The most promising Disco Elysium successor studio says workers must unite to topple Valve's 'digital fiefdom' of Steam
The most promising Disco Elysium successor studio says workers must unite to topple Valve's 'digital fiefdom' of Steam
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One of the only good stores is suddenly the asshole but not because they did something wrong, its because everyone else sucks.
Fuck that. They aren't responsible for other's failures. GOG and itch.io are around and doing fine and aren't hated, if GOG would finally make a Linux GOG Galaxy without having to go through troublesome third Party tinkering (compared to steam) it would be a great competitor. But Epic and the other "stores" just suck ass lack features lack community lack privacy and generally suck ass. That's not valves fault.
if GOG would finally make a Linux GOG Galaxy without having to go through troublesome third Party tinkering (compared to steam) it would be a great competitor.
I still think this is a huge blunder by GOG. There has to be a very significant overlap in the user base of DRM free software and Linux.
At least Heroic has matured very well and GOG partnered up with them so something is moving.
Glad to hear Gog is partnering with Heroic. Heroic is pretty slick, and only getting slicker. Shame to waste effort, and much better than forking and not contributing to upstream.
By far not enough sadly, and they could literally just integrate proton into a store that runs on Linux, proton is open source (besides some steam API stuff).
Its not hard and them not doing it shows how little CDPR actually cares about GOG, its either running or not they don't really give a fuck. And for that it works good all things considered.
I think there's a difference between them being a good company for customers and them being a digital fief. Similar to how Amazon could be seen as a "good" company by customers (return policy, cheap stuff, etc), but they essentially own an entire marketplace and decides who sells products, and extracts rents from people who are making good innovative stuff. Steam is the same way.
Of course, Valve doesn't have the mistreatment of employees Amazon does. They have no internal hierarchy, which is cool and I imagine means less management involvement. Their president seems to just want to make gamers happy, and thats great too.
Theyre an anomaly in the business world because they're seemingly a great company that doesn't follow monetization trends, while still being hugely financially successful. But they still extract rents from videogame makers, so leftists see that as a black eye.
Agree with most you say. Just two things
Steam doesn't own the market place, as said, gog and itch.io do their stuff, epic is also there (nobody with a brain likes them but they still have a share) and then a publisher could just make a website for their game, Minecraft for example.
They don't decide either, the algorithms within steam work very clearly and their seasonal sales are from my knollage open sign up for the devs and publishers. The player specific feeds also work according to tags, play a lot of builder games recently? Steam recommends similar games you might like, sometimes mixes between tags you haven't played like that.
In reality it's almost exclusively up to the devs/publishers and the players what gets sold steam does push indie stuff a little more in recent years but I don't see the downside of that.
And secondly.
"Leftist" real left people would be happy that steam is how it is and would bring constructive criticism. The people screaming Steam bad, are the same people that scream everything else when they get cloud from it.
I see what you're getting at, and I agree to an extent. Steam doesn't own the whole marketplace, but they do own their whole marketplace, which is the biggest. So I think the issue for leftists that I'm referring to is the rents aspect -- profiting off of the value of other people's work.
You could argue steam adds some value to accessing games in one place, or that they need to be able to maintain their servers in order to maintain efficient distribution for publishers. But in terms of classical economics Steam doesn't produce a product, I think it's arguable they provide a service, and I think their capital is mostly a product of their ownership of cloud capital. When a company makes money based mostly on the ownership of an asset, be it land or machinery or computers, that's where leftists take umbrage. Not liberals or Democrats necessarily, just leftists.
But that all said I still like Steam and Valve overall.
These "leftists" have a screw loose. Servers are a money sink, especially regarding electricity costs. Its not a property they own its a service they provide that costs a lot, servers have gigantic upkeep compared to real estate or similar.
These "leftists" as said aren't actually left, they are identity political cloud farmers and no life trolls. Actual left people don't hate on reality for the sake of it. Shit costs money and actual left people know and accept that. Shure you could argue that steam needs to pay more taxes around the world and I would even agree, that's a leftist take, but brain rot morons shitting on people doing business isn't left, its dumb.
