Let's replace "good guy" with "one of the few actually good services in gaming", would you still disagree?

I mean I get what you're saying, but Valve is actually one of the few large tech companies that are providing an actually good service (Steam). People should be allowed to make money by providing value to their customers because that's the motivation of building such services and products in the first place.

The hatred should go towards the companies abusing their position and violating customers and then just cashing excessive amounts of money for a crap product/service that has no real competition. If Valve had started making their competitors lives harder, by generating lots of nonsense lawsuits for example, they should absolutely be blasted down to hell by everybody. As long as they are just earning lots of bucks by providing a service people want to use without restricting using other services and playing with healthy rules otherwise as well, it's all fine and everyone working on the great service SHOULD earn more than average.

Steam is a service that costs money to keep running - lot's of money actually in their scale. When you sell a Steam key outside of Steam, they don't get their cut which goes toward running costs and whatnot. It doesn't of course matter if it's just some random few keys but if almost all devs started to do that, it could cause some serious funding problems to Valve. That could then lead to reduced service levels of Steam and that would hurt their customers - the players - the most.

So while it's not a big problem currently, it could be if it wasn't prevented properly in contractual level. People who think that is an unfair clause don't probably understand what it actually takes to run a service like Steam or they are straight competitors trying to run them out of business in any way imaginable.

E: And actually if Steam still allows selling the Steam keys in external services but only requires the price to match the price in Steam, it's already a quite charitable policy. I guess they count on not too many people buying the key externally for the same price than in Steam store.

Okay, but who gets to decide what's the maximum profit margin allowed? How would it be determined so that it wouldn't also prevent new competition from growing up because that 30% is the only thing that allows the companies to make some money from their service and use that money to develop said service.

I do, and I feel like the real intent is something completely different here than what is said out loud.

E: So Epic Games Store is actually giving out games for free and they still can't gain traction because their platform sucks so bad otherwise. My guess is someone just wants to try and get a tough competitor driven out of one country so that they could bring their own, worse, service there instead and take the market share without actually competing.

Exactly. Why should they succeed if they don't even try to win the competition?

Streaming platforms for TV series and movies went into the direction of every large movie company running their own streaming platform and only limiting their own content to their own platform which lead into a bad customer experience when you just wanted to see the latest Disney or HBO or whatever thing. I think it's a good thing EA and others didn't succeed doing the same in gaming industry and only limiting their games to their own stores even though they did try really hard. That's not even competition, it's just being greedy.

A true competitor to Steam would try to sell and serve games of their own and also made by others. I guess Epic tries to do that in a sense but they also lack the actual effort of making a good product and instead tries to win some market share by just throwing lots of money at it. I know it's hard to build an actually good software product (because I work in the industry) but I also know it's not impossible. Somehow the companies that have the means to compete just aren't able to get their shit together and for some reason that's the reason why we shouldn't like Valve either?

I don't care how many yachts Gaben owns, he's free to do whatever he wishes as long as he provides me a great service that I'm willing to use money towards.

And Microsoft did try really hard back in the day to make Linux go away. Luckily OSS community was already large enough that they were able to fight the legal cases and the whole thing didn't dry up. Nowadays Microsoft endorses Linux because they decided they can squeeze value out of other people's free work for themselves (and because pretty much the entire server industry runs on Linux anyways).

They absolutely could. If only there was any serious competition and not just some quick cash grabbers like EA and others. As long as Steam is providing most value to users (=players) without even restricting competition like other tech companies do in other areas (cough Apple), they are able to take the 30% cut without a complaint.

So "too big to fail" or something?

I don't know if you lived through the Internet Explorer era, but that was exactly the same situation in browsers back in the day. Internet Explorer was preinstalled in every Windows computer, so in pretty much every computer, and it was deemed as "unbeatable" because people were too lazy to install anything else. In retrospective, it didn't take too long for Google Chrome to beat IE market share and nowadays pretty much the whole world uses Chrome and nothing else. Now, with IE, EU had to step in and force Microsoft to present their users a dialog to choose their browser in a fresh Windows installation which did have a role in that market share change. With Steam there isn't a need for that, because every user has to go and explicitly install Steam client to their computer before using it. Same goes with Chrome.

Although, vendor lock really is a real issue, and I do agree with you that if one has thousands of euros/dollars worth of games in their Steam account, it's purely convenient to keep on buying their next games on Steam as well. What I don't agree with is, that if there was a new competitor that was better in every way imaginable and they were able to sell the games on their platform for, let's say, -5% constantly, people wouldn't start using their service. You have to remember, that there is also a constant stream of new gamers (young people) that haven't even created a Steam account, and nothing is preventing them from choosing another service for their first game purchase. It's just that there isn't a real alternative to Steam currently.

