megopie

“It’ll make costs go up! It’ll cause inflation! It’ll cause a wage price spiral!” NEWS FLASH! minimum wage hasn’t risen for over a decade and yet prices have risen faster than they did when we *did* raise minimum wage. Almost like, cheap minimum wages allows for more capital consolidation, and that in turn makes it easier for cartels, oligopolies and monopolies to form to enforce larger margins on low elasticity goods.

Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space. They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive the use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system. Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that. If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.

What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms. Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.) The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.

They don’t mandate price parity on other platforms. They mandate that people selling steam keys on different storefronts match price with the steam store. Which is to say, they allow people to distribute through steam’s infrastructure, without paying steam’s vendor fee, but not for a lower price. Publishers can absolutely choose to sell for cheaper on EGS(or any other distribution platform for that matter), that they generally don’t is not due to some valve policy.

It’s not so much that the distro is bad, but the leadership of the project, according to a lot of the community working on it, is very unresponsive, bad at administration, doesn’t make decisions that need to be made in a timely manner and not really doing their job. The community basically wants to cut them out and move on.

“Oh and it’s more expensive to run than your salary… but… there is zero risk it will try to unionize.”

I suspect it’s largely more the result of failing internal organization. Like, a detached from reality and ideologically motivated faction with in corporate leadership has seized control of the company and fired anyone who told them they were being idiots or opposed their initiatives. People are probably getting promoted or hired to management positions based on their ability to tell leadership what they want to hear rather than their ability to actually run things. Everyone lower down has internalized that telling the higher ups what’s going on will get them fired and only is telling them what they want to hear. Resources and people got diverted away from projects that the management doesn’t care about (have no potential to drive growth), and they’re just assuming that the “increase in productivity of AI” will make up the difference. Now everything is melting down and their core product is losing market share while the new products intended to drive growth are failing to see meaningful adoption. Heads will probably role, but it’s unlikely it will be the people who are causing the problem. That’s what it looks like to me from the outside.

They companies making TVs don’t want to sell simple displays, they want to expand their businesses beyond just one time sales of hardware. So they and the store fronts don’t offer the average consumer a simple display. People can still find them, but they need to be actually looking for a dumb TV and know what to look for.