First of all, people sometimes use analogies that dont make sense to you. No need to be a dick about it. You could just make a better example.
Staying with cars, I see my mistake. Valve is not producing the cars in this example, valve is doing the car sales for the (small) manufacturer. They dont provide any part of the car, only the exposure and surrounding community. Its not nothing but has zero to do with the product.
What they are asking is „you can sell cars from our showroom, just dont sell them for cheaper than we do“. Which does make sense.
Let me try and understand this by altering the product.
Valve now produces cars and the devs are people who make these cars inside factories. Same as is currently the case, these employees get cars cheaper and are asked to not undercut the seller by holding onto the cars for a certain amount of time before selling them used.
It does make sense for me to view it that way. One could argue that the couple cars that get sold by employees doesnt do anything to hurt the brand and that pressuring them to keep the price high manipulates the market.
Also, doesnt the work of steam accumulate to hosting mirrors of a game and hosting a large website they get billions in revenue for?
The issue is much bigger than this and much bigger than valve.
The underlying problem are nation state sized companies that are so vertically integrated that they profit from every step of the process they are involved in.
Through their huge size they have the power to profit on procurement, labor, production, sales, etc. compared to smaller companies. The concept of billion dollar companies (and individuals) is perverse.
The capitalist system was not designed to harbour companies that never make a loss and are sold or broken up just because they dont satisfy last quarter‘s predictions.
Everywhere where joe or jane average cant start a competing business (either through overzealous regulations like tiny banks or through monopoly inducing IP laws like the one allowing valve to infinitely hold games hostage) you will have overcharging, barely any progress in development and small numbers of people ridicolously raking in profits.
We need to get rid of the right to „sell“ limited licenses, billion dollar companies and shareholder primacy.
Playing steam games on the TV has become really good. I played through most of control over steamlink and besides my ps4 controler losing power too often - which has nothing to do with steam, it has been a blast.
Games that can be played with controller work great on the tv.
I‘d refrain from posting it openly as it may be monitored by valve if credentials of accounts surface somewhere. A bit far fetched but I‘d just make the first person who answers a specific post or whatever.
The „laws“ that predatory, autocratic, overpowered nation states veiled as „companies“ push down our legal system are not the will of the people, nor are they based on „justice, fairness and equality“ as stated here so they are not laws.
I know but thanks. the data on this is rather old so I thought if I can get the prices from the game directly I could write something that changes with the game if an update messes up the prices.
Important addition: the majority of people isnt equipped for this kind of game. Patience and ability to grasp this kind of thing is what makes the computer nerds the computer nerds.
Programming and sysadmin stuff isnt really popular either for that express reason.