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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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I generally avoid liking any companies or brands, but it’s difficult to not appreciate some of the things Valve does.
They do things for their own benefit, but it benefits everyone because they don’t try and lock things down quite like other companies.
Agreed! They make it very difficult to dislike them. I suspect a time will come when they start losing touch, and I've always wondered how much of their general direction is associated with Gabe specifically.
Having seen some of the things Gabe has done, like personally delivering the first Steam Decks and constantly speaking at gaming conferences and doing panels, etc, I think a lot of it is him. I do worry about whether he has a succession plan in place.
I've heard that the company internally functions a lot like a co-op. That's your succession plan right there. Mondragon lights the way.
Well there was the whole dollarization for less wealthy countries that made them a no-fly-zone. A friend of mine was recently telling me about how he bought Deep Rock Galactic for 600 pesos and since the dollarization the same game now equates to 30 thousand pesos.
It hurts to do it because right now Valve is an amazing company, but I've started buying games where possible on GOG and archiving the installers for exactly this reason. If some horrific Valve-EA merger ever happens in the far future they won't be able to hold all of my library hostage
Yeah, they've got a monopoly and it sucks, but they don't seem to have a desire to push it to the point of drawing attention. I know why Epic does what it does, because they have to compete with the near complete market dominance of Valve. However, it's not like Valve has used their position to increase prices or anything like that. They also invest in doing things that improve the experience rather than just trying to harm the competition.
I don't like the monopoly, but I do appreciate Valve as a company.
I keep seeing "Monopoly" repeated, but I'm having a hard time understanding the logic.
They haven't bought competitors. They don't do anything to hinder others progress in this market, sometime to the detriment of their customers (see: Steam launches another launcher, to launch the game). They haven't openly shown anything anti-competitive, in fact they have stuck to their guns (30% cut) when others have attempted to compete.
What they have done is cultivate the best platform that continues to evolve, add features, and maintain stability. Consumers continue to choose to use Steam overwhelmingly, but outside of Valve's own games, there is no threat of exclusivity or punishment.
It's the opposite of monopolistic behavior. Any company is free to compete, build their own platform, and offer software. It's expensive, and tricky to get right, but nothing is stopping them, Valve included.
A monopoly doesn't care about actions. There's only one place people think about when they think to purchase a game on PC. That means it's a monopoly. Sure, it's not a horrible situation, and they don't seem to be significantly exploiting their position, but that doesn't change that they have no real competition.
It's just a shame the competition kinda sucks. Epic is pulling some good moves with all the free games and some really competitive prices but their launcher sucks and GoG have an abysmal launcher while rarely having newer titles because of so many companies holding tight to DRM
Valve doesn't set prices on the store in the first place. They are giving more margin for big sellers now too.
More margin to big sellers seems sort of backwards to me, but I guess it makes it easier to convince large publishers to put games on steam? Personally I’m more interested in bigger margins for indies, but maybe I’m ignorant.
Ah yes, the monopoly, a business with competitors such as ea origin, Ubisoft dunno what they called it, epic store, gog. The word monopoly must break down like monopol-y as in like a monopole, a magnet with only one polarity that is separate from the other polarity.
The fact you can't even name the Ubisoft service shows it's isn't really competition. It exists, but it doesn't compete. Sure, you can choose to go somewhere else to purchase some games, but none of then threaten Steam.
The Ubisoft one is just particularly shitty. The only reason steam remains unthreatened is because the rest of them have mentally crippled shareholders at the helm. If steam ever went that way or undermined customer ownership they would surely be fucked and everyone with a functioning brain would go GOG or sail the seas. It's also not like they chose to or actively pursue being the only game store. The only limiting factor in using other game sources on the steam deck for example is the lack of interest from any other sale platform to support any degree of Linux. Open source devs have already replaced most if not all of their functionality with easily installable frontends. If one was really so deranged, even windows can be installed on the damn thing. I've at least never heard of any valve enforced steam exclusive titles, but vaguely recall some developer advertising something as only on steam.
The only way I feel one could justify calling steam a monopoly is to totally shit on the utter ineptitude of the competition so far as to dismiss their very existence, using it more as an insult to the competition than a descriptor for valve/steam, which is valid in a way but I don't think it makes the terminology usage objectively true.
