This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Such a weird stream of comments to be read on Lemmy.
Regardless of what you folks think about Valve, does anyone believe that a marketplace should have this kind of leverage over their suppliers? For instance, should Amazon be permitted to force manufacturers to set the price of a product outside of their marketplace? Should Apple be allowed to force app developers to price match the Google store?
Amazon literally does this if you sell on their platform as the manufacturer or just at all. My source: Hi, that’s me, and I can confirm this is standard practice at Amazon and I’m the manufacturer of my own product.
And in my opinion it should be illegal. What do you think?
Genuinely why? Why do you think you have the right to any specific marketplace?
Do you really think that Amazon should be allowed to set prices outside their marketplace? That's wild.
remind me again how Gaben is a GoOd BiLlIoNaIrE?
How many non-game related ads have you seen on Steam?
How many actual ads have you seen on every other platform you used?
How many ads have you seen in the game released on Steam in general?
Does that answer your question?
Just because Steam doesn't have ads, doesn't mean that Gaben is a good billionaire. For a large chunk of the existence of Valve, they wouldn't even give you a refund. They had to be mandated for them to give you a refund.
While the rest of us starve to death, Gabe is sitting pretty on over a billion dollars worth of boats
The amount of people in this thread that are arguing that steam is fully within the right here due to the fact that they have a restriction on steam key pricing blows my mind.
for example with the UbiSoft case, It's clear they have never actually opened or used Uplay because if they had they would realize that Uplay does not use Steam keys period at all. They are their own distribution platform that distributes off of uplay servers.
The entire point of the lawsuits is going one step further, which is that despite steam having a policy that says it's for keys only, they unilaterally enforce it on all platforms regardless of the usage of the keys.
Now whether that's actually true or not is what the lawsuits have to determine. But that is what the claim is. Personally I'm leaning towards it's true because I've seen some screenshots posted about customer service saying that's how it worked and threatening to delist steam games for cheaper first party distribution pricing elsewhere.
I'll be curious where these cases go.
Bloomberg cites two high-profile cases referenced in the ongoing lawsuit, one involving Ubisoft, and another Warner Bros.
First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.
Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.
Yeah.
Because it violates their policy. That's not a "threat", those are the terms of the contract Ubi and WB agreed to. Terms that everyone has to follow.
Heck, Ubi and WB should be hit with a counter suit for trying to leverage their market position to exert control over valve and getting unusually favorable terms.
Clown suit. Ubi and WB are mad they can't break their contract with valve in a one sided way.
edit: I forgot some context:
The deal between valve and a publisher or dev is: they can sell on steam and elsewhere if steam is at least tied in price, or cheaper, but when they sell somewhere else, that includes the steam key and access to steam and steam's distribution at no cost.
What the devs and publishers wanted to do was leverage other features of steam and the steam ecosystem, while undercutting steam's price.
They are always free to just not sell on steam for a cheaper price. That's not what this is about.
edit2:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
"Steam Key Rules and Guidelines"
First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.
You shouldn't trust any of them. No billionaire has your best interests at heart. Even Gabe.
I'm inclined a little to agree with you, but it's not like he made his money because Gabe refused to be run by anyone. He pays his employees really well. My dad's friend still is working at Valve after going there 20 some odd years ago. He rakes in money like no ones business. But they are all benefitting from the work they have done.
Secondly, nobody knows how charitable he is in his private life. The fact that he's so private about it, inclines me to believe he's probably a decent guy, who just doesn't like the spotlight. He may be a billionaire, but how many billionaires have their employees love them like at Valve?
Lastly, most of his money is tied up in shares of the company, as he is 50%+ owner. He may use that to leverage cash loans, but he's also just smart. He doesn't really do that all that much, except when he's buying his research yachts. And those shares are only accessible by the workers, as it's a private company. Why? Because the money belongs to the laborers who produce the goods.
Now, I'm willing to change my view if there's ever a situation in which Gabe Newall is intentionally trying to avoid paying taxes, but that hasn't happened yet.
Bezos, Musk, Gates, Trump, Zuckerburg, Page, Brin, Ellison, Dell, Huang, the Waltons, Blomberg, Thiel. There's so many worse people out there. I do agree wealth is bad, but what the aforementioned are doing is significantly worse.
Now, I'm willing to change my view if there's ever a situation in which Gabe Newall is intentionally trying to avoid paying taxes, but that hasn't happened yet.
What about exploiting child gambling? Valve's value, and thusly Gabe's value, skyrocketed after introducing lootboxes to TF2, CSGO, DOTA2, etc. He can be as charitable as he fucking wants, but he still defends lootboxes while taking little to no efforts to ensure that children aren't gambling on his platform. He's had... how many years to fix this problem now? Too many. He's not fixed the problem, and continues to reap the rewards in the meantime.
As far as I'm concerned, he's just as much of a piece of shit as any other billionaire. The only difference is that he makes toys that a lot of us really, really like; toys that we apparently like so much so that we're willing to handwave child gambling as long as it doesn't get in the way of making it moderately convenient to download DRM-infested games.
That is true, definitely a "lesser evil" situation.
I love valve as much as the next PC gamer, but I agree their rules should not affect what publishers do entirely on other platforms.
They aren't. If Ubisoft wants to release a game on their own platform steam can do nothing about it.
Steam can delist all of Ubisoft's games from their storefront in retaliation to what Ubisoft does on their own independent store
