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“Big tech monopoly is bad”, but somehow “Valve monopoly is good for the customer”.
I had this discussion with some friends of mine lately. Valve is definitely not perfect, but the steps they’ve taken to be better than their competition, often in the consumer’s favor, is so far and away better than the likes of the other entrenched market leaders: Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. I’m not a fan of them tying Steam Input and Steam VR, among other things, to…Steam, naturally…when they should be independent libraries, but would Sony and Microsoft have started to abandon their walled garden ecosystem strategy of exclusives without Valve leading the way? Not a chance.
Predatory pricing? Not a problem. It’s the industry standard.
But like…it is the industry standard, and it’s definitely not the definition of the word, “predatory”. If they offer the best deal in town, it’s still a good deal. Epic is offering better than that, but if it was so easy to match, you’d see the other platforms doing so as well, including those also trying to compete with Steam, meaning maybe the dollars don’t really make sense in Epic’s world.
Steam is dismantling the entire concept of digital ownership
The hell they are. For one, not every Steam game has DRM. For another, when I buy a game on Steam, any game, I certainly “own” more than when I buy a “digital copy” of a movie or a TV show, of which there is no avenue to actually legally obtain the file that contains the movie. It’s only streaming.
[Before Steam] it was possible to buy a game and just play it without internet access
Perhaps the video author is too young to remember, but online authentication on PC games definitely came before a single third party sold their games on Steam. MMORPGs predate Steam for that matter.
Honestly, this whole video seems to come from someone who’s too young to have lived through this and only read about it. We became happy Steam customers because it was better than what came before. Valve is not responsible for standardizing any of this nonsense and did in fact get to where they are by being better than everyone claiming to be their competition.
For many games sold on Steam, Valve takes a flat 30% cut. Why 30%? I don’t know.
Exactly my point. They picked 30% because they were confident it would scale to cover their costs and because it was a better rate than what the developer could stand to make in brick-and-mortar.
The cost of running an online store is essentially zero.
No, it’s very much not.
Now all of the other tech companies are getting sued for…[these monopolistic practices]…
Because they’re exhibiting monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior. It’s a much harder case to say that Steam has engaged in monopolistic practices compared to Apple requiring that all software on their devices comes from their store. Which is why the Wolfire case is not a slam dunk.
A lot of the other bad faith arguments here are derived from the incorrect idea that running a digital store costs nothing.
I do shop on GOG for lots of the reasons that the video raises, but it’s often still a worse experience than buying on Steam. For instance, I’m on Linux, so while GOG’s refund policy is exceptional, I have to do a lot of legwork to get a game like The Thaumaturge to run in Wine, a game that’s Steam Deck verified and just works on Steam. And the only way I was able to deduce the steps to get it working was by taking a peak at SteamDB to see what the game’s dependencies are.
How did you try to get The Thaumaturge to run? I found that I could run many games on my library without issue using the Heroic Games Launcher, which is arguably the premier Linux client for GOG games.
I launched it from Heroic, but these same steps will work without it. Run winetricks in your Wine prefix, install a DLL or component, and select both vcrun2019 and vcrun2022 and hit OK to let them install.
I followed some steps for another game and found that you can look at SteamDB to see what other dependency depots the game uses. I also try to update the PC Gaming Wiki with fixes like this whenever I find them.
I agree with almost all of your viewpoints , however I believe that steam has engaged in monopolistic practices. The difference in market share between Steam and any other game launcher is night and day, it is the online game store. That being said that’s not always a bad thing as they have shown
They have a higher than average fees that is for sure, but they also have a significantly bigger feature set than any other store out there. Like when you launch a game on Steam you have a game publishing with built-in DLC support, you have a built-in mod Workshop, you have the review system, you have a built-in DRM if that’s something that you wanted to do, you also have access to a community forum for bug reporting and discussions, not to mention you have the entire steam proton system and the VR system at your disposal both of which are Super complicated to set up stand alone.
Their Workshop, while it takes a 75% cut, is mostly for the Cosmetic items or the trading items were steam does almost exclusively all of the work for it. Basically the only thing the dev team has to do for it is upload the image for the item and the cost that it thinks that item is worth and then steam does the rest. At that point the 75% cut while steep, makes sense to me
Every other reason that they provided in that video, seemed to either hyperbolize the impact of it or disregard what is concidered standard. like for example pricing parity that’s an industry standard, any reputable shop has the same system, and if there is any place that’s different, they actively try to have similar pricing. Hell Walmart hires people strictly to go to their competitors to make sure that their pricing is the same as their competitors. The attribution agreement while I don’t believe should be legal, isn’t anti-competitive, it is anti-consumer but not anti-competitive. I am also super against the fact that technically every game is a license but again that’s not anti-competitive that’s anti-consumer.