Even ignoring all that or if steam actually was a monopoly by my or anyone's standards, I'm more concerned about the things that technically are not monopolies yet collude (even unintentionally which is unlikely) to fuck everyone over. Such as food industry globally, Canadian telecom, the current state of tv/movie streaming, etc.
They mainly have a monopoly because everyone else's attempt to compete sucks. I haven't seen any launcher that has half the features or conveniences steam has. Most of them are slower too.
Steam offers actual value. Other launchers just feel like a lazy way to add drm.
Well, yeah. Steam has been around for a very long time and is the only real option. They have a ton of extra money to spend that a new competitor hard never expect to match. That's what makes it bad. Yeah, it's a great product, but what would we have if there was an actual competitor pushing them to be better? Would they take less of a cut or would they make Steam even better? Maybe they'd reduce prices of games for consumers even.
The fact of the matter is no one else really competes, so it's a monopoly.
The hardest part is getting games on the platform, and epic and gog have already done that. Giving it features that steam has is just a matter of money and time, which other game companies definitely have.
I agree it's a monopoly and I'd love to see a good competitor. But it's different from something like at&t, where to even be a cell service provider you need a huge investment, time to build infrastructure, and government approval. All you need to make a good game launcher is a dev team, which is what these companies do all the time.
Well they kind of have used their position to indirectly increase prices... If they take a 30% cut then the games need to sell for more to make the same profit (and there's the geolock and anti price-competition thing too)
Yet they also allow developers to sell generated keys with 0% cut either directly or to key sites if they desire.
The only reason being that they loosely apply the agreement people sign with them, they still reserve the right to remove games from their store of they're sold at a lower price elsewhere. They're getting sued for that at the moment.
They do lockdown things.
On EU they tried to geolock customers.
Steam Deck works on selected Linux systems, Steam Deck operating systems isn’t open source after many people demand it to be released for the public.
Alyx is still VR only game and must buy VR game, unless you mod it. Valve refused to release PC version.
Exclusivity is the number one reason they are making money. You can not buy certain games outside of Steam and Valve hasn’t released their own games outside of Steam.
Valve isn’t the good guys and they are criminals with multiple history of lawsuits and abuse to their employees. You shouldn’t keep supporting them.
Most of these are either misinformed, straight misinformation or just weird nitpicks.
The steam deck works perfectly fine with windows and should also work just fine on any linux system. It is literally just a x64 PC in a hand held format. Nothing has been done to limit the devices functionality on systems that aren’t SteamOS.
AFAIK SteamOS 3 will be dropped in the future. Also afaik, development is currently focused specifically on the steam deck first so it’s not particularly useful outside of that.
Thing is though, there’s nothing stopping people from using any other distro other than the belief that SteamOS is some super special distro filled with gaming secret sauce. It’s just a fork of arch with deck specific tweaks. A lot of the work thats been put into SteamOS has also made its way to linux at large.
Alyx is built from the ground up to be a VR game. There really isn’t any way to convert it to a flatscreen game without completely doing away with what makes that game what it is. There’s no flatscreen version to release. Though something to mention is that SteamVR (and by extension alyx and any VR game on steam) supports all VR HMD’s provided they’re compatible with OpenVR.
The games that are exclusive to Steam, aside from valve’s own games, are there entirely by publisher/developer choice and are not enforced by valve. Unlike a certain other storefront that pays for timed exclusivity rights which is, ironically for them, a monopolistic move.
There are legitimate reasons to criticise valve, they’re not innocent by any means.
But the things I’ve pointed out really aren’t issues.
Also valve being criminals and being abusive to their employees are massive claims. Would be nice to see some proof of that. Not a fan of making up things to be angry about when there are legitimate issues that we can be angry about instead.
It’s not perfect fine, there’s always a problem like the virtual keyboard from Microsoft (not steam) has problems with the Deck. Linux side also doesn’t have perfect results with reports like starting a new clean state or running without additional background application. The Linux side doesn’t have less problems it has more.
