atrielienz
@atrielienz@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 2 days ago:
From what I read, that $4BN number could be taken two ways. I don’t know if that analyst excluded the games Valve developed, and that $4BN is games sales of everything else, or if that’s what they made from their own titles. I didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of Xitter to see the direct quote and I haven’t had a chance to find it in the internet archive.
I also kind of want a good run down of what steam offers to developers that makes their platform so attractive because my understanding is it’s more than just e-shop services and that’s one of the reasons I have seen touted as why people feel the service fee is reasonable.
I didn’t want to leave you on read, but I also am still looking up all kinds of random information to put together.
Also, my confusion is because there are two different lawsuits involving the 30% cut of game sales.
There’s a class action lawsuit in the UK involving all of steams consumers there, predicated on the idea that the 30% service fee makes games more expensive to the detriment if those consumers.
And there’s a different class action lawsuit brought by developers Wolfire and Dark Catt every developer who uses Steam as an E-Shop platform, also over the 30% service fee and alleged anti-competitve practices (Wolfire say that Steam told them they couldn’t sell their game anywhere else for less than it was available on Steam (even if they didn’t use steams license keys)).
I know I can come off as really terse, and tone is hard via text anyway. But thank you for addressing it.
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 2 days ago:
By sold cheaper I meant MSRP price, not sale price.
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 2 days ago:
You’re not being annoying. It’s probably because I lost track and for what it’s worth I am sorry, I’ll try to fix it but probably won’t catch all of them.
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 3 days ago:
I can’t corroborate that Steam’s revenue for the e-shop was $16Bn. The best estimate that I have is that their game sales netted them $4Bn last year. I’m still trying to find a better source for that. However we may both be wrong here.
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 3 days ago:
I’m not reading the Google summary. There is no Google summary for me. That shit is deep sixed. I don’t want it. I love it when people automatically assume that I must be using Generative AI to get some silly answer off the internet.
The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).
If so then Epic should have caught up by now, no?
That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.
Please back that up. The game developers seeing bankruptcies are seeing them because of gross mismanagement and a never ending attempt to deliver crap that their consumers don’t want. Pushing the “bleeding edge” of graphics while making games that sell poorly because they want to charge $60-70 for a game even 5 years after it came out.
And that’s with the proliferation of crap like in game micro transactions, season passes, DRM, and internet sanity checks to even play single player games.
Indie developers are caught in the lurch, but that’s generally the case with any small business, and on top of that the regulation will probably harm them more than it will help them because the percentage of sales pays for things that they use to market their game.
What is the limit on what store fronts can charge going to be? How much is too much? What does that 30% pay for? Do you know? Does it scale by user base?
Would other store fronts who charge less be more successful by a meaningful amount if they were charging the same?
It literally doesn’t matter where your products come from. I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam. I have paid for more than one game on both steam, switch, PS4, or physical copy. I’m not trying to call Steam the good guy here.
But I do not trust the developer who originally brought the lawsuit because even now most of the other devs who have games for sale on steam have not attempted to make a statement, join the class action, or even make a complaint about what is alleged.
On top of that, why sue only steam if this is a problem. Nobody is suing Nintendo, PlayStation, or Microsoft over this.
I also never said “steam shouldn’t change”, or that steam shouldn’t take a smaller cut.
I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say so you could be snotty in your response. You have a good day dude.
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 3 days ago:
That’s false. They do not allow steam keys (free to generate steam licenses of games) to be sold cheaper anywhere else for less than the game is sold for on steam. And in exchange, the profits on those game licenses sold elsewhere the developer gets to keep 100% of.
It is alleged by one developer that steam told them they can’t sell their game for less on other stores even if they use a different company to generate the license keys. But that hasn’t been proven. And since only 2 other developers are backing the new class action lawsuit out of literally thousands of devs who would be effected this way if it were true, it logically doesn’t make sense. The dev who brought the first lawsuit that go thrown out? Their game is still up on Steam.