I mean Valve has a game store called Steam, but what's the actual position they have? There are competing game stores - both digital and physical - and Valve isn't trying to run their competition out of business with shady business tactics? Just by being good at something and therefore running a successful business shouldn't be illegal or hated by itself - it's the way the business is being conducted that actually matters. Gaben is free to have yacht or two as long as his company is being run with a healthy mindset, their employees are being paid a fair salary (which I guess is another discussion in it's own who decides that) and they are not screwing their competition nor their customers up.

What would be the solution here that could drive the prices down? Limit profit levels per company?

I feel like it's not even capitalism itself being the problem alone, but also the entry cost for all these services. Building a competitor to Steam is pretty much equal to building a competitor to Youtube which means it's almost impossible due to the running costs of the service AND you would have to be somehow wildly better as in not gather as much money from your customers. It would be lovely to see some resolution to these problems without going full communism first.

I brought Epic just as an example of an actual competitor actually trying to compete against Steam, sorry if I I was a bit unclear about that.

So lots of entrepreneurs get rich when they make a product that solves people's problems in one way or another and it sells with a profit - let it be a small profit or a large profit. The thing with capitalism is, if you make your profit too large, eventually a competitor will come and provide an equal or better product with slightly smaller profit or they figured out a way to make the product cheaper and still maintain the same profit margin with a lower price gaining a market share.

The problem with Apple, other large tech companies or some grocery chains in some parts of world (this is the case where I live actually) is that they are not allowing a healthy competition in the first place. If a competitor appears on the market, they will buy them before gaining too much traction, or if that's not possible, they will do everything they can in their power to drive them out of the market by lobbying politicians, or if they control some valuable aspect of the market, restrict access to said market.

Valve hasn't practiced any of those shady tactics as far as I know of and that's why people actually think of them as one of the "good guys" even if it is somewhat unhealthy. You shouldn't try to beat down the people playing with a friendly rule set of capitalism because they are the ones driving the competition forward.

Eikös tämä tapahdu jo ihan luontaisesti ajan myötä? Sen sijaan, että blokataan kategorisesti kaikki ääntä aiheuttavat ajoneuvot päivästä X eteenpäin, odotettaisiinkin vain rauhassa ajoneuvojen sähköistymistä koska vuosiluvut ovat jo selvillä (kuten aloitteessakin mainitaan).

Ja sen lisäksi melurajat ovat jo olemassa. Eri asia onkin siinä, että kuka niitä valvoo ja kuinka tehokkaasti.

I was just watching CityPlannerPlays stream where he was trying the new patch out, and oh boy has the game changed totally. It actually looked like a fun challenge instead of the money printing simulator that it was before.

To be fair Windows Live for Gaming (or whatever it was called) DID function on release. It was dropped after a few years and doesn't really count as a bad release.

If you aren't native English speaker and therefore use a different keyboard layout than US, pretty much all features disappear on iOS. The keyboard is garbage compared to Android's native keyboard and for some reason even after 3 years of iPhone ownership I still write more typos on the iPhone than I ever did on Android phones.

I wish I could use some 3rd party keyboard, but because Jobs decided in the past that Apple's keyboard is the only thing users ever really need, I can't. There is a limited support for custom keyboards but in practice the user experience is garbage.

Let's play ball here too. So by definition there's always going to be a richest person in the world - let it be with a difference of 100 dollars to the median or a billion dollars or 100 billion dollars. Who gets to decide who is the richest person and by what means? Clearly it shouldn't be a business person so would it be a politician, a dictator, a president or who? And how should we restrict entrepreneurs getting there without destroying every company and therefore making everyone unemployed because there's no incentive to run a business anymore? How would we balance risks with gains if we are not allowed to make a profit?

I have to say I haven't had an issue with Nvidia graphics on Linux in... ummm... 10 years I guess? I used to switch between Nvidia and AMD GPUs but for the last 7 years it's only been Nvidia in my computer. Now, I would love to try the latest AMD stuff but there's one critical problem:

AMD choosing to only provide open source drivers is absolutely great except for one thing: They lack the HDMI 2.1 support on Linux because HDMI Forum doesn't allow that to be open sourced for some reason. I also happen to use an LG C2 42" "monitor" on my work desk for the great real estate and I really need the HDMI 2.1 support. So now I'm stuck with Nvidia GPUs until either AMD can implement the HDMI 2.1 support for their Linux drivers or I feel like replacing the insanely expensive monitor for something equivalent or maybe better with a DisplayPort connectivity.

I've been learning German too myself, and the thing that the traditional language courses don't teach you is the way natives speak. Listening to actual German speakers was pretty much alien to me even after two years until I bumped into a couple Easy German videos where they touch the very same subject as this xkcd and that actually got me listening to certain parts of speech more carefully and that way also understand it better.

Now I actually find myself doing the same shortcuts sometimes when I'm progressing with the skill. It's the same with English since I have to use it daily at work even though I'm not a native speaker. Funny how the languages work in real life vs. in theory.

Oh no, the FizzBuzz EE has evolved since I've last viewed it! 😱 Is it bad if it actually reminds me of my current work project's backend (that I haven't written) a bit?