You just did describe the limitations of Steam Deck, all 64x can’t support 32 bit programs and using something like CD to play 32 bit games will cause problems that otherwise isn’t a thing in Windows. Proton doesn’t support CD games which means you aren’t going to play games with CD requirements. Think about this next time instead of using your big mouth.
Someone has made a mod to play the game without VR, it’s Valve who refuses to accept the opportunity for better PC gaming for everyone.
Unfortunately after the EU lawsuit filed. We did learn about backdoor dealings and Valve with other companies do exclusively deals. You are only sourcing your statements from other people who said the exact words. You just messaged a propaganda outlet that is false since EU lawsuit. The court records state the publishers were in agreement to exclusive support for Valve Corporation. It’s unclear if Insomnia studios has a copy of Valve Corporation’s official contract agreement for exclusive content but we may learn more soon.
The proof of criminal activity is in the news. A simple google search will find the answers.
Valve stealing controllers patent from famous keyboard maker Corsair.
Valve guilty of not following AU law for customer refunds.
Valve guilty for EU geolock laws.
Valve guilty for violating the USA monopoly and will be investigated by the federal government.
Valve guilty for breaking French resell of digital games and must offer resell for digital games.
The list goes on and on. They are criminals and supporting criminals makes you a criminal.
Like what issues? What is the problem with the OSK on Windows? How is this valve's fault? I personally can't find any issues regarding the OSK other than people not knowing how to open it. Some help would be nice to see where you're coming from.
Can you be more specific please? What distros are we talking about? Certain distros such as debian and ubuntu generally don't ship with the bleeding edge of software updates. Mainly kernel updates. Which can lead to issues when running them on the latest hardware. One issue being audio, that was recently fixed with support being added to the kernel. Since it's relatively recent it wouldn't surprise me if it hadn't reached the slower release cycle distros like Debian and Ubuntu. While it reaches bleeding edge distros like Arch. So again, be more specific. What issues. What additional programs are needed?
Except 32-bit applications do run under linux and the steam deck. I know this both from personal experience and the fact it's not to hard to check ProtonDB for 32-bit games and see that reports are given.
You do realise that x86-64 does have 32-bit support, right? Have you actually taken a look at the hardware that the deck has, by any chance?
But anyway, to make the point clearer:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Windows_32-bit_games - This is what I'm using to determine if a game is 32 bit.
https://www.protondb.com/app/107100?device=steamDeck - Bastion, a 32 bit game, that I've been playing recently. Has positive reports for steam deck compatibility.
https://www.protondb.com/app/49520?device=steamDeck - Borderlands 2, same story.
https://www.protondb.com/app/108710?device=steamDeck - Alan Wake
https://www.protondb.com/app/242940?device=steamDeck - Anachronox
So either you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about or you're making this up.
What problems? Again with the vague statements.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1217896/can-i-play-an-old-cd-game-on-linux - Yes you can play CD games.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/rg6wyp/can_linux_run_cd_rom_games_just_as_well_as_windows/ - Same answers across this thread
Thing is though, do you have any proof that this would be an issue that Valve has specifically caused this issue. How do you know that this isn't a linux issue in general?
I'm finding information about the geo blocking. But nothing about exclusivity deals. Got a source?
If this is the Steam Controller back buttons thing. This may be something to consider.
https://metacouncil.com/threads/metasteam-august-2021-openness-is-its-superpower.2507/page-71#post-258331
That's fair enough.
If this is the wolfire games thing. They haven't yet been found guilty and the trial and investigation is still on going. We should probably wait for the results before jumping to conclusions.
Fair.
Kind of have a hard time justifying this though. Yes, fair enough, they did break that law. But at the same time that law does seem rather shortsighted.
On one hand, yeah it's good for the consumer to be able to resell stuff. On the other hand, it's kind of hard to work out how a resale market for digital games would work. It's not like physical games where there's clear benefits and drawbacks to buying new vs used. Something like this would probably push publishers/developers hard into a solution that would get around this that would be worse for the consumer. How would you confirm that the "used" copy you're buying isn't linked to CC fraud, which is a common issue with key resellers like G2A. There's plenty that doesn't sit right, despite it initially sounding like a good thing.
But at the same time the ruling may have been to just prevent valve from adding the stipulating regarding reselling accounts and games. Rather than explicitly forcing them to set up a game reselling platform. Considering it's been 2-3 years since and nothing major has been announced or changed regarding the ruling. It may have been that.