The fact is, Epic is making half the revenue Steam is with 11 times less market share, and not gaining market share because customers don’t want to use their store. Customers don’t want free games they want services that work.
You’re alleging that Valve is doing something anti-competitive to maintain their market share here and you still haven’t given me what I asked for.
What regulations are you expecting to be imposed, and how will that detrimentally or positively effect the consumers?
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 3 days ago:
I never claimed steam was being sued by Sweeney. Sweeney made a statement about the steam lawsuit saying he agreed with it. pcgamer.com/…/epic-games-boss-tim-sweeney-voices-…
I was quickly googling market share stuff on break so I misread the Epic e-shop market share vs Epic’s full market share outside that.
The fact that Steam only makes double what epic e-shop makes with literally 11 times the market influence?
What regulations are you expecting out of this? How will that have a positive effect on consumers?
I never said this was about good or bad. I pointed out pros and cons of using each service which extrapolated quite literally to why consumers choose Steam over Epic.
A monopolistic corp who uses anit-consumer/anti-competitve tactics to remain a market leader/? monopoly is illegal. And it’s regulated.
The only reason steam is being investigated at all is because 2 or 3 out of literal thousands of game developers have made a claim that steam is threatening to remove their game if they try to sell it on other game stores for cheaper than steam (not steam keys, but using another stores licensing keys).
That hasn’t been proven and if it is, a further investigation into how wide spread that behavior is would still be needed to prove that Valve or Steam came by their market share illegally.
Also the fact that you brought up Amazon as the foil to your argument at the end is laughable. For multiple reasons.
- Comment on Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? 3 days ago:
Why is Epic insignificant?
They launched with a 12% service fee, dropped that service fee to 10%, and then dropped the service fee entirely for the first $1Mn in sales per year.
In June 2025, they released a new feature enabling developers to launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store. These webshops could offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more “cost-effective” alternative to in-app purchases.
They provide developers with free to generate license keys, and keyless integration with other e-shop stores including GOG, Humble Bundle, and Prime gaming.
They offer a user review system.
They also added cloud saves in July of 2025.
The thing is, they offer none of the other features Steam offers:
- In-Home Streaming
- Remote Play with Friends
- Family Accounts
- Achievements
- Price Adjusted Bundles
- Gifting Games
- Shopping Cart
- TV/Big Screen Mode
Epic launched their service in 2018. It’s been 7 years. The only reason not to offer feature parity (for a company that makes $4.6Bn - 5.7Bn in revenue, and a shop that makes $1.09Bn, you’d think they would be enticing users with the services they want.
What they have done instead is exclusivity deals that plenty of consumers complain about but devs don’t seem to care about so long as they’re getting paid.
So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it’s just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic’s 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.
It makes sense for GOG or Itch.io who’s market cap is smaller by quite a lot to not offer the same feature parity. Each of those platforms has figured out they can offer other things to devs and consumers to make themselves competitive over time.
Sweeny’s attack is basically just a pitry party he’s throwing for himself because he doesn’t want to compete.
- Comment on Legal action over 'unfair' Steam game store prices given go ahead 4 days ago:
It’s crazy to me that when they sell a steam key on another store front, steam takes none of the profits from that at all, the key is free to generate for the dev, and the only stipulation is that they have to sell if for the same price it is on the steam store front.
- Comment on Facial age checks are now required to chat with anyone on Roblox 3 weeks ago:
Honestly? It’ll probably be an amalgamation of different tech to do it. That’s at least part of the reason I’m not sure it should work. Using identity to certify age or age gate products in this way when so much data is being collected already about users kind of doesn’t make sense in and of itself. It either leads to a database of data that’s dangerous to store, or it leads to government entities using such services to spy on people. Or both.
If the data that’s already out there about me being collected by data brokers can’t prove what age I am (and it absolutely can even when it’s anonymized) then I suspect no other system by itself will work. Because really what were talking about here is four things.