I firmly believe that if a game competitor decided to have an equal feature set to the steam launcher, eventually they would be able to give steam a run for their money. Which is not something I can say the same of with companies such as Google which has been proven to actively manipulate the market and use their position of power as a way to keep competitors out, be it by making it so third-party browsers can’t use DRM, or doing things such as manipulating your web results that way your competitors do not appear. I have never seen steam do this
You say they engage in monopolistic practices, but did you cite one? You dismissed a lot of the same points from the video that I did, but I don’t see what supports your point that they’re behaving as a monopolist.
not to mention you have the entire steam proton system and the VR system at your disposal both of which are Super complicated to set up stand alone.
Proton is actually super easy for a competitor to set up standalone. There’s nothing stopping the likes of GOG from just distributing Proton or Wine with their Windows executables for Linux customers, if they wanted, and they can even obfuscate it and make it invisible to the player like Steam does. The big trick that Valve pulled out of their hat for Proton, which again is not monopolistic, is that they re-encode videos that use Microsoft’s proprietary video codecs, since they can’t legally share the DLL that enables playback of those videos. To do what Valve does here is replicable, but it comes at a cost to the distributor. I can’t speak to the effort involved in setting up a competing VR platform, but it seems to be of less and less concern at this point.
It’s monopolistic practice is soley due to its market share, that alone is enough to. It’s a monopoly that isn’t anti-competitive, it’s inherently not bad, as long as it isn’t being Abused, many misconstrue anti-competitive as monopolistic, the term doesn’t go hand and hand. Monopolistic competition exists when many companies offer competing products or services that are similar, but not perfect substitutes. This is valve at the moment with steam. Alternatives exist but none come even close to being a full substitute. but that’s OK it isn’t a bad thing, but it doesn’t change the fact it’s monopolistic.
As for the gog thing, maybe it is easier than I thought, if so I’m surprised that no other game store has done so, steam dedicated an entire division to it and it still has a lot of issues with functionality and usage.
A monopolistic practice is one that enforces a monopoly unfairly. Just having market share means they’re approaching a monopoly, but it doesn’t mean they’re getting there by monopolistic practices.
The true silken song will be the unabashed wailing of gamers who have been edging so hard for 6 years that this game couldn’t possible have lived up to the hype anyway
Ah you know, not the outcome I hoped for but it’s exactly what I expected from humans.
paraphrasing a little more than a half hour of the video: “Man, fuck Thor/Pirate Software for either lying or misunderstanding and signal boosting his incorrect interpretation of the campaign.”
I agreed with Ross previously that Thor taking a really dumb fuck position helped get more attention on the issue that was, IMO, as hopeless as trying to get the masses to care about or understand Net Neutrality. That was what I saw repeated and upvoted at the time even before Thor revealed himself to be a gigantic narcissistic nepo baby bullshitter more recently.
If you watched the vid OP, what changed his opinion? I’ll check it out once I’m home from work regardless.
It’s all incredibly online, but searching the keywords “piratesoftware WoW drama onlyfangs” will get the ball rolling if you want to see a prime example of how a narcissist acts when getting caught out very publicly. He also embellished his past a lot and that got parroted in every thread mentioning him for months, so that shouldn’t be hard to stumble upon.
Don’t forget throwing his LGBT fans under the bus to have a happy conversation with asmongold and basically inviting the cunts fanbase to harass his LGBT viewers.
Then when said viewers tell him that he was wrong for that and now they are being harassed, he said people were trying to cancel him for having a normal conversation with asmongold about a video game.
That shit pissed me off so much. Pretentious cunt…
The metrics on signatures for the citizens’ initiative. If it helped, it would have boosted those too, but it didn’t. He also got word that at least one very large YouTuber/streamer that he did not name decided to stay quiet about SKG because it would have contradicted Thor.
I’ll also reiterate that 1M signatures out of a population of 450M is an absurdly high threshold to have to reach, so getting 1/10th of that is still impressive, even if it’s unsuccessful.
Man, so many influencers do this. It’s really a shame what kind of world we are building. People who actually have reach - influencers, staying quiet about real issues in fear of cutting the hand that feeds them. Off topic but damn if it doesn’t hold true.
He also got word that at least one very large YouTuber/streamer that he did not name decided to stay quiet about SKG because it would have contradicted Thor.
Don’t worry, in five years it will launch with the same physics tick rate bug and the dearth of anything interesting that is customary of any Bethesda Game Studios game.
I wish we’d get another Left 4 Dead, and while I don’t feel like TF2 really needs a new game, it could probably do with a fresh coat of paint (like PBR materials).
DoD was the first FPS I ever played that had mouse aiming. That sounded dumb to me so I just camped in crowded areas with a machine gun and waited for people to run into my crosshairs.
I cannot aim and also have a crap mouse (don’t really want to spend money on anything gaming related) so I alternate between MG and nade runs. Small maps are great for nading all night long.
Goddamn, for real. Left 4 Dead 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, maybe even my favorite. Everything that's there adds to the experience and is finely tuned and crafted. It just plays so well that it's the only game that Ive played for over 200 hours and still go back to that has no meta progression whatsoever, aside from achievements I don't even chase.
I mean, half-life recently got a new game. It wasn’t Half-Life 3/HL2:EP3, but it was more recent than L4D and TF2; which tend to be forgotten about until people start complaining.
