It’s true that Steam is in a dominant market position so I do agree they should be kept in check. At the same time, their value-add is quite reasonable, so I wonder what the “correct” charge is for the service they provide. Or perhaps some system they need to make more open to competition like Steamworks or the Workshop?
Private companies can have shares and shareholders too, fyi. They just aren’t traded on a public market and aren’t beholden to a public mandate of profit or share growth above all else.
I was like…what comment did they make in response to mine that got removed before I got a chance to see…and now I can guess the type of comment it was. It’s ok to be wrong, it doesn’t mean you’re weak or a bad person.
I had made a reply for this user here: lemmy.ca/comment/9780622 but I guess he wanted to give me a copy paste reply for a reply I was giving to someone else…
The comment can be boiled down to: Everyone is sucking up to Valve like usual, they could just as easily become evil like Google did, despite their old motto and everyone in tech loving them in the past. Being private is the one thing keeping Valve from enshittifying themselves so they are just as bad as any company.
So long as Valve remains private, the experience getting shittier in the name of more profits is a pressure that faces Valve but not necessarily an inevitably.
If Valve breaks the trust they have built in ways that Google and Microsoft have and continue to do, of course I will stop using them where feasible. Assurances mean nothing, I will respond to action with action of my own. Support more games for Linux, I will buy more of their games. Support bad practices like kernel-level anticheat, launchers in launchers in launchers, PSN, I will buy fewer of those games. I have an account with GOG (I have spent a little bit of money, I would more it Galaxy was available for Linux), Epic (I have spent $0 there because of Tim Sweeney’s aversion to Linux) and Itch.io (has a Linux client). I can move platforms if Steam has a sudden change of heart tomorrow and becomes hellbent on screwing customers over.
I think that there is regulation to be had re: the ownership of games or minimum availability of service for what is paid on both the seller and consumer side. But “I’m paying too much for games because of Valve’s monopoly” wasn’t really on my radar of things that Valve is doing wrong.
How big do you think Valve is? They’re estimated around 8 B net worth. That’s 3 orders of magnitude less than Microsoft, at 3 trillion. 8 B is chump change at the megacorp stage.
While you wait there’s HoloISO, Bazzite, and ChimeraOS filling the gaps. I stopped recommending HoloISO because development stopped for a while, but it looks like they’re back at it and I haven’t had any major problems. Just one issue where I have to unload and reload Bluetooth, but I’ve got a job that does that every time I boot now because I don’t have the time or inclination to figure out why it’s happening.
To be fair I haven’t found anyone else on HoloISO with that issue so it may be because of the chip being used in the mini PCs I stream games to around my house.
I’m a firm-believer that if there was a product that could compete with Steam, then people would use it of their own volition.
GOG is the only platform people ever willfully recommend to others without twisting their arms because of exclusives or deals. Why? Well, they have something Steam doesn’t. Epic, Blizzard, Rockstar, all of them have platforms that exist to do one thing: make rich people richer off of the backs of useful idiots.
Getting mad at Steam for having market dominance is asinine. Get mad at the market for rewarding bloated companies who put out garbage just to make themselves more bloated and the useful idiots who go along with it.
Monopoly, noun: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.
Imo this does not apply to Steam. They do not have an exclusive possession or control of the PC gaming market. As is proven in the rest of this thread by just about everyone, there are other online game stores/launchers besides Steam. Literally no one is forcing you to use Steam (because then it would be considered a monopoly), when Epic, GoG, Uplay, Origin, and Rockstar Launchers all exist.
Again, like it was said elsewhere in this thread, they’ve just crushed the competition so completely that it feels like they have a monopoly.
Price parity obligation clauses: We say that Valve Corporation imposes price parity clauses that restrict and prevent game developers from offering better prices on PC-games on rival platforms, limiting consumer choice and harming competition.
This seems to be common practice, but is anti competitive. If another platform would charge 20 instead of 30 pct and the publisher would give half this discount to the customers this would be against these clauses. Good that these are looked at.
Tying: We say that the restrictions Valve Corporation imposes, that mean the add-on content for games must also be purchased from Steam, restricts competition in the market.
And vice versa, steam dlc does not work with games on epic. Interesting case here too.
