… of fucking course there’s a marketshare, for the sales of games on the PC market. Most sales are through Steam. Be serious.
The only games that don’t live or die by being on Steam are wildly exceptional cases that would have succeeded even if you still had to drive to a store to get them.
Market share is the only thing defining a monopoly.
Absolute monopolies basically do not exist, except as subcategories of de facto monopolies. Even Apple obviously does not monopolize smartphones.
What would anti-competitive practices even mean, if there were no competitors?
And yet, plainly capable of abusing their near total dominance of an open platform. Hence the concern about Gabe specifically. They have this power, but choose not to be dicks about it.
They still have this power. That’s what the word means.
You went straight from ‘they don’t have a monopoly’ to ‘they don’t abuse their monopoly’ in literally the next sentence. This topic is bewildering to discuss, because everyone not simply acknowledging ‘yes of course the one store with like ninety percent of sales is a monopoly’ is trying to juggle several conversations they’d rather be having. I often come to regret mentioning Epic or consoles because people pivot into criticism like I offered any form of defense.
Look: I have an NES homebrew that opens with the Yuzu logo and the words “never give Nintendo money.” I’ve been yelling about Apple’s enforced censorship since 2007. I’ve called for Google to be broken up for at least ten years. You do not need to tell me what an abusive monopoly looks like, in this thread where I am explicitly making the distinction between abusive monopolies and just plain having a monopoly.
There’s other subthreads saying Valve succeeds “despite capitalism.” People get so fucking weird about this company, because they refuse to believe that a corporation can do normal business and still be fine.
Steam does not abuse their what?
Standard Oil was not an absolute monopoly. Nobody was forced to buy from them. And yet.
An egregious standard is still egregious. The excuse has always been, well, Nintendo made the console, sold on thin margins, and they manufacture the carts, sooo an entire third must be reasonable. But Steam proves the only reason is that they can get away with it. They don’t need any force besides their existing dominance, to maintain that dominance.
It’s not a problem. But it easily could be. That’s all anyone’s talking about when they worry about the company after Gabe.
Their monopoly is preferable to many alternatives, but we need to remember:
It is a monopoly.
Their 30% cut is egregious.
The latter should be a simple argument, but I’ve had some bewildering interactions where people cannot grasp ‘number too big’ unless I name a precise lower value and stake my life on it. Nah. The simple fact is, it’s the same gross cut that console manufacturers take. Those companies design and manufacture the underlying hardware, and ruthlessly maintain absolute control over what games are permitted on the platform. So it’s eyebrow-raising that a mere independent repository can also scrape off a third of the retail price for games they didn’t make.
The former is a simple argument, but only when people can be honest about words. Every denial boils down to ‘but I like Valve!’ no matter how thoroughly I establish, so do I. They’re doing fine. They’re still a monopoly. There’s one store you kinda have to be on because everybody goes there… often exclusively. They have a super-duper-majority market share. Their competitors exist but do not matter. Epic has one game that makes a billion dollars a year selling hats, and even they can’t move the needle.
It’s fine because they’re not evil. They have not abused their monopoly position for anticompetitive practices, and it’s hard to argue they’re anti-consumer. But the precondition for abusing a monopoly is being a monopoly.
Known fraud demonstrates why voter fraud basically never happens, hopefully rots in jail.
I dunno how onerous the usual punishment is for trying this - but any judge should see a pattern of abusive recidivism. He’s not going to learn unless you hit him harder. Or maybe he’ll never learn, and it’s for everyone’s benefit if his dumb ass is kept off the streets.
‘Oh it’s a crime for The Idiot to use federal money to promote his lackeys? Well then we get to say that too, or you’re not playing fair!’
Over details any functional adult should’ve known immediately - not because the whole fucking idea is unhinged drooling fascist wank material.
[This is what John Searle actually believed]
Ban advertising entirely.
Put someone in jail.
Stop drawing lines in the sane and apply consequences, god dammit.
If we held these things indoors ten years ago we might not be in this mess.
People in Texas think plenty about Texas politicians, and are the only people allowed to select Texas politicians, and they seem to think it would be funny if Republican candidates skinned a live dog on national television.
I mean, Ted Cruz’s opponent was in a band. How gauche.
Unless his magical immunity to laws stops working outside the Texas border, I’m not sure what the fuck would change.
The Onion could publish a headline like ‘Ken Paxton kills local man for sport, nothing expected to happen.’
The appropriate use of this technology would be to make rendering dirt cheap and then apply style transfer as a constant overhead. But really, it should be something the game does. Like if you develop on some 500 FPS relic of an engine, but train with offline renders of whatever you want it to look like. Full global illumination, true subsurface scattering, flawless hair sims. all that fancy shit. Spend an hour path-tracing each frame. That’s the look you’ll fake on top of a fullbright Source g-buffer.
At least two of those are preliminary Doom ports to the NES. There’s a third one that’s only on Github.
It’s almost like the chatbot that codes has made arbitrarily complex goals massively easier. Will that produce many low-effort or half-finished projects? Sure… but so did Unity. Ninety percent of everything is crap. You have to focus on the exceptions, or you’ll drown in it.