Then everyone is a criminal. If you had to avoid any company that has had legal issues in the past then that would leave you with very little to choose from. Especially with tech.
What companies have you bought from in your lifetime? What about people in your family, or friends? I'd bet my cock and balls that you and/or your family/friends would be a criminal under that exact same reasoning you use.
So there's my thought on that. If I'm a criminal for using steam, then arrest me I guess. I must be a rotten bastard criminal for having used/bought windows, GOG, Uplay, Battle.net, EA, Epic games, meta(through oculus), Apple, Amazon, Ebay, Google, Samsung, Nvidia, AMD, Intel... Need I go on?
All you talk about is defending the criminal after they were convicted of the crime. You are acting like those stupid trump supporters who don’t care about the criminal act. You don’t even dare to research the truth either, the controller lawsuit was under jury, AKA the people AMERICAN people voted Valve committed the crime of stealing patent.
The Europe Commission trial documents are open for the public to read.
During the AU lawsuit Valve was fined for trying to hide the truth about refunds. Valve lawyers fought to the highest court to not pay the millions.
Valve is not good in any case and will never consider you a loyal customer. You are a money bag to them.
Lastly, there’s hundreds of reports of Steam Deck or Proton unable to work. A simple github search from serious tickets to low problems are available for the public to read.
You ever heard of nuance? I'm beginning to think maybe you havent considering your wacky ass statements.
There is room to argue why a judgement may be Just/Unjust. The law upheld by people and people aren't exactly perfect. So there's room for debate.
"You disagree with me therefore you are the worst thing I can possibly thing of."
That's such a genuinely stupid remark to make.
I do care about criminal charges but shit ain't as black and white as you seem to think it is. Like you yourself said, these things are upheld by people and people are rarely ever perfect so I think there's plenty of room to argue why you think a ruling may or may not be perfectly just/unjust.
The legal system has it's flaws.
Go look at that link I sent in regards to the Valve vs Ironburg case.
Specifically this
The verdict was reversed.
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cafc/20-1315/20-1315-2021-08-17.html Here's the full document.
See what I mean by decisions by people aren't perfect and should never be 100% ride or die?
Send me the source then. Like I said, I've looked and I've only found information about the geoblocking and how Valve and a few other companies colluded on that.
If you can point me to some information on valve getting done for exclusivity stuff, that would be great.
I didn't dispute this at all. Why are you reiterating on something I agreed with like I said anything different?
My honest reaction (I am extremely whelmed by this information that I have just heard for the first time)
There's hundreds of reports of just about every device out there not working. It's almost like you make something look really bad by being very vague with your statements.
It's also really easy to do that when you refuse to look at positive reports and also the fact that people are generally less likely to make reports like "My steam deck is working alright" which creates a negativity bias.
It's also really easy to do that when you completely ignore that Linux gaming is still in it's early stages and far from perfect. This isn't specifically a steam deck issue, this is just linux in general. It's only in the last few years that Linux even started to become viable for gaming. Not to mention the fact that linux gaming is largely banking on a compatibility layer because it's trying to run games built for a completely different operating system.
Do you actually know anything about linux/linux gaming at all? Everything you have spoken about regarding linux/linux gaming or the deck has been completely wrong. Again. either you have absolutely no idea what TF you're going on about, or you're lying through your ass.
You were wrong about the x64 thing. You were wrong about the CD thing. You were missing a lot of information when it came to running different OS's on the deck. In fact you were really vague about the majority of that as well. Never gave anything specific. Just said there were problems and never elaborated on them. Why?
Ok, now go do that to any major Github/Gitlab project and realise that they all have a myriad of tickets of varying severity. But don't forget to lose any of the nuance like you did here though.
It's not like Linux Gaming is still in it's VERY early stages and that the Steam Deck is primarily reliant on linux to do it's job. Or that linux gaming is an incredibly complex task to handle given all the low level work that is put into compatibility. The vast, vast majority of games that run on linux are written for a completely different operating system and 100% rely on compatibility layers that capture their windows and graphics API calls and translates them to their closest linux and/or vulkan calls while also having the condition of having as little overhead as possible. And that's only part of the problem.
