Permanently Deleted
:lenin-shining: Half a century ago, when Marx was writing Capital, free competition appeared to the overwhelming majority of economists to be a “natural law”. Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly. Today, monopoly has become a fact. Economists are writing mountains of books in which they describe the diverse manifestations of monopoly, and continue to declare in chorus that “Marxism is refuted”. But facts are stubborn things, as the English proverb says, and they have to be reckoned with, whether we like it or not. The facts show that differences between capitalist countries, e.g., in the matter of protection or free trade, only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies or in the moment of their appearance; and that the rise of monopolies, as the result of the concentration of production, is a general and fundamental law of the present stage of development of capitalism.
But facts are stubborn things, as the English proverb says, and they have to be reckoned with, whether we like it or not.
:shapiro-gavel:
Oh well. I'm glad someone tried. Steam is a bomb waiting to go off, and when it does it's going to tear a hole in gaming as everyone loses access to god knows how many $$$ of games.
Definitely try out Overgrowth. It's a neat game about rabbits who do brutal kung fu to each other. Furries will love it.
professional end of the industry will never recover from
:sicko-yes:
Didn't think so, but I'd love to hear about a judge who says fuck it and rules in favor of human decency at least once.
You know this joke about shitty judge have been made for literal thousands of year so if no honest judge have appeared bin the past millennium then the outlook isn't good.
I don't really care about anything that Steam does specifically anymore, like the stupid market stuff. The Epic Launcher sucks and is slow but developers should release their games on it. I usually check EGS for a game before Steam. If you're on Windows you can use Playnite as a library aggregator and it's way nicer to use than any other launcher. The Steam as a monopoly thing is more true for indie devs than anyone else but there are other options if you can do marketing outside of the game platform, so that makes it harder to say that Steam is still a monopoly.
For some reason there's a lot of games that don't release on itch.io. Like Overgrowth, for example. I guess there's probably a bit of work to do to create a store page and everything.
Stop paying for games on anything
but Itch and directly from the developers.There
What really seems to make Steam a functional monopoly is how launchers are generally treated. Nobody wants to have more than one launcher, launchers fucking suck if you have to juggle them, and so people would prefer to just use one launcher for all their games. GOG, Humble Bundle, Itch.io, and even to a limited extent (as in it's probably not actually intentional but more a result of the... "economical" implmentation) EGS can all have their games downloaded, installed, and updated through a third party FOSS client, which makes it at least theoretically possible to truly integrate them into one launcher. You don't have to launch a separate launcher to launch (most) EGS games, you can simply install Legendary, a FOSS CLI tool for managing EGS games, and have a FOSS launcher use that to launch those games without even having the EGS app itself installed on your system. Heroic is a GUI frontend for Legendary, for those interested.
But Steam (and Origin and uPlay, for that matter) requires you to launch their full-fat client to launch games bought on that platform, and the experience of launching a launcher is really, really bad. Origin, at least, has a thin client whose purpose is to make this launcher-launching-a-launcher business not suck as much, don't know so much about uPlay but I believe they still make you launch their whole fucking GUI for it. And so people generally would rather just launch their games through Steam rather than use a FOSS, interoperable launcher (or, gasp, an OS's package manager!).
And that's how Valve's able to have something of a walled garden on PC, because they got their launcher in first and nobody can reasonably pressure them into making their games comply with an open standard so that a FOSS launcher or package manager could integrate their games seamelessly (and so make the choice of storefront somewhat more competitive).
If I let myself speculate wildly, I'd suspect the reason Valve's actually p generous about Steam keys, letting developers sell Steam keys on other stores while Valve takes a 0% cut, is specifically to avoid antitrust regulation. I would suspect that at some point some of these companies trying to have their own launchers just to avoid paying Steam 30% will attempt to have some sort of interoperable standard for game ownership authentication (NOT NFT'S JESUS CHRIST); that would allow a single client to basically support any arbitrary store, so that you can buy Origin and Bethesda games in the same place and neither company has to share their profits, because I suspect they're aware the "I don't want more than one launcher" issue gets worse when they all have their own bespoke launchers that have, like, three games worth playing apiece. In that context, I think it'd be more likely that some sort of legal action might be taken to try to coerce Valve into supporting that standard lest it be seen as anti-competitive, at which point Valve will go absolutely fucking apeshit because that would fundamentally threaten their de facto monopoly on PC.
because I suspect they’re aware the “I don’t want more than one launcher” issue gets worse
Except they probably use their clients to collect information about your computer, what programs and hardware you have installed, and sell or at least use that information for marketing and business decisions, so they won't want to support a standard launcher. Plus with their own launchers they can introduce you to the store page and notify you of stales and junk. And also supporting standards actually requires some effort and cooperation and desire to improve things which most of these companies have none of.
Possibly, but I think the value of that data is less valuable than not paying Valve 30% of their sales revenue, data is worth money but certainly not that much, especially when they're struggling to have many concurrent installations and especially when the games themselves could collect telemetry just fine. I'd imagine such a standardized launcher could also easily support multiple storefronts. Agreeing on the standard in the first place would take effort but also corporations do that all the time anyways when it suits them.
Most companies with their own launchers attract people to them with exclusive titles (their own games) and they probably don't lose thaaat much revenue. EA has a bunch of properties, Blizzard has a bunch, Epic Games has Fortnite, and so on. However, EA did recently decided to release their games on Steam again, I think they've probably negotiated a better profit-sharing agreement (most big companies can do this), although it still just launches their own game launcher. It doesn't really seem like the paradigm of Steam as industry leader and other launchers just... existing, is going anywhere. Having annoying launchers probably isn't going to lose them many sales, although with GTAV and RDR2, the Rockstar launcher is infuriatingly bad and might lose some sales.
I don’t really care about anything that Steam does specifically anymore
The best thing it does is controller compatibility, and I'm 100% certain that if Steam's ownership changed hands this feature would be allowed to atrophy and get abandoned and we would be back to relying on joy2key.
its so weird to hear about this game again. My brother bought the ultra alpha game when it was still just a hyper technical fighting demo.
It's like Dwarf Fortress in that I chart its development in terms of number of years it takes for the rabbits to do something new. One year they're jumping with different physics than their 2008 jumps, decades later my grandchild will show me that they can jump-roll now.
pretty unfair to compare it to dorf since toady actually like, adds features and content and shit in his updates
