Because it's not quite the good-faith gesture people are making it out to be; it's a cost-saving measure for Valve. From the consumer standpoint, very little actually changes, as the average user isn't taking Valve to court in the first place. It's not as if Valve is suddenly lowering their legal funding in conjunction with this move; they'll still defend themselves harder than most consumers would be able to, and will win their cases in court instead of in arbitration, which is even more costly for the consumer when they lose.
While arbitration favors companies, so do the courts. If anything, this just makes it more cost-prohibitive on the consumer side to make Valve face the law.
So if it's worse for the consumer for valve to allow class action lawsuits, then should the consumer see all the other companies who force arbitration as the better outcome?
Nah, not really. Technically, this is better. But only marginally so, and unless Valve does something catastrophically, egregiously abusive with the Steam platform, then the people who will actually benefit from this are few and far between. Valve wouldn't just say "come sue us" if they weren't wholly confident that they weren't about to be losing any cases any time soon.
This isn't some huge "win" for the people; gamers aren't gonna rise up over this. For 99.999% of Steam's userbase, this is an entirely lateral move. Valve are the only ones who will see any tangible benefit from this.
Other companies didn’t pay the arbitration fee so valves system was a bit better than the rest. Realistically, the consumer always gets fucked.
The point is more that Steam is getting praised for this, while it’s just to make class action lawsuits, like the one they were just served with for their anti-competitive and monopolistic behaviors, much costlier for the other party.
Except it doesn’t make class actions more expensive, because it removes the step of invalidating the arbitration clause.
Footing the bill for arbitration was pro-consumer. They abandoned the whole thing because of bad faith frivolous lawsuit spam trying to extort settlements, not for any other reason.
Twofold: One, they lost a case in arbitration that basically said arbitration isn’t usable.
Two: Lot of companies do arbitration to avoid court, which works fine and is cheaper if you’re not getting taken to court much. If 75,000 people that could do a class action suit all go to arbitration though, the benefit is lost. Lawyers threatened that. 3 grand a arbitration case x 75,000 people == 225 million dollars on fees alone.
Big win for consumers, at least in the US. People tend to do better in courts here than they do in arbitration (where one side pays the judge(arbitrator)).
"Specifically, the named Plaintiffs won binding decisions from arbitrators rendering Valve's arbitration provision unenforceable for both lack of notice and because it impermissibly seeks to bar public injunctive relief."
So none of these stupid clauses are valid? FOO FYEAH!
its not exactly for the positive reason you think. theyre trying to prevent the class action lawsuit going around the (UK?) right now and realized when a certain amount of people take the arbitration, it gets fairly costly, so they reverted on that clause.
regardless fuck arbitration, its like paying off judges but even more transparent about it.
its basically doing the right thing for the wrong reason (reverting arbitration cause not for thr consumer, but for their wallets)
Valve's contributions have singlehandedly revolutionized the Linux gaming scene. They're the only reason I can play most of the games I own. I don't worship them, exactly, but I do think very highly of them.
This for sure. Making games easily accessible on linux have lead to a lot of people not having to deal with windows anymore.
It is the same effect as a kidnapping victim beeing grateful when someone comes to release them fom the torture rack. It is not strange that valve gets a lot of goodwill from their actions.
Would i sish more people did as steam does? Ofcourse! But none do, so we are grateful for steam. I think they saved pc gaming. And not only for linux.
Before proton we used wine. And wine will continue development with or without steam.
If anything the open source community did more and gave steam a firm platform to build on.
Edit: And to add an observation steams push for Linux is a reaction to Microsoft becoming a contender in the PC games market place. Its not for our benefit anymore than for valves.
I’m pretty wary of corporate propaganda, but from the article this sounds like a pretty clear case of some greedy people taking advantage of Valve offering to cover all arbitration costs. Yes, they’re doing this to cover their ass, but it’s not a malicious move and I don’t see how it could be interpreted as anti-consumer.
I mostly like Valve, and agree that going too far with Stan-ing over a company is dumb. However I think the majority of people that tend to greatly support Valve comes down to both pushing tech and games forward into better consumer directions, and that they are currently not joining in on the mass enshittification as other companies (but of course all big companies can and will do some level of that given enough time).
With regards to pushing tech, they have done more (in at least the last 10 years) to force Linux to be seen as worth supporting. Their efforts to actually add to projects that were already around has been game changing. And that they kept actually putting time, money, and resources into it even after their initial efforts with Steam Machines and the original SteamOS didn’t gain traction on a mainstream level. The Steam Deck keeps outshining the other options even while being technically less powerful specs and they are putting work in to make sure things like drivers are released to help people that choose to install Windows.
But all the positive stuff will only keep happening so long as people don’t start feeling locked out or cheated. I forget a lot of the time how bad many users hated them back when the original versions of Steam were released. Many of the issues people had and were concerned about were valid and could have tanked Valve if they didn’t do everything they could to address them. If they start pulling shit like EA or really any of the console companies have done. Then it will be their time to see massive losses and get all the hate that is deserved.
I would if it had any lasting power. I mean, can’t they just push out another eula update 6 months from now when this change is no longer useful to them?
Fuck arbitration, of course, I’m just not expecting this to really mean anything.
A friend of mine bought one at MSRP to add to his collection along with the likes of Anthem and Babylon’s Fall. He also picked up Suicide Squad for this reason, but he found that he unironically really enjoys that game while it’s still operational.
Right? For a game to be a collector’s item, it needs to still be able to function in its intended capacity. Additionally, they need to be considered good. Most games that become a collectable do so when they transition into the “classic” category, usually 20+ years after they released. In 2050, no one’s going to think, “Oh man, Concord was hailed as a masterpiece in its day, I need to own that piece of history!”
This is perfect for capitalism with Matrix bio-fuel-cells-human/battery tech!
It would have been too easy to just chill peacefully and unbothered in my cozy pod - they would feed me a hallucination of a dead-end job the whole time, complete with all the stupid office buttons I have to press.
It’s basically like. Someone drawing a picture. Then watching the buttons you’re pressing on a controller. And then drawing a new picture. And based on the game that they think you’re playing in their head trying to guess what the next picture ought to look like. With no error correction and no conceptualization other than what the next picture should look like.
The… many limitations of this is the inability of image generators to rationalize 3 dimensional space. It can only approximate it based on what it thinks should appear on the screen. It lacks any ability to keep track of variable information. It really is more like a Doom-style hallucination than anything else. Some of the videos on that article are truly bizarre looking. I’d imagine after a few minutes every single one of them would devolve into an endless loop of being trapped in non-sensical geometry or killing the same enemy over and over again as the AI has no way of remembering the enemy existed to begin with, let alone that you killed it.
I’ll be honest I don’t think there is much use in this at all. It suffers from the same limits as any other model AI. Believability at a glance is not believability under scrutiny and if it’s only believable at a glance then there’s not much practical use in it. The advance in computational power and model sophistication required to stand up under scrutiny is massive.
arstechnica.com
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