What “better right for consumers” are you advocating for? The false claim that Steam bars anyone on their platform from selling cheaper is easily proven false by looking at any of the numerous websites that track prices of games from various storefronts and is the key point used by Epic’s legal team to try to garner support to break up steam in order to gain market share themselves and make the industry markedly worse.

Your post is thinly veiled “Valve bad, give money to Epic instead”, whether you realize it or not. So what is your plan to make the industry actually better?

True, which is why it is so easy to tell which one you are doing. :)

You’re just simping for a different billionaire out here regurgitating Tim Sweeney’s talking points verbatim…

Make it so I OWN my games if a dev isn’t okay with that they can sell somewhere else.

I feel like we might be more likely to be successful lobbying Valve to make this a thing than we are the government. Fingers still crossed as hard as they can be for Stop Killing Games going somewhere productive in the EU.

The interesting thing about Steam being a monopoly to me, is that the complaints are always that they charge too much… They aren’t undercutting all of the competition in order to maintain massive market share at all. The biggest complaint seems to be “they charge so much money, but I have to list my game on their platform or else I will get basically zero sales and visibility to my game!”

Yea, Steam is huge. The eventual total enshittification of Valve terrifies me, but not enough to just nuke them today and hope a better alternative materializes out of thin air tomorrow. From what I can see, their market share is purely a factor of offering a better product, so smashing them to bits just sounds like being forced to use even worse products.

I never said it was too big or too important to be broken up. I’m saying I don’t see how to split it up that actually solves the problem. I don’t think people are scared of Valve the Game Devs, maybe the hardware section but there were tons of other options on the market almost as soon as the Steam Deck took off. It’s the store that people take issue with, so how do you separate to make the store not a problem? Regionally? Have Steam NA, Steam EU, Steam Asia, etc. etc.? I suppose that is possible, but I’m unsure if I see how that actually solves the problem (even assuming you can get around people just buying from a different region’s Steam).

As for nationalizing it… I just don’t have any faith in the US government to not turn it to absolute shit on day one. Unfortunately, at this stage, I trust Valve and it’s Billionaire CEO more than I do the government. I hate to just resign myself to trying to make the most of the dystopia we’ve been given but… :(

What is and isn’t a Monopoly varies from country to country, and always turns into the same circular debate every time it comes up anyway. That’s why I was trying to avoid getting bogged down is “is it or isn’t it” and focus on “if it is, then what?” because I’m not sure a lot of people have thought that far ahead. Myself included.

Their policy is not that you aren’t allowed to sell your game cheaper on another platform, their policy is that you can’t sell Steam keys on other platforms cheaper than you are selling the game on Steam. Basically, you can’t use Steam’s infrastructure when undercutting “Steam customers”. Games that are on Steam go on sale on other platforms when they are not on sale on Steam all the time currently.

I mean, it definitely isn’t going to happen in the US anytime soon… We haven’t had any teeth behind our anti-trust laws in decades. In my lifetime we have basically seen Bell Telephone get rebuilt under AT&T.

What’s your point?

Are you saying that Microsoft being split up made no sense? If so, what would you suggest instead?

Or are you saying since they “almost” did it to MS, then they could do it to Steam? If so, where do you make the split that effects any change? You could split Valve the game dev company from the Steam platform, but I don’t think that makes Steam any less monolithic in their space - they don’t get their market share from the games Valve has made.

I’d be completely in agreement of what you are saying if it wasn’t for the fact that there are so many people acting like Steam is the worst platform in existence every time they get brought up. People are awfully quick to suck Tim Sweeney off for only charging 12% and fill up the comments with whatever the opposite of “fangirling” is.

Here’s what I don’t understand… Say we all agree they are a monopoly, what do you do about it?

It doesn’t seem feasible to break them up into smaller companies, how would that even work? What are the dividing lines between what portion of the company goes where? Does that even solve anything?

Force them to charge less money? Okay, now they charge the same as Epic (or even less). Basically every other store is now being undercut by the biggest player on the scene. There is now even less reason to use a storefront that isn’t Steam. It doesn’t feel like that solves the problem either.

It seems like all the courts have tried to do so far is charge them money for existing, not get them to change what they do, which seems a lot less like the government trying to stop the big bad monopoly and more like the government wanting to get their cut. What does “stopping the monopoly” even mean? Are we happier and better off as consumers if Valve is forced to shut down Steam entirely? Is that the goal?

Imagine Obiwan put the lightsaber in training mode and never told Luke about it. Then Luke doesn’t know what they are supposed to do and basically just trains with it and fights with it under the understanding it is basically just a riot control baton until he loses his hand to Darth Vader at the end of Empire.

To be fair, at that time, we had no idea what a lightsaber could or could not cut through either. The entire first movie, we just see them block shots from a training drone, and hit another lightsaber. We don’t see them cut anything until the wampa cave at the start of Empire (and I’m still amazed how luke got his feet out of the ice and still had all 10 toes…).

I usually don’t have to worry about it because your parents let me watch.

Who just searches on google for porn? wtf? That can’t be a legitimate sample of the public, can it?

It’s a chat bot that googles your question before answering in the hopes to cut down on hallucinations. It doesn’t solve this problem at all.

They are pointing out that the instructions are “Answer all questions.”

How do you have internet without a DOCSIS modem? Is this a problem of where I live that the only option requires it? Or do you just have a strong firewall between it and the rest of your network (assumably on the router)?

What? No, Cisco Systems, the company that makes routers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco