Steam lawsuits in a nutshell
Gamers: competition is good Also gamers: watches everything get absorbed into one launcher 😭
Submitted 1 month ago by RickyRigatoni@piefed.zip to [deleted]
https://media.piefed.zip/posts/yp/MU/ypMUrBmqLkHNC28.png
Comments
sanbdra@lemmy.world 1 month ago
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Well, yeah…I mean it’s a non-zero group of people that specifically avoided consoles because of the walled gardens and monopolistic behavior by the companies that make them and the stores you get locked into.
So when one of the main vendors for your PC gaming platform starts behaving similarly of course you’re going to notice it.
procapra@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
God I hate steam fanboys so fucking much. There is no such thing as a corporation which cares about you. Every single action is done to keep profits up.
jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev 1 month ago
Yes but also no. I agree that steam is only looking out for its own bottom line
However, they definitely do not fall into the “every action is done to keep profits up” since they’re private they’re not legally required to stay on the ~shareholder value~ train
Hence why they invested all that money into proton and then open sourced it 🤷 any company that makes meaningful investments in open source is good in my book
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
Sure, but corporations which keep profits up by providing a good service that people are willing to pay for should be celebrated and rewarded over those which keep them up by wringing every last penny out of you while simultaneously degrading their service.
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Capitalism good when valve does it?
Nugscree@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Not really, Valve has a dominant market position because they have done no moves to against their consumers (although they did mess of a few times in the past) and have always tried to resolve issues. The other companies keep shooting themselves by continuously implementing anti consumer rules, horrific handling of their customers, or just have the worst implementation of their version of a launcher. Their support behind Proton has been a enormous and the main reason why pretty much every game I own works on Linux.
Getting back to the case though, the whole reason Steam has that big of a market share is because they seem to care about their customers, create tools that can be used for non steam games (like the controller adapter layer, or Proton).
So it’s not like the other billion dollar companies can’t, they just won’t create something that comes even close to what Steam is offering in software, hardware and their support behind the products.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I wish Valve weren’t so efficiently run. One of the few companies I wouldn’t mind working for, even though they’re not perfect. But they only have a few hundred employees and I’m not that good at anything, unless they need a full-time love-maker.
Gold_E_Lox@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
i dont know why you think they are run efficiently, they just dont need much labor to run their “land lording” scheme
m3t00@lemmy.world 1 month ago
move to linux really paying off then
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 1 month ago
I mean … all roads that lead to a monopoly … do lead to a monopoly.
MarjorieM@lemmy.today 1 month ago
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RickyRigatoni@piefed.zip 1 month ago
This is the only good comment on this thread.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Now I really want to know what it said without digging through the html.
neobunch@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m no steam fanboy, we’ve been at odds ever since they decided to stop supporting Windows 8 and 7 and deliberately breaking the client so it stops working with those old systems, but there’s no denying that Steam does a bunch of things right.
All these Monopoly charges are just bitter competitors envious that they can’t just walk in throw some money and start getting market share from the PC market, they would actually have to put in an enormous amount of effort to to even approach all the functionality and feature set covered by Steam.
The PC is an open platform, you’re not obligated to anything, there are multiple storefronts which you can decide for or even go at it without using storefronts. Tell me again what are the alternative storefronts on the Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Apple and Android ecosystems?
And for the “if you’re not on steam you might as well not exist” crowd, isn’t that, like exactly that, the value that Steam brings to the table? You only need to decide if that’s worth the 30% cut they ask in return, like with any other purchase or contractual decision you make in your life.
FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Should be NSFW tagged if not trigger warning-ed
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 month ago
you have eyes, just shut them and move along.
FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 1 month ago
my suggestion: takes one second, literally ticking a box or typing ‘TW: Suicide’
Your suggetion: anyone who gets triggered by cartoons of people blowing their brains out should develop psychic foresight and tune into it whenever scrolling through lemmy, then close their eyes when the post in question shows up. estimated training time: 1000 years (nobody has developed such active premonition abilities yet)
ThirdConsul@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Any business that has over 4% market rate should be forcibly split.
Steam is not FORCED to compete and innovate or go under, they do that at the whim of the owner. Who can change his mind. Or die, and the company will be inherited by whomever and sloppify.
Heck, anyone shilling that Steam is a good guy - ffs, you do not own the games you bought.
(Why 4%? There are some old studies that at 5% it brings more profit to get rid of the competition, below innovations are the way to get the money).
SparroHawc@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
ffs, you do not own the games you bought.
You haven’t owned the games you buy since software licenses became ubiquitous.
Any business that has over 4% market rate should be forcibly split.
My dude, 4% is insanity. If you did that, there would be - at absolute bare minimum - 26 different companies for any given market, including distribution. No one would be able to scale to serve global demand in any way, shape, or form. You’d have to route packages through three different companies in order to get a product to your friend in Switzerland. Any product that got popular would see its parent company split. If someone wrote an OS that was too good and everyone decided it was fantastic, the company would somehow have to split in such a way as to divide the OS share between two companies, which would then negate the point of having the same OS as your buddy.
The problem isn’t market share, it’s enforced market share. Anti-competitive practices. Lobbying. Buying out competition. These are places that Steam demonstrably is more ethical than its competition.
All Epic had to do in order to capitalize on Fortnite was to make a launcher that was better than (or at least approaching the quality of) Valve’s. Instead, when the starting gun went off, they started walking backwards.
ThirdConsul@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
My dude. At over 4% market share companies are incentivised to buy out competition and become monopolies because it’s more profitable.
No one would be able to scale to serve global demand in any way, shape, or form
Yes. Because any and all global companies so far are evil ant anti-consumer. Disagree? Name 3.
The problem isn’t market share, it’s enforced market share. Anti-competitive practices. Lobbying. Buying out competition
So yeah, I’m glad we agree, that any company at 4% market share must be stopped from growing, because otherwise all of that happens.
captcha_incorrect@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Which lawsuit is this about?
glitchdx@lemmy.world 1 month ago
take your pick
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Do not pass Go, do not collect $200
Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Not true. Look at how they handled their anti-gambling lawsuit. They essentially did away with cases and keys, and now you can “open a terminal”. You aren’t gambling according to steam anymore, since you can decline the offer, but because this decline accept mechanic is baked into a dynamic pricing, you are now required to pay steam an average of 1700 usd for a pair of digital gloves, if you even get the offer.
They got rid of “gambling” for something much worse