- Linking access to age verification.
- Linking identity to age verification.
- Anonymizing that data so the service/or anyone with access can’t store it or use it for anything other than age verification.
- Verifying that the person who device/token/certificate/verified medium is linked to is the person using the device.
So, say you were to use the block chain method. And say the device was verified. How would I verify it’s me using the device (me being the person who certified their age via block chain or some other method). What prevents me from unlocking the device and handing it to my kid? What prevents my kid from using the device without my knowledge (circumventing the password etc).
That’s at least part of the reason Roblox want to use facial recognition to verify users. But how often are we doing that check? Once isn’t enough. It’s not a hard barrier to cross. And say it’s twice, three times. Once a week. Say you use AI generated pictures to bypass that. Then Roblox or the service they contract with for verification has to maintain a database and compare pictures to each other etc.
Databases can be hacked. That information can be stolen. And linked to driver’s licenses, used for reverse image searches etc. If you or your child has ever posted a picture to the internet etc that can be used against you or your kid. It could be used to verify further accounts outside your control etc.
Following this to it’s logical conclusion you’d need to use a combination of things. Something you have (yubikee or some kind of authenticator, ID, credit card). There’s nothing stopping a person from selling this with the account credentials.
Something you know (password, passphrase etc). The account credentials to be sold.
Something you can’t change about yourself (iris scan, fingerprint, voice clip, etc). The dangerous to store information that when leaked or breached would cause damage to the life of the user in question.
Someone somewhere is going to need to keep a record of that to prove you are you which means it can’t by design be anonymous. And it means that there’s a database and it there that’s dangerous to the users but had to be maintained for the purpose of authentication. And that’s why this doesn’t work.
- Comment on Facial age checks are now required to chat with anyone on Roblox 3 weeks ago:
There’s nothing to stop them selling that email address with cert.
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
One of the articles I linked you to had not just Steam but other payment processors talking about it.
So are we talking about Steam making statements about why they refused to accept the game Horses on their platform, or are we talking about payment processors? Because the thread you started responding to me in is the one about payment processors and as a result that is the vein in which my responses have been directed. And since news outlets have been very outspoken about the likelihood that Horses was refused due to payment processors pressuring Steam to better adhere to their Terms for content sold, it was reasonable to assume that that’s what you meant.
If you would like to talk about Steam’s removal of other games, or you would like to talk about Horse’s rejection specifically, you’re going to have to say so.
Microsoft isn’t selling products on GitHub. They bought it to have control over open source projects and code.
Even if they were going to sell ad space that’s still not the same conversation as the one about payment processors. At best the only similarity might just be that MS might find porn content to be detrimental to their image. Because that’s the BS reason payment aggregators gave for not allowing porn content every time this has come up.
But MS has been disallowing nudity, pornography, and other adult content on their products and ad aggregation service for more than a decade now. So either this was house keeping, it was an afterthought, or someone complained. And considering just how little MS cares about the complaints of consumers and consumer groups normally, I doubt it’s the latter.
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
What you said and what you meant were two different things.
The wording of the OG comment original comment absolutely lent itself to conspiracy theory level inference that it was steams fault.
They not only didn’t actually answer the questions I asked. They claimed “nobody is talking about it” which is demonstrably not true.
Further, they went out of their way to play what about blah, but didn’t give and explaination of how that related to the conversation being had or their original point.
Then you show up with language that could be taken one of two ways, and when I respond with proof from what I took from what you said “I now have reading comprehension problems” because you "didn’t mean what they said in relation to payment processors (which only entered the conversation because one person who was not the OG commenter brought it up), and I continued the conversation in that vein.
So either you chose to answer me on the wrong part of the thread, or it’s your own fault you were misunderstood.
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
So, when pornhub had problems with payment processors it wasn’t pornhubs fault they had to remove content.