Normally, I would say that I don’t care when a game comes out, as long as it’s a genuinely good, complete experience. But knowing Bethesda, it’ll be another 5 years before we see anything, and then we’ll get an embarrassingly buggy title, that hasn’t innovated on anything since Fallout 3 came out.
I used to forgive them for anything, knowing that the modding community would just patch things anyway, but we’ve seen how Starfield was rejected by a ton of people with skills.
I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.
That really is a pretty substantial part of it too. Modding at its core requires a good game, and everything else comes from people wanting to change parts of it, that aren’t necessarily to their liking. Bethesda somehow assumed that people would be willing to reimplement half of the game at launch. That just won’t slide anymore, for 70$
Yep. And the good mods take a while to make too. If your game is dead 3 months after launch, who’s going to still be motivated to keep working on a big overhaul type mod?
Shadow of the Erdtree DLC comes out this month after being developed for 2 years. Even amazing games take forever to develop, I’m certainly not waiting half a decade for another fucking Starfield…
I’m more interested of how much satire, sarcasm, irony and parody they bring into gta 6. Not really care about graphics since whats shaping up gta is the satirical of the world especially usa.
If they still keep those in check on release, rockstar still had the balls.
Even though it is coming from rockstar main studios, I just hope it won’t be end up like Saints Row reboot which turn out become massive joke and the volition had to close up lmao.
Honestly, if Rockstar can make a modern GTA equivalent of Saints Row 2, they’d be golden. Which is kind of ironic in a sense since Saints Row was originally the “GTA at home” clone but became amazing.
In a sense of gritty crime story telling? Yeah I’d agree. Things that make SR1 & 2 differs from GTA is that they dont shy away from goofiness and let players having fun with lots of side activity but at same time they also have coherent direction where the story heading at (like Yakuza series).
Though I would be more cautious in writing as the only veteran staff of GTA creation that stays on Rockstar is Sam Houser. Dan Houser (his brother), Leslie Benzies and some others key people had leave Rockstar games due to some internal issues as far as I know.
Jirard never seemed like the type of guy to pull something like this and I really want to see his response but having the money just sit there (and hopefully still there) for years is a really bad look for him. At the very least he was just clueless but that’s still damaging taking into account all the lies on the charity streams
I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, but after listening to the call, basically he pass the blame on both because they found the issue, to the point of saying that they did it for the views…
After that I knew that something is off, then he replied with something like “what do you want me to do, give all the money away, that will only make me look bad if I do it right now”, but that was the goal of the donation.
I mean, I wouldn’t see an issue if he was giving money but he didn’t and he was claiming to donated to several associations, which didn’t get a single dime
Muta talks to him during his video, I think. Response is basically “I had no clue” mixed with some vague excuses, including some that clearly contradict what was said before.
And then does the “But I don’t know how to fix this, so if you have any idea…”, as if, you know, donating the fucking money is such a difficult thing to do. And like Muta says, they don’t even detail their operating expenses, so any accountant could have a field day with that.
Pokemon doesn’t have direct control of the mechanical system by which pokemon cards are traded. They also don’t get a percentage cut whenever a pokemon card is bought/sold on their storefront, and they don’t take pokemon cards as payment for games, software, and computer hardware. Valve facilitates, profits from, controls, and could ultimately shut down, these online casino spaces. They actively choose not to, and participate in using loopholes (see the xray scanner). Ideally, yes, the government fixes this. Realistically, any solution that isn’t going to take years, and be easily bypassed with a VPN, or just having your company be based in a “sanctuary” country, is going to lie with Valve. Either self enforced or forced by the US govt, they have the means to kill gambling easily because they control the accounts involved, the systems used to trade said items, and the virtual currency players earn. Even something as simple as adding age verification would help. They don’t have to stop, just accept responsibility for having an in game slot machine that spits out items that have real world value, and follow laws and measures to protect minors.
So yes. i hold Valve, a massively profitable company directly facilitating and profiting from its illegal gambling industry to the point where the casinos openly sponsor pro teams to a higher standard than the company that prints pokemon cards, which can be bought and sold and gambled with like any physical good in a physical game of chance.
You could always use Invidious or Piped (instance list here) to avoid using YT directly if you want. You won’t get any ads or anti-adblocker bullshit with Invidious, so I usually use that. I’m not sure about Piped, but it seems good too. Unless your point is to simply stop using YT for anything, in which case just ignore what I said.
EDIT: To the now 8 of you who downvoted me, just, why? No, seriously, why. If you downvote me, please at least tell me why you are instead of downvoting and leaving. It makes me anxious to think that I was a dick or spreading misinformation or just being rude and not even noticing it, and would much rather have someone say something to me so I can at least know what people don’t like. That’s not to say I would agree with it, I might not, but I’d rather know what the problem is so I can agree or disagree.
I think it’s the fact that not everything needs a 20 minute video. There’s a lot of topics that I’m interested in but skip because I don’t have 20, 30, 40, 60 minutes for it.
That makes sense. I just thought he had something against Youtube (and for good reason), since he only said “Not watching a YT video” instead of “Not watching a 20min video”.
youtube.com
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