And you still missed the fact that yes, it turns out Valve was aggressively locking down developers by forbidding other platforms from competing on price by holding store discoverability hostage. Which may have been illegal, we still have to wait on that particular class action to resolve. And that regulators had to force them to hand out refunds after a lot of the “evil” competition was already doing it.
Look, the fact is these are massive corporations fighting for who gets to milk money from gamers. I have zero need to root for either Fortnite guy or Digital Distribution Inventor Monopoly Haver guy. Steam is undeniably the better software by a mile, but considering their margins I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to ask them not to do the shitty things they do (and they do do shitty things, as you point out).
I do root for GoG, but let me be perfectly honest here, it’s because they’re the only semi-viable 100% DRM-free option. And even then, you can tell they absolutely hate that they are grandfathered into that branding and increasingly unable to compete because of it. I will have no need to root for Cyberpunk guys the moment they cave and/or are forced to drop that policy.
It’s not about “my billionaire is better than your billionaire”. Epic could gain complete supremacy overnight and my position wouldn’t change.
Which may have been illegal, we still have to wait on that particular class action to resolve.
Can you give me a case number or some other reference? I know of only one class action lawsuit, but that one is concerning the resale of Steam activation codes.
Nah, it’s weird how many people missed that during discovery in that one (the one everybody was saying was irrelevant and vacuous and only about code resellers) emails came out where Steam reps were outright telling devs that either they kept price parity on Steam or they wouldn’t get store placement. Not just resellers, but for Humble and UPlay as well.
It’s nuts how long it took me to find the quotes and documents, by the way. It’s all about how few employees Valve has and that one time Tim Sweeny called them assholes in an email for having a 30% cut and they shared it internally with “Are you mad, bro?”. Barely any specific coverage about the fact that… yeah, Steam will pressure you to never have the game cheaper anywhere else, resale keys or not.
For the record, my position WOULD change if Epic gained total dominance because I want the gaming market to be competitive. Any of these people having a monopoly is a bad thing in my book, so in our reality that’d be Steam.
My publisher once asked me to remove my game from itch.io, saying it was needed to negotiate some deal with valve. I don’t know how much of it was true though. I had set up that itch.io before signing with the publisher.
See, that’s a very even keeled summary.
And you still missed the fact that yes, it turns out Valve was aggressively locking down developers by forbidding other platforms from competing on price by holding store discoverability hostage. Which may have been illegal, we still have to wait on that particular class action to resolve. And that regulators had to force them to hand out refunds after a lot of the “evil” competition was already doing it.
Look, the fact is these are massive corporations fighting for who gets to milk money from gamers. I have zero need to root for either Fortnite guy or Digital Distribution Inventor Monopoly Haver guy. Steam is undeniably the better software by a mile, but considering their margins I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to ask them not to do the shitty things they do (and they do do shitty things, as you point out).
I do root for GoG, but let me be perfectly honest here, it’s because they’re the only semi-viable 100% DRM-free option. And even then, you can tell they absolutely hate that they are grandfathered into that branding and increasingly unable to compete because of it. I will have no need to root for Cyberpunk guys the moment they cave and/or are forced to drop that policy.
It’s not about “my billionaire is better than your billionaire”. Epic could gain complete supremacy overnight and my position wouldn’t change.
Can you give me a case number or some other reference? I know of only one class action lawsuit, but that one is concerning the resale of Steam activation codes.
Nah, it’s weird how many people missed that during discovery in that one (the one everybody was saying was irrelevant and vacuous and only about code resellers) emails came out where Steam reps were outright telling devs that either they kept price parity on Steam or they wouldn’t get store placement. Not just resellers, but for Humble and UPlay as well.
It’s nuts how long it took me to find the quotes and documents, by the way. It’s all about how few employees Valve has and that one time Tim Sweeny called them assholes in an email for having a 30% cut and they shared it internally with “Are you mad, bro?”. Barely any specific coverage about the fact that… yeah, Steam will pressure you to never have the game cheaper anywhere else, resale keys or not.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F778bbf05-f937-4f50-a8a5-90de4185172e_1000x677.jpeg
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view
For the record, my position WOULD change if Epic gained total dominance because I want the gaming market to be competitive. Any of these people having a monopoly is a bad thing in my book, so in our reality that’d be Steam.
My publisher once asked me to remove my game from itch.io, saying it was needed to negotiate some deal with valve. I don’t know how much of it was true though. I had set up that itch.io before signing with the publisher.