But when steam removes some content because payment processors won’t let them take payment for that content it’s steams fault. Have I got that right?
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
That’s a conspiracy theory with a whole heaping of whataboutism.
And the other guy who I blocked can suck my left nut. I blocked you because you added nothing at all to the conversation and I wasn’t interested in talking to you.
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
Tell me very specifically what that has to do with Steam?
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
Microsoft went and changed the TOS for GitHub intentionally to remove this content. Valve hasn’t made changes to the TOS to exclude sexual content. They specifically never allowed sexual content that included minors in sexual situations.
Those are not the same thing.
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
This smells suspiciously similar to the stuff affecting adult content on Steam, like Horses.
With this sentence you basically implied that Steam is removing or not allowing porn games.
You never in any of your comments mentioned payment processors. If that’s what you meant, that’s what you should have said.
You also claimed nobody was talking about it when literally everybody everywhere was talking about it when the news first dropped. So much so that Mastercard made a statement about it.
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
Again. This wasn’t on steam it was on the literally payment providers who forced the issue. If steam can’t accept payment for your game, of course they’re going to delist it. That’s not what he said. He said steam is trying to clear porn games.
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
They did elaborate though. They explained that the game had depictions of children with adults in sexual situations and the game developer removed one scene and paid some lip service about how they were just small adults. Steam didn’t buy into that and wouldn’t allow the game on the platform which is a reasonable take.
Would you like to give the names of specific other porn games involving children in sexual situations? I would like to see that list because I’m pretty sure it violates the law in several places.
You seem to be suggesting that Horses got treated differently for invalid or incomprehensible reasons and that isn’t true from literally every article I’ve seen reporting on the situation.
GOG is based out of Poland, and I’m sure Polish law absolutely does cover children in sexual situations in media.
But we also don’t know what the developer went on to change in the game since it was submitted to Steam with acception of the part highlighted by Steam specifically when they denied it.
This developer may have gone on to change several things that clear the bar in Poland but not everywhere else.
In any case you speculated that Steam might be trying to clear porn games from the platform in your initial comment (or inferred such) and one game doesn’t validate that claim.
- Comment on Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why 4 weeks ago:
Go on then. Talk about it. Which other games besides Horses (the feature adult content) have been removed from or not allowed to launch on Steam? Because that platform is full of porn games and the Horses thing was about sexual themes involving minors.
- Comment on Aldo Leopold was right. 4 weeks ago:
I think Team Cherry might have read this excerpt.
- Comment on The way my fuck-ass pharmacist makes up the remaining pills in my bastarding prescription 4 weeks ago:
This is likely the fault of the pill manufacturer who the pharmacy is at the mercy of.
- Comment on Shout out to the NYE shift at all the Emergency Departments around the world. 4 weeks ago:
I hope one of these id my neighbor who was illegally setting off fireworks for 3 hours after the new year started.
- Comment on The Best-Selling Video Games Since 2020 5 weeks ago:
I think the reason it’s sold so many copies is because it’s been on perpetual sale everywhere. People were majorly against buying it and that dampened some people’s interest initially but when the game is $5, a lot of people will buy it just because it’s cheap.
- Comment on The Best-Selling Video Games Since 2020 5 weeks ago:
Animal Crossing was a birthday gift. And technically Stadia refunded my money for Cyberpunk.
- Comment on The Best-Selling Video Games Since 2020 5 weeks ago:
It’s crazy that I only own two of these games and they couldn’t be more different. Animal Crossing and Cyberpunk 2077.
- Comment on That's ok, I don't want to see the shop anymore anyway. 5 weeks ago:
I use reader mode pretty often on news websites. That’s the main use case for me.
- Comment on That's ok, I don't want to see the shop anymore anyway. 5 weeks ago:
Mostly this is for sites I click on links to that do paywall banners honestly. That’s what I use it for. Most of the places I go to I could exclude or whitelist and be fine.