They literally, objectively, have, monopolistic anti-competitive power, largely thanks to blind corporate dick riding gamers like you.

And yes, in literally every single western democracy you have special obligations to actually further competition beyond normal if you’re in a situation without competition, because competition is inherently beneficial.

Are you saying that creating literally all the code that make those usability improvements possible is not worthy of praise?

Do you only praise the window washer and not the architect or construction worker who built the building? Are you really sitting here trying to praise surface level sheen over the actual infratstructure and bones?

UX is important but so is the literal foundation it’s built on. If Valve deserves praise as a saint for their Linux contributions, then so does Microsoft and IBM. If that makes you uncomfortable, the lesson to learn is to stop dick riding Valve, not that you need to praise IBM.

You’re just not getting it. That hypothetical money isn’t going anywhere but the pockets of the people a level above the actual developers.

Literally just objectively false.

If I self publish my game on steam, I get every dollar from it except for the ones that valve takes.

Are the developers a studio owned by a large publisher like Microsoft? Microsoft is funding the entire project and studio operating costs, and all the revenue is going back to them. They set the budget, and anything above the projected sales figures a nice bonus for Microsoft execs and shareholders.

Yeah bro, some developers are not owned by Microsoft, what’s a twist!

Your premise of lowering platform fees leading to better games is only ever going to happen for early-access indie games where the devs quit their day job. Those devs are a tiny minority of gross PC game sales, and while it would be nice for them to be paid a bit more, it’s not going to change anything for the average Joe Gamer consumer.

No dumbass, it’s just fundamentally more efficient. Your premise of giving Gabe Newell 15% of every game sale and then deep throating him while you thank him for the opportunity, for literally no benefit or reason, is just asinine.

My point still stands: you’re proposing something that doesn’t actually benefit the typical consumer, but merely shifts the profit ratio between two profit-driven corporations.

No. It doesn’t. Your position is that you want to waste 15% of every gaming purchase on enriching Gabe Newell instead of the developers who actually made the game. Congratulations, that makes you a dumbass who likes wasting money on hero worship.

It literally is if you have a monopoly.

Try clicking past the first result next time you “research” something to prove how unbiased you are:

https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenue-revealed-in-lawsuit/

Also, stop dick riding corporations.

So basically “we should all be little dumb dumbs who praise the shiny bauble in front of us, not the actual work and effort that goes into creating something”.

Interesting point.

Yes you are defending rent seeking behaviour, which is what rent gouging landlords do.

Its not arguing about shifting money between two arbitrary corporations, it’s about shifting money to the people actually creating something, not the people who own the store that sells it to you.

Every dollar Valve gets, is one less that a game developer had to spend on staff and creatives to make a better game.

So?

Just because you don’t understand electrical engineering doesn’t make it less valuable then paint. If Valve is a saint for contributing to Linux then so is Microsoft and IBM and we should all dick ride Microsoft and IBM like the Valve dick riders in this thread.

No, they’re anti Starbucks price gouging. It’s like all those companies taking advantage of a little inflation to drastically increase retail prices.

I said Valve is taking 15% more that they don’t have to, they said who cares if a landlord drops Starbucks rent 15%, the consumer won’t save. I pointed out that that means that not just Starbucks is being gouged but also independent stores and places that might actually drop their prices, or not increase them as quickly in the future.

There is literally no way to defend rent seeking. It makes everything more expensive for everyone.

How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren’t going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That’s wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.

This is the most dumbass asinine defense. So now you’re pro landlord rent gouging?

Jesus fucking Christ how are people upvoting this flat out landlord simping crap.

It does not fucking matter if Ubisoft remains greedy. Every single independent self publishing dev gets 15% more money. If a landlord gogiges Starbucks, they’re also going to gouge the independent business, and the family needing somewhere to live.

If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.

“Oh my corporate landlord might be owned by a billionaire and every single one of his employees might be a multimillionaire, but he’s a good landlord because he gives us a washing machine. It might be old and clunky and never repaired, but hey that makes him a saint, right?”

The fucking fact that you brought up landlords rent seeking as a non issue is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. You need to go outside, give your head a shake, and do fucking better.

Lock-in != Monopoly

They asked if they did anything anti-competitive. Lock-in is inherently anti-competitive.

As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the “developers pay less fees here” approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn’t benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn’t exactly pan out.

Oh really? Please do point me to the study you did where you gave 15% more revenue back to developers and then assessed their output quality.

Claiming that having the store take 15% less cut of revenue will have no effect is a quite frankly flat out absurd claim to make.

And the Linux Kernel which powers the whole thing directly effects them, so we should all praise Microsoft and IBM like we praise Valve right?

Is it a form of lock in or not?

It literally either goes back to the consumer or back to the game developer.

Valve has ripped off every single game purchase to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (taking an objective 15% more than they need to from the total cost of every single game), for the past 20 years.

But let’s thank them for that! Thanks Valve for making every single working class gamer poorer. We all love the fact that every single Valve employee is a multimillionaire, at the expense of literally every single game player and developer. What kind generosity! /S

Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they’re also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn’t get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they’re going to want to keep their customers happy. It’s good for them, and it’s not terrible for us. Everybody wins

No, they don’t. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.

And they don’t have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.

I don’t agree that they’re a monopoly, because they’ve done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.

Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can’t transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you’re used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn’t mean it’s not.

So?

I’d like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve’s money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.

Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn’t make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.

Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let’s not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.