people fellating valve will never get less disgusting. have some shame and self respect.

These comments…

Some day, Steam is going to enshittify, eat game devs for breakfast, and all these Steam fans will wonder how anyone could have possibly seen this coming.

Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.

Not that I don’t enjoy Steam. But I trust them as much as any corporation: not at all.

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?

One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.

Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.

No matter how good or bad steam was and is for gaming industry, they made gaming on Linux not only viable but great, and hence made completely ditching windows an achievable thing with little effort.

I'm grateful for that, even though I boycotted them from day 1 (until left4dead came out) for destroying physical and used games.

I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.

They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.

It's the most nothing of nothings.

To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they'd constantly try to switch you back to IE.

Only beef I have with steam off the top of my head.

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

2. Reverse you decision on steam account not being transferreable/inheritable

Probably others but those are the two I think of.

Not true. Look at how they handled their anti-gambling lawsuit. They essentially did away with cases and keys, and now you can "open a terminal". You aren't gambling according to steam anymore, since you can decline the offer, but because this decline accept mechanic is baked into a dynamic pricing, you are now required to pay steam an average of 1700 usd for a pair of digital gloves, if you even get the offer.

They got rid of "gambling" for something much worse

Leave the multi billion dollar corporation alone

Remember that you are on Lemmy: a decentralized and open source platform owned by the community.

Steam is a proprietary, closed source, for profit third party software launcher owned by a billionaire.

Even if Valve's offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven't seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.

Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don't love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don't want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.

STOP giving the COnsuMer WHAt they WANTTTTT!!!!!NOOOOOOOO MY SLOPCORE BUSINESS CANT COMPETE WITH ACTUAL GOODS AND SERVICES.