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I think you might reconsider what qualifies as “best case scenario” if you end that statement with “when this thing goes, it’s taking the industry with it”. Like, best out of a bad bunch, for sure, but the best possible outcome?

Steam kinda killed gaming piracy for many. Hope they won’t go the Netflix way in the future.

But you don’t have to do anything at all to get rich off of steam

You can’t create new ones afaik, but you can add and report tags. If enough users do either and it meets the threshold it will be added/removed. The order tags appear is also relevant, if the first tag is FPS then it’s the most voted tag. I’m sure devs/publishers can set initial tags but after that it’s users that maintain them.

It is a good idea to keep this simple in theory, but it also is exploitable. Especially since you can’t search by tags set by users vs devs/publishers. Or the first 4-5 tags. I see a lot go into safeguarding reviews, but very little in tag abuse. There’s cheep no effort games with a crazy number of tags - most people can identify trash, but if it can be abused, then what about other legitimate games?

Steam also categorizes tags in 4 types: Genres, Visual, Theme, and Features. It would be nice to search, say, games that are primarily one genre. When I search for JRPG, I don’t want a City Builder that has JRPGish elements, but I’d be ok with a JRPG with City Builderish elements. You could really narrow down what you want if you used some advanced logic. But that’s not simple, so I can see why they don’t, I just wish I could if I wanted to.

But I’d have to disagree, if it’s open to abuse, then it is a dumpster fire. The thing is that the alternative is…well they aren’t doing it. It’s one of the few things I think, if a competitor focused on and got right, would really hurt steam. But no one seems interested in doing that, so for now, steam is all we got.

You can run GOG games via Proton these days btw!

I could understand this sentiment for any pc-platform but GOG. After all, they are the only ones (afaik) that make their launcher optional. And while i do ocassionally use launcher-functionalities from for example steam, i would much rather not have to bother with it if i didnt have to.

The problem is the launcher. He does not want one.

Steam’s “most favored nation” contracts with devs explicitly prohibit this

Steam’s “most favored nation” contracts with devs explicitly prohibit this

Yeah they were ahead of Steam there for a while.

You’re right that going public would virtually guarantee they enshittify, but staying private does not guarantee they remain customer focused. It’s still a business, and right now the only thing making it so good for customers, IMHO, is an ideological vision that favours long term stability, and steady profits. That is not the norm in the business world (of tech platforms).

My personal opinion is that better than this in a money driven capitalistic economy is not possible. The pressures to keep growing and to make more are too great and most companies will do anything to make line go up. Valve has been very steady and metered in their ways over the years compared to any other company I am aware of.

If we change the external pressures, as in change our entire economic model, then sure, better can be had, I assume for all companies everywhere not just valve.

lol I’m imagining a line item on all transactions like

    Subtotal 13.21
        Taxe 6.02
Platform fee 6.33
   Yacht fee 10.00
---
Total      $35.56 CAD 

If you login to the Lutris client with your GOG account it skips GOG Galaxy and install the game for you in proton.

I simply do not understand the sentiment that not being a total bastard is something celebrated and not expected or required.

And while many like our Steam benevolent (almost) monopoly, I do wonder how would the market look like if we had 20 competing companies that cannot gain more than 5% of the market share. Can you imagine the competition between them and how would that benefit us, the consumer?

Should the second be punished in some way because of that?

It’s not a punishment. It’s a correction, required to maintain a healthy market.

Your lemonade stand would be more like if there was a stand on every block: By virtue of the scale of their business they could afford to undercut any competition that tried to start up. If they did that they could be slapped on the wrist for being anti-competitive.

Is Valve/Steam anti-competitive? IDK. It’s a monopoly, though, so you have to watch it extra carefully to ensure it doesn’t abuse its position as a market leader.

I think Valve has a lot of good people there. Hopefully succession has been planned and leadership will go to someone as good as GabeN.

It would likely result in endless corporate backstabbing, exclusive deals, contracts fights, and patent trolling

Which would likely result in horrid quality of life for the end user. Having to maintain countless accounts and subscriptions to have even fractional access to games.

It would likely also fuck over the studios and indie developers who would be shoved aside or relentlessly bought up in a ever growing attempt to grow.

More competition does not always mean things are better for the consumer. You can see the exact same thing played out with the recent rise and now slow descent to streaming services. As we went from one good one that turned into a horrible one as the sharehold is demanded it, then more rows and then things only became worse.

When you start operating at the sort of scale that the internet does, true, the whole competition thing being better for the consumer rarely works out.

You more frequently just end up with a bunch of greedy companies endlessly trying to one-up each other f****** over everyone in their attempts resulting in no one-winning, not the company, not the developers creators or middlemen nor and definitely not least the consumer.

True competition benefiting the consumer also requires there to be a connection to the consumer in a reason to actually service them. The companies need to be fighting for the consumer and not just each other. But that is all capitalism is turned into. The consumer is no longer the end goal. They’re just fighting each other to stomp them out so that all that’s left is themselves.

It’s been shown time and time again for decades now at at sufficient size competition just by itself does not help. The only thing that is repeatedly shown to be helpful is private companies with a good person at their home. Not trying to be a greedy f***.

And it’s showing time and time again. Every time that person retires the company sold their holders. Found public offerings made things just get worse.

The problem is not monopolies are bad. It’s not. The competition is good. It’s at public companies are a problem in the law forcing companies to do everything in their power to please. The shareholders is killing everything.

I’m the opposite, I find user assigned tags to be far more accurate. Otherwise every game would be put into the most generic categories. From my experience the tags are generally accurate.