Excessive pricing: We argue that Valve Corporation has imposed an excessive commission, of up to 30%, charged to publishers, that resulted in inflated prices on its Steam platform.
The 30% market standard seems to be under fire across the board, so if there is a solid case to be made that this is excessive, I’m glad the watchdog is trying to make it.
In all good that this is investigated, cause just paying for another yaght or house for Gabe is not nessecary.
It wouldn’t be the first time the first point has been brought up. If true it does sound pretty anti competition. But so far there’s been no proof valve is actually doing this and I’m skeptical that it’s happening at all. If it were happening I don’t think we would be getting free games on epic (at least not ones that are also sold on steam). Nor do I think we’d have games on gamepass that are also on steam. I also routinely see sales for games on Green Man Gaming, Humble Bundle, and epic that at the time at least make the games cheaper than they are on steam.
Maybe they have agreements with certain publishers to provide a lower platform fee than 30% in exchange for them not providing the games cheaper on other platforms?
Sure it has been brought up. But that’s why these investigations are good. If it’s true, slap em with a fine, if it’s not… valve can make a victory lap.
IIRC Steam has used that first clause to limit Steam keys being provided on another store at a cheaper price. I believe devs have been allowed (maybe unofficially) to sell at whatever price they want if there’s no steam key being provided.
I thought it was lower retail price not allowed but lower price allowed for discounts?
Pretty much most my Steam games I have bought have been from places like fanatical after taking a look at isthereanydeals to find the lowest price for steam games.
Here we go. It’s not a monopoly because vAlVe aRe gOoD GuYs aNd eVeRyOnE ElSe iS BaD. The internet defends this company like they are the godfather of their children it’s insane.
When the competition is trying to bring in scummy, sugar-mommy approach to gaming by luring unsuspecting players with sweets, a company that has consistently proved to be rationally pro-consumer is bound to earn the right to be defended, as long as they keep their pro-consumer approach intact. Which Valve still does, while others are quite shit.
Except GOG, but I’m gonna presume GOG had higher currency conversation rates or advised rates, which made the games there 3-4 times more expensive than Steam in many 3rd world countries. Still cheaper than most other storefronts, but it was more expensive than Steam till the latest currency change.
A company that makes a billionaire out of its owner is overcharging you, no matter how much you like the company or the owner.
It’s funny because if it was any other companies I’m sure a bunch of you would be happy about it, but it being against Valve you can’t help but defend them.
Should I dig in everyone’s comment history to show who are the hypocrites that otherwise act like they’re left wing?
Valve doesn’t set the prices for any of the products you buy through their store. The game developers and publishers do.
The exception is valve developed games which are mostly free to play and make money on useless cosmetics. Most of their successful games are built on mods that are only possible because valve takes the very consumer friendly position of supporting and encouraging modding of their games.
Hell, they even allow and promote fan made remakes like Black Mesa and unofficial sequels.
If valve is a monopoly, it’s only because they’re the only corporation in the pc gaming space (OK maybe include gog too) that respects their customers. They’re not perfect but they’re orders of magnitude better than the competition.
No matter the reason, private monopolies are a bad thing for consumers.
The game devs and publishers set the price by taking into consideration that 30% goes to Valve, without that 30% games would be cheaper as they wouldn’t need to sell for as high a price for the devs and publishers to recover their investment.
No need to have studied economics to understand that if you need to have 30$/copy in your pockets in order to cover your cost and someone takes 30% from every sales then you need to sell to the consumers for 43$.
No matter how nice Valve acts towards consumers (in many cases because it was imposed to them, not by choice), in the end you’re defending a billionaire while you make less a year than he spends running one of his yachts for a single day.
Bullshit. Games on steam that hit sales thresholds pay less to steam and the prices remain the same. Games on EGS only pay 12% and prices haven’t dropped.
Reality does not comport with your argument at all.
I’ve been in product development and management for 10+ years. I know how pricing decisions are made. You’re very naive.
Well no shit they’ll look at the highest price on the market and use the same price everywhere, but the highest price is based on the fact that the distributor takes a 30% cut!
Again, you are very naive. What you’re describe is cost-up pricing which hasn’t been a generally used method of pricing goods and services for decades at this point. The reason is that doing cost-up pricing is a really good way to go out of business.