Sorry dude, you have a right to your opinion -- but most of what you just said isn't true. I understand you think it's ridiculous, but being against rent extraction is a classically leftist political philosophy. You're right that it costs money to operate servers, but that doesn't mean those servers are not the property of Valve. They utilize that property to collect rent from publishers.
That fact is not well liked by leftists. By liberals? Sure, go nuts. But I think you're in the process of finding yourself in the latter camp, at the moment. I'd definitely encourage you to look up leftists vs liberals because I think you may have a misunderstanding.
Regardless, I agree the hate/vitriol can go overboard coming from these types of people. I agree with the political and philosophical underpinnings of their frustration, but we are all born into a rat race and taught that we should do anything to get out of it, so no one actually thinks about whether things like "passive income" are right or wrong. We are taught that's what you gotta shoot for, and I'm not going to blame someone for still believing that.
I came to think of a good analogy!
Steam is the guy that build up a stand on a farmers market and sells his goods and the goods from the people in his village that don't want to brother with the work to drive a hour to the city and set up a stand and stay there all ray long.
The steam guy does a service and keeps a agreed upon portion of the sales for his needs.
Its not rent, rent is what the steam guy has to pay as a stand fee.
Yes, being against RENT is left, but steam is a store not a property that is rented, a real store also needs to pay its employees and profits from selling stuff. Its not rent. Its not passive income either, steam as a store is under constant maintenance and upkeep.
And i know what liberal means, liberal means less government involvement, however liberals opposite is authoritarian, not left. Left doesn't need to be authoritarian even though it tends to become in real life.
I'm a liberal, moderately conservative, leftist, and yes all these terms have separate meanings that don't excluded each other. Liberal = Less state and government involvement, Conservative = doesn't like cultural change (in my case its mostly about being realistic about things, so I could replace moderate conservative with realism, however realism isn't a political terminology) and left is a economic/social orientation that wants to reduce wealth gap between poor and rich.
I have passive income, I'm literally profiting of of basically every war, doesn't mean I want war, I just invented intelligently when it was too quite for some time. There are people that hate me for it, and i actually couldn't care less. I make a dollar doing nothing and they don't, I still go to work every day like a normal person and contribute with my work, Im also politically active, all the people that are loud and cry on the internet have something in common, their RL sucks and nobody cares about them.
Again, Rent and a service are different things. And people that don't understand that are... Well, mistaken.
The cut that Steam takes from publishers is a rent. It is the equivalent of buying property and allowing an individual or family to live in it, for a cut of their wages. The landowner and Steam do not produce anything -- they are a place, physical or virtual, for people to operate out of, at a cost. Steam is not a store that sells their own products, they are a platform that sells other people's stuff and they take a cut. If I own a big plot of land, and let a bunch of businesses operate on that land as long as they pay me monthly, I'm taking a rent. It's the same thing.
I feel like I don't even need to comment on your weird bragging about profiting off of war, but I'll just say this -- whether you like it or not, whether you are personally interested or not, you are financially interested in the suffering and death of other people. If you think that's morally okay, good for you. Personally, I think that's pretty monstrous. I'd wish you a good day, but after learning that, I hope you get some help.
Steam is a service provider, they don't rent out shit. They do the marketing, distribution and payment processing. They are not rent. Idk what definition of rent is stuck in your head but I think that definition needs some reinstall, apparently its corrupted and fucked up the definition of Services.
A rent is something you get for giving someone property for money and still own it.
A service is (for example) when you distribute a product for someone and market it to people that might want it.
Big difference, and exactly what I don't like about the nowadays leftists, speak a lot without knowing theory and definitions. Make the movement look like anti realistic morons that fight ghosts.
Oh and yes I'm absolutely financially interested in the suffering of others... Where is the diviece from that you made this comment with?
Edit: In case anyone needs this broken down: Online videogame marketplaces are a resource. The supply of online videogame marketplaces is fixed. Valve is the owner of the largest online videogame marketplace, Steam. The publisher of a videogame pays Valve to list their game on Steam. A payment to the owner of a resource, the supply of which is fixed, is economic rent. Imagine how low you gotta be to downvote Wikipedia.