Lets not forget though that you can make any situation look bad if you're very vague with your statements, provide no reasoning, ignore all nuance and you compare them to literally nothing and just look at it in a vacuum.
Yes, the deck has issues. But have you seen the amount of work that valve has put in to improve things? There is active work put into the entire project. A lot of that work also makes it's way to linux at large as well since a lot of the issues are just to do with the infancy of Linux gaming.
I mean there must be a baller ass reason why the deck is the most successful handheld on the market if it's got all these problems that are as catastrophic as you seem to imply. People that aren't the most hardcore shills generally have a hard time excusing things when their $300-$500 dollar hardware is shitting the bed as hard as you seem to want to imply.
People with working kits are far less likely to open tickets. "My device works well" isn't useful to anyone, is it? No fucking wonder all you're seeing is bug reports and tickets. You're looking at the place that is specifically for people to post bug reports and tickets.
I've been open about my attempts to search about these things. I've also taken every opportunity to ask you for help in finding this information. I've also not commented on the things I couldn't find any information about. I've backed up as many of my claims as I could. Wish the same could be said about you, who has been largely spouting objectively wrong information with no indication of research at all.
Oh come on the same news paper saying the lawyers are fixing the issue of evidence that should finalize the verdict. MAYBE READ.
You are just creating double standards as the truth of EU lawsuit is easy found but you don’t care. You looked into easy reporting of Valve case that defies them in better light. You didn’t cate about the fact or evidence. You only want yourself to believe Valve is the good guy.
This is a common misconception in trump supporters that only viewing small companies that benefit from good content.
You'll have to help me out here because I didn't quote a newspaper. So I'm not sure what point you're disputing here.
I'm going to assume it's the wolfire games lawsuit since you menioned the lack of a final verdict.
I'm just going to say the same thing as before. There's no final verdict. I'd rather wait and see the outcome rather than jump to conclusions. That means both "Valve bad" and "Valve good" opinions.
My man, I haven't disputed anything about the EU lawsuit. I've agreed on the Geoblocking issue and that I can't find anything on the exclusivity stuff. I can't comment on something I can't find. Are you just angry because I'm not blindly agreeing with you or something?
Except for the fact that I have gone looking for facts and evidence. Don't accuse me of something you're guilty of, just with the opposite goal of wanting to believe that Valve is evil.
If I wanted to believe that valve is the good guy I wouldn't have agreed with some of your points like
But for some reason you didn't accept this and tried to push it further as if I didn't already agree.
Fishing for a specific response? I've agreed that valve broke AU law. But because I don't have an extreme opinion on the matter, that's not good enough, apparently.
Don't give me the facts and evidence shit when you've literally been spreading blatent false information to have some excuse to say valve bad. Especially when I posted evidence where I could regarding your misinformation.
Funny how you dropped all that misinformation as well the second I called it out. Didn't try to defend it. Just conveniently act like it never happened.
You also tried the facts and evidence argument once, it didn't work.
Speaking of, just realised you conveniently forgot yet another claim. Remember how you claimed valve was abusive to their employees and I asked for proof? Haven't heard any mention of that from you since. Another case of misinformation?
I guess you didn't get the response you wanted, so you're trying again hoping for something different?
Bro back at it again with the "You don't share the exact same views as I do therefore you're the worst thing I can think of" nonsense.
Whatever happened to this, btw?
Conveniently dropping another point because you didn't get the response you wanted? Seems like a running theme.
I mean you've already rehashed about 3 points you've already tried, and failed. Why not go for another.
Not really, in the first reply I made I even stated that valve isn't an innocent company and they have very real issues. But at the same time, no company is the good guy. I just think that as far as problems every company has, valve is not as bad. Once again, yes, they have problems. But no, none of it is enough to have me sharing the same opinions as you.
That's how it be.
Sorry for not taking the things I'm told at face value and making an attempt at applying some critical thinking to come to my own conclusions. I just find that better than blindly agreeing to a random stranger that really, really wants me to affirm their own views.
You can just ask for the source code, if anyone can get the source code if they get the binary and can modify and redistribute it, its free, as is steam os