The way pricing works today is that sellers set pricing based on what they believe the customer is willing to pay. From there you work backwards accounting for retailer margin, cost of goods, transport, discounts, etc… To find your maximum cost per unit. If you can’t produce the product for less than the maximum cost, you either need to scale back your features, add a feature that would justify a higher sell price, or abandon the project.
Your notion that companies would lower prices if they had to give retailers a small cut is not borne out by theory or by observed real world outcomes.
You’re wrong. Doubling down won’t make you less wrong.
Ideally I’d like to see media distribution be nationalized. Video streaming, audio streaming, videogames, e-books. There have been multiple cases of companies selling digital goods, then ceasing to provide those with consumers left holding the bag. Multiplayer games whose servers are gone. Movies “purchased” on Amazon that become unavailable when their agreement with the publisher expires. I am concerned about what Valve will look like when they inevitably get new leadership.
But I suffer no delusion that nationalizing that is realistic. Certainly not in the US where I live, where even libraries are under attack from conservatives. I’m doubtful that would happen anywhere else either. So what’s the next-best thing?
Seems to me like the capitalist response would be to try to encourage competition. A lot of companies have tried and failed, so I’m not sure what else can be done on that front.
Valve does plenty of unethical stuff, you’re right, but the store isn’t really it. Go after them for their shady loot box gambling and really predatory monetization in f2p games that creates secondary gambling markets. It’s insane.
Valve has actual blood it’s hands and you’re complaining about the legitimate business front that covers for a deeply profitable and unethical core.
Loot boxes suck but I’d argue valve is still one of the better approaches. Makers of skins get cuts of sales, Dotas sales help the international prize pool to an extent, and it doesn’t lock you into a treadmill just to unlock gameplay elements.
Every other company seems to be doing the same but somehow even worse.
I disagree. There’s a deeply unethical core built into Steam that is distinct to it. Since you can sell your loot drops for actual money, they are more literally scratch tickets than your standard loot boxes.
I don’t know, I’m all for keeping people away from addictive behaviors and would rather micro transactions not be a thing at all full stop - but allowing users to get money out of games they have already invested in is also a benefit, so it feels weird to single out the one option that provides consumer value. Don’t play CS anymore? Sell the AK Fire serpent you unboxed for 2.50 back in 2014 and buy yourself a steam deck and keep a gift card for a few games. Or a new set of skins in whatever game your playing now is.
As far as the API goes, Im pretty unfamiliar so Im not sure what responsibilities a company has when using their site as a login to another site. There’s porn sites that allow me to sign in with Facebook / Gmail, if someone uploads CSAM to that site do those sites have a duty in some way?
It’s so crazy how Valve gets called a monopoly because of how their competition refuses to make anything of equivalent quality. It literally took the epic games store years before they had a shopping cart to check out in. Valve is the only one with good customer service, a solid refund policy, and no 3rd party exclusives in the platform. Valve is basically the only one that’s not a publically traded company, so it’s not responsible to shareholders and going through enshittification like everything else.
Its like imagine five barbers in town. One gets all the business and is rich, but he’s nothing amazing, just a reliable barber. The other four barbers are constantly using rusty razors and punch customers in the throat right before they leave. No matter what anyone tells them, they won’t stop. New razors cost money they don’t want to spend, and your hair gets cut mostly the same in the end so why bother?
Stop defending them, monopolies are never good to consumers.
By your logic monopolies shouldn’t be broken because it’s the competitors’ fault if people don’t do business with them instead.
Well no, if your company is big enough that it doesn’t make sense to go for the competition then no matter what the competition does you are so far ahead that they’ll never catch up and you can sway the market as you please.
Monopolies are often great for consumers… When they’re nationalized. Obviously that’s not going to happen with Valve any time soon.
What would the benefit be to breaking up Valve? How would you even go about doing that? The obvious choice is to break out different business units- break things like the hardware sales and game development into separate companies. But that still doesn’t address the issue of them having too much market share for software sales.
The next beat thing I can think of would be to have some sort of regulatory body just to place restrictions on the industry. Which, of course, would vary from country to country, and would probably have to include all of their competitors: Epic, GoG, and the various publisher-specific stores, maybe even other storefronts like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It would be hard not to also hit the mobile games industry too (which, to be fair, might be a good thing). But this kind of thing is usually reserved for things like utilities, communications, financial markets, etc. Such an organization for a luxury recreationak market… I have to wonder how much political appetite there really would be for that? Is that really what people want their governments to be focusing on?
