically using Steam’s business model because there’s no other choice as long as Steam exerts it’s monopoly power.
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megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.
Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)
The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.
Teppa@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I do buy games off other platforms and import them into Steam all the time.
gmtom@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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Being a simp for a multi billion dollar company is never a good thing. It’s not good for you as a consumer and, frankly, is just incredibly cringe.
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No, it’s not, the main point of the lawsuit is that Steam does not let game Devs sell their game for cheaper on any other platform.
So if you don’t like that Steam takes a massive 30% cut of your sales so that Gabe can buy his 27th mega-yatch, and you decide to also put your game on another platform that takes a fairer, smaller cut, then chose to pass on those savings to the consumer, then valve will kick you off the platform and you’ll lose access to by far the biggest market in PC gaming.
Fuck valve and fuck you brain dead fanboys simping for a billionaire and making everything worse for the rest of us because your entire worldview comes from memes.
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network_switch@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
People constantly dooming steam are punching themselves in the face instead of pushing for anything better. If they wanted a more competitive market do two things. Buy games on other storefronts. They exist. There have been digital storefronts since before Steam. Second is direct your complaining to competitors to improve their services. Like go complain on every EGS press release for Linux support and a gamepad friendly interface. Something equivalent to Steam input and remote play that isn’t using third party software like Sunshine/Moonlight. Something like steam curators and other social features. User reviews. The complainers of Steam are pretty much campaigning for Steam to be worse so others can compete without having to improve as much
nialv7@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I mean, this meme is not wrong. Valve is a de facto monopoly because everyone else is shit, and user hostile. But, a monopoly is still a monopoly, and we shouldn’t be glazing a billion dollar company, in any circumstances. And it’s not like Valve has never done anything wrong.
It’s ok to like Valve, I like Valve. But we need to hold them to account, and call them out when they do something wrong. If you think Valve did nothing wrong, why not let them prove it in court? They have a lot of money, they can afford some lawyers.
yabbadabaddon@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Jesus fucking Christ in blue skirt, y’all have your nose full of Gabe’s juice gagging him so much.
I truly enjoy all of you morons cicle jerking “eat the rich” but bending over Valve and paying for the lube.
“But think of how much he did for Linux gnagnagna”. Fuck that shit. Wake the fuck up. Torvalds does not own a 500 millions yacht.
Lemmy is truly going full retard and speedrunning Reddit clusterfuck as fast as possible.
L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
STOP giving the COnsuMer WHAt they WANTTTTT!!!NOOOOOOOO MY SLOPCORE BUSINESS CANT COMPETE WITH ACTUAL GOODS AND SERVICES.
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
When I think of monopolies, I think more of telecomms, of Wal-Mart and their selling at a lose to kill off competition, Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software, and other examples. Unless I’m missing something, Steam didn’t do that, they were just first in the game and built a better product than the others did. Offering a better service that attracted customers. Now do I think it’s too large and would welcome competition, absolutely. But monopolies typically aren’t though just having larger market share with a better product.
If Steam did something like oh, pay developers/publishers to be exclusive to their platform, then yeah you’d have a good argument there.
MrKoyun@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
While the actual monopolies actively making the world a significantly worse place keep getting away.
Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Here’s what I don’t understand… Say we all agree they are a monopoly, what do you do about it?
It doesn’t seem feasible to break them up into smaller companies, how would that even work? What are the dividing lines between what portion of the company goes where? Does that even solve anything?
Force them to charge less money? Okay, now they charge the same as Epic (or even less). Basically every other store is now being undercut by the biggest player on the scene. There is now even less reason to use a storefront that isn’t Steam. It doesn’t feel like that solves the problem either.
It seems like all the courts have tried to do so far is charge them money for existing, not get them to change what they do, which seems a lot less like the government trying to stop the big bad monopoly and more like the government wanting to get their cut. What does “stopping the monopoly” even mean? Are we happier and better off as consumers if Valve is forced to shut down Steam entirely? Is that the goal?
lorty@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Remember when steam introduced the 2h refund policy out of their own volition rather than being forced by multiple governments? Yeah me neither.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Remember that you are on Lemmy: a decentralized and open source platform owned by the community.
Steam is a proprietary, closed source, for profit third party software launcher owned by a billionaire.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Valve does a lot of things pretty badly, it’s just that they and the fans control the narrative.
noname_yet2077@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Based
Skv@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
All launchers mustdie and devs need to go back to selling their games directly.
the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Other companies keep suing Steam because they (the other companies not steam) are run incompetent fools. Overpaid executives with no clue are desire to learn anything about their target audience keep telling them that screwing your customers and employees is good actually. When they see a company that doesn’t is able to effortlessly outmatch them they can’t stand it.
zikzak025@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Steam has convinced the gaming industry that you can own nothing and be happy with it, just by virtue of being less shitty than everyone else.
