- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/lemmyshitpost/p/1324450/steam-lawsuits-in-a-nutshell
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I’ve never seen it put so well. Yes it’s a monopoly, but unlike most bad monopolies it didn’t get there from being predatory, or anti competitive. Ironically with the Deck I’d argue by allowing other launchers and stores they’re surprisingly pro-competition.
It’s that every single other store (except GOG) has done everything in their power to be as anti-consumer pro-business as they can and just have destroyed themselves. EA’s Origin from the start was a buggy mess with bad DLC. Ubisoft was just an Assassin’s Creed store and pissed everyone off by forcing it and not giving a single reason to be over there except “You can’t buy Valhalla anywhere else”, proving how little PC players needed to play Valhalla. Microsoft had a strict 5-install limit of installing games over the lifetime of the purchase, and you had to use their shitty “I solidly work 15% of the time” microsoft store. Everything other store was just hot garbage made up by MBAs who had zero interest of serving the consumer.
But now “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
Fully agree with your point, but to be fair Steam sucked balls in the OG Counter Strike days. It was dretchingly slow, buggy and nobody wanted to use it. So other stores sucking balls in the beginning by being buggy is not that strange. Although all the anti-consumer stuff is not bad programming, just bad morals.
And when they firsy came out they pissed off a LOT of people (including me) when they’d sell physical videogame cases with a piece of paper inside it with the key for downloading. I felt tricked when I bought games that were like this.
There was an option, and some companies did ship a disc with the installation files. Obviously the license was tied to the Steam account and not to the disc, but if companies weren’t shipping the disc with the license, that’s their fault for cheaping out, not Steam.
You’re probably right, but as a consumer all I saw was “LOL no disk for you, download game via steam.” And blamed steam.
I bought Valhalla on Uplay (or whatever it’s called now) back when it came out… And I spent 150 hours playing through it…
Tbh it was probably the most boring AC game I’ve ever played. It actually made me stop playing them at all because it just dragged on so goddamn long.
Stop bending over backwards to defend corporations. There are no good corporations. Corporations are not your friend. They will never be. They have only their interests in mind. They don’t care about you.
I mean there is some hint of defense in this meme, and people definitely do jump to Valve’s defense, but I read it differently. I read it as a complaint that all these companies keep making the dumbest sounding ideas and are pissing people off. Like Sony removing the PC tag across all their sites today.
Like yes they’re corporations just trying to make money, but frustrated fans are frustrated and rightly so.
These lawsuits at Valve risk harming an ecosystem that’s actually quite fair to the consumer.
This might seem unusual, but some weird people out there hate corporations for what they actually do and not because hating corporations is their fashion statement.
So you hate Valve for creating gambling infrastructure, for taking a massive slice out of developers’ paychecks on every purchase, and using sales to get people to make FOMO purchases, right? Right?
Here’s the problem: Out of thousands of corporations, the chances that none of them are headed by genuinely nice CEOs that at least like to balance consumer needs with the drive for price squeezing is pretty low.
Presenting high suspicion, and suspecting that most of them are out to get you, even in Valve’s case, makes sense. But here’s the kicker:
People are pressured to spend. Food, basic luxuries, transport; on some measures they have to, no matter how much they protest it. The scummiest of the companies providing those things know you’ll hate them. So, their version of PR is to make sure you hate all of their competitors equally, absent of logic.
There are plenty of genuine, real, tangible reasons to hate companies that can be described in detail, like Valve inventing the loot box and making a gambling market accessible for kids. But throwing logic aside and saying to hate them for nothing specific is, in some ways, shilling for the worst of big game companies.
At the moment, I can’t say I really care that Steam and GoG are the only two major platforms on PC.
Eventually a CEO will take over at Valve and get too greedy and ruin it.
As a gamer, I love Valve. Problem is, I’m not their customer. Their customers are publishers and independent devs. Their main product is digital shelf space in the one of, if not the, most visited digital game store.
This is the lens through which any discussion of Valve’s business practices has to be viewed. None of the companies in this meme compete with Valve in this arena, except perhaps Epic Games. They are for the better part Valve’s customers, and they probably don’t like that. They might create their own stores to try to claw back some of their sales, but their core business model is not reliant on those stores.
As another commenter said, if this is a monopoly, it doesn’t seem like one created through anticompetetive behavior. You can watch Gaben on YouTube talk about how he just wanted to make a distribution platform for Half life that wasn’t clunky like Microsoft. Steam was just one of the first, imo.
(This isnt necessarily me condoning their business model though. Still feels like digital feudalism if you ask me.)
Valve is going to have to pull an intel/amd thing and start licensing tech from gog just to keep them from folding.