By your logic they shouldn’t be broken because it’s the competitors’ fault if people don’t do business with them instead.
Yes exactly, that’s why they shouldn’t be broken.
They’re consumer friendly and are not taking specific action to BE a monopoly, contrary to many other companies.
There’s also enough competition and it’s exactly their fault that they fail/refuse to implement what makes Steam so popular.
I’m definitely against monopolies, but mindlessly slapping rules on them just because they’re labeled monopolies is some of the dumbest shit I’ve heard
Not that I disagree with the good experience - Valve has done a lot to support Linux gaming and I’m bloody grateful for that, but I believe Valve was kicked up the arse by regulation and Epic Games converting their Fortnite launcher into a Fortnite launcher that lets you buy other games being a viable threat (the whole controversies not withstanding).
Not to mention that in the US and Canada (outside of Quebec), you get a one year warranty on Steam Deck while in some other places (namely the EU, UK and Quebec) the regulations kick in. For the UK, you get six years minimum from consumer protection law (oversimplification, but you get the gist). Some of their good decisions and experiences were a result of regulation forcing its hands.
I hold my hand up as someone who hates the Tory scum but even I wouldn’t make a claim that bold simply because they’re too incompetent to be actively screwing over a market they simply don’t care about.
My wife used to work as a researcher in Westminster. She always laughs when she hears most conspiracy theories, as she knows first hand 90% of the people there couldn’t conspiracy their way out of a wet paper bag.
Long winded way of saying I should’ve put an “/s” on the end of my original comment.
I play quite a bit of idlers and clickers, and they’re generally quite low on the gameplay department, but this… this just looks minimum effort meme game. Doesn’t seem like there’s anything more than a click counter and an image of a banana.
Valve probably hit em with a pretty high price for licensing. Not high enough to be entirely unreasonable, but I reckon they know they have the best OS by far.
So the most accurate and helpful descriptor would be “mario-like 2d platformer,” but then you might have no reason to click on the link if you’re a weirdo who thinks “Oh, that might mean a game like Mario Party!” ;)
I wasn’t sure what to make of ‘gay furry Mario-like’… But the gameplay actually looks pretty polished - clearly inspired by SMB3! I’ll give the demo a go.
I tried the new AoE director’s cut or whatever about a month ago and just couldn’t continue playing it because the AI was soooo bad. I don’t recall it being that awful when it came out some 20 years ago, but that was forever so maybe. But my units were all over the place it was just unplayable.
I loved AoM, it was my favorite. But if the AI is just as bad, I can’t see playing it.
It’s not just your memory. The devs for the definitive edition have been working to remake the navigation subsystem for some fuckall reason. It gets progressively worse every patch.
The original pathfinding was much better and felt more fluid and responsive.
They are already changing a few of my favorite things about the original version of AoM so some wind is already out of my sails. I hope they don’t unnecessarily change things for the sake of change and make it worse.
Oh cool. Good to know my memory serves me well. The original did some derpy stuff but the new AI is a train wreck in comparison. My units would run around and not attack half the time. Half my workers would go around my walls for some odd reason, while the rest would find the shorter path. It was insufferable.
I don’t know how they made it worse. How is that even possible? My standard insult was always “MS could fuck up a cup of coffee” but maybe I should change that to “MS could fuck up a cup of water!”
I really loved AoM as a kid. I guess I won’t be enjoying a slice of my childhood any time soon.
Yes, but Age of Empires II DE, Age of Empires III DE, and Age of Empires IV have all been great, and are still doing great. Out of all the recent Age of Empires stuff, only the very first Definitive Edition didn’t do well, but ended up becoming a DLC expansion to AoE II DE.
Basically, there is no reason to believe Age of Mythologies will be a bad remake based on just the one game that didn’t do well out of a bunch that did do well.
I’m a huge Doom (1/2/3/2016) fan but I’m not sure how I feel about this. Eternal just seemed like more or the same so I never even bothered playing it. The Dark Ages is starting to feel a little too Anime and just outside the whole space-based Doom universe. This just doesn’t seem like Doom to me and the gameplay looks like more of the same basically from the trailer.
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