Lemmy hates billionaires but never hesitates to kneel at the altar of Gaben.
Xylight@lemdro.id 2 weeks ago
Leave the multi billion dollar corporation alone
NateNate60@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Many things can be true at once. Is it true that Steam controls a dominating share of the PC gaming market? Yes. Is it true that when a company enters such a market position, that they can use that position to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer behaviour? Yes. Has Valve actually engaged in such behaviour? No.
Telodzrum@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Doesn’t matter how you got there, if you have become a monopoly you should be brought low.
Changer098@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
How DARE this post claim that XBOX is a monopoly, nobody is buying that shit.
Grimy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
EA and Microsoft aren’t the bar. Being slightly better isn’t good enough.
pyre@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
people fellating valve will never get less disgusting. have some shame and self respect.
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.
Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
it doesn’t just do nothing, it sticks to its core idea : we can’t do as much as the community can when it comes to making games, how do we maximise the community’s possible output?
People love to shit on valve working on lootboxes, but I was there to see how it developed. It was there as part of a way of getting money back to the people making stuff, which is why a shitload of the TF2 hats came from the community and steam workshop. The system came from a left wing greek economist, before , you know, he BECAME Minister of Finance for greece (for half a year)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
This is why they have steam OS, steam greenlight, SFM, etc etc.
Valve doesn’t make games anymore, because they know hobbyists can make shitloads of more games than them, they need a platform to shove them into.
Also, the other goal is to improve and extend the PC gaming space, which is why they are working on SteamOS, the deck, and all the other shit they are working on. Because of the work they put into making steam work to make game distrobution better than piracy (LITERALLY said by Gabe), PC releases became synonymous with “Steam”, which is why whenever you have a game announcement, you get “New game : Available on (XboxLogo : PS5Logo : SteamLogo)”
Valve is doing stuff. Just not, you know, making HL3 or nothing.
hayvan@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
In a service business, if you do things right, people think you’re doing nothing.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
TIL a greek minister of finance is responsible for TF2 hats. Fucking wild.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m baffled that I didn’t already know that lootboxes were created by the husband of the woman that the Pulp hit Common People was most likely written about.
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Valve is a for profit company, one of their main goals is to make money and they work daily to do that. There are people at Valve who work 8h a day on how to boost profits.
I think you are confusing lootboxes with the items market which was there mainly to compensate the free to play model. If you were there i hope you remember too no DRMs and no third party software launchers to run games.
They have steam OS because microsoft become one of their competitors
Mozingo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We don’t have Steam Greenlight anymore, but otherwise 100% agree.
kn33@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Deadlock would like a word with you.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Steam:
Image
red_tomato@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Valve is winning because they don’t enshittify
brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Valve is winning because the average gamer doesn’t care much about owning his videogames.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Steam is a great example of how a privately held company can out compete publicly traded and venture capital funded corps.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
Seriously, we need more companies doing nothing and taking 30% fee, becoming super rich corporations making more money than any other company per employee, while devs wonder if they’ll break even
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
“doing nothing”
Global distribution of exabytes of data, handling the entire e-commerce side and offering great toolings with steamworks while requiring onyl 100 dollars upfront is now considered “nothing”. Yeah, we should definitely go back to a time when steam wasn’t a thing and indie devs were required to have a publisher to even get their games into stores, and those publishers often took 80% of the entire profits. I’m sure indies had a much better time back then when they didn’t have to pay steam!
Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
You mean like those paid mods they were trying to introduce together with Bethesda?
Valve does not always win. Users are just more tolerant towards Valve than any other platform because of the cheap games they can buy during a sale. Nothing more.
realitaetsverlust@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
They introduced a feature, the community didn’t like it, and they canceled it a few days later because of that feedback. What exactly is the problem? Making a mistake and rectifying it within days is not a bad thing at all.
If that was the case, people would be extremely tolerant towards the epic game store which regularly throws out games for free, but they aren’t.
architect@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
It’s funny that they tried to get indie devs paid for their contributions to these games (and therefore incentivizing more great mods) and gamers were like FUCK THAT SHIT! Typical, honestly. So now there’s no legal way to charge for mods and you get to do it only for fun asking people for coffee tips.
Imo this was Bethesda more than valve, anyways, and while it would make both of them too much money doing that it would have gotten regular people paid, too. Which they deserve, by the way.