Comment by tombert
2 days ago
I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company.
All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.
Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not.
No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.
> like Apple: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model.
Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from every business that's not them. Apple is trying to own the entire world. They're quickly becoming the bank by offering Credit Cards and Savings. I'm sure once they get big enough they'll turn the screws and add more charges because no company will want to lose 50+% of their market. The only thing that will stop them is regulation. Apple is fully an exploitive company
More than a little irritating that the only real contenders for smartphones is either Google or Apple, two companies with more-than-a-little dubious business practices.
I really wish that the Ubuntu phone had fully come to fruition. I think if a dedicated Ubuntu Touch phone had been pushed in the US in ~2013, Canonical might have had the weight and funding to make it work. Sadly the Indiegogo was never funded, and we're stuck with the duopolistic dystopia we have now in the smartphone world.
Yes, I know about the Pinephone and it looks neat and I'm sure it's a decent enough product, but I haven't bought one because I've been afraid of things being missing. The network effect is strong, and I find it unlikely that my bank app or basically anything I use for work will ever get ported over to SailfishOS or Ubuntu Touch, meaning I'd have to carry around an iPhone or Android phone with me everywhere anyway.
I am not sure that this kind of vertical integration should be legal; Apple services and iOS should probably be different companies.
> Apple does have an exploitive business model. Take 30% from every business that's not them.
Exactly, and the same goes for Steam.
I honestly can't remember the last time I brought something through the App Store - my lifetime total money spent there is probably less than $500
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Oh I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in which to do so isn’t inherently bad.
That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.
Valve's DRM is trivially bypassed. It's just there so that the checkbox 'has DRM' is ticked.
You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.
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You complelty ignore the foxcon problem?
Google makes money with ads and at least takes this serious.
Apple just exploits.
Valve makes most of their money from Steam lock-in. Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...
Not to say they are not great for Linux gaming. But this should not be mistaken for some kind of idealistic position. Windows a threat, they need to commoditize OS for gaming. At heart they still make Amazon's attempts at monopoly look like a lemonade stand :)
Does Valve engage in a lot of unfair or anticompetitive behavior? If you were to apply some anti-trust enforcement what would you actually do? Split off their game studio (that makes like one game a decade) from Steam?
They mostly sell space in their digital game shop, and services directly related to that shop.
Like, when people say “split up Google” or “split up Amazon” I know what they mean: you have a bunch of things that would ideally be profitable competitive businesses, under one umbrella—Chrome, Android, ChromeOS imagine if browsers and operating systems didn’t have a market price of $0! AWS, Amazon shop, etc. Valve, I don’t see it…
There is no lock-in. It is normal to have accounts on multiple storefronts, and have multiple storefronts installed on your gaming PC; one can access multiple digital libraries on the same PC!
Steam wins because it provides a superior product for the end-user, not because of lock-in. Games purchased through Steam can be vetted with user reviews, supported with user-created guides and steam input configurations, streamed across devices, shared with family members, and even modded; all within the Steam experience.
Valve is not a monopoly/part of a duopoply/oligopoly. They're also not behaving like knobheads. It's the combination of monopolistic practices and causing harm to consumers that should invoke antitrust enforcement.
There are plenty of other stores to get games from. They're just consistently worse than Steam.
One wonders why other, well funded games stores can't compete on features and sales pricing with steam?
Epic is giving games away but it still doesn't seem worth it to me to switch over because they lack steam input, good achievements, friend systems, good chat, inventory systems to trade items...
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> Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement
So the thing about antitrust is that it's not the act of having a monopoly that is punishable, it's the act of using that monopoly unjustly that is punishable.
Apple's app store is a good example here--their stipulations on financial payments in apps starts to really cross the line into illegal product tying to me. Whereas what Valve has done to lock-in users to Steam is... um... you might at best point to actions they haven't taken, but fundamentally, the alternative game stores have failed because they've not really demonstrated any value proposition other than "redirect Valve's profits to us", which isn't a big motivation for consumers.
lock-in?
there's no lock-in in any of the contracts
Valve is not building all this Linux Compatibility out of the goodness of their hearts. They are doing it to avoid being shutdown by Microsoft, who effectively had a monopoly on the OS people used to play games.
It's a bit of miracle that Valve beat MS to the punch and built momentum behind Steam as the marketplace for games. They know this.
If gamers move to Linux and all the compatibility issues are solved, Valve is not going to pick a different passion project. Conversely, as long as Microsoft has a monopoly on OSes for gaming, Valve will support linux gaming.
Sure, none of that is untrue, but they could still engage in rent seeking behavior. They could start requiring subscription fees for stuff that previously didn't require it (like start capping download speeds unless you're part of "Steam+" or something), or blacklist any distro that isn't SteamOS, or make it difficult or impossible to install games from third-party stores (like GOG) on Steam Decks or their upcoming Steam Boxes.
I'm not saying that this still will happen, and it's fairly likely that it won't happen, but I just think we should be mindful for it. Twenty years ago, pretty much everyone in the tech world loved Google.
A "company" is just an organizational model employed by people to pursue the intentions that those people have. It goes without saying that large endeavors involving many people will have a mixture of good and bad intentions.
Opposing all organized endeavors simply because they have the potential to pursue bad intentions essentially resolves to being against anything anyone is ever doing, which is more than a little bit pointless.
I didn’t say you would oppose all organized endeavors. I said we shouldn’t worship companies.
Well, no one is literally worshiping companies, so I interpreted this as a hyperbolic way of saying that people shouldn't express approval for activities done by companies.
But companies themselves are just organizational paradigms used by people to pursue human intentions, and the reason you offered as to why we shouldn't "worship companies" was based on the possibility of people acting on bad intentions within those organizational paradigms.
But the possibility of people acting on bad intentions is present in all contexts of human activity, regardless of what organizational paradigm people are using to coordinate their activities.
So if "worship" resolves to "express approval for", and "companies" resolves to "organized human activity", based on a failure modality that's always present in all cases, then you are actually saying that people should not express approval for organized human activity.
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I mean you're completely correct.
But if we treat all companies the same regardless of their behavior, they don't have any incentive to change their behavior.
So I'll keep rewarding the good behaviour and punishing the bad.
I just wonder if it's an inherent symptom of massive success. I'm not talking Valve level of success, but more like Google and Apple and Microsoft levels. Eventually every company has downturns in the market, and whether or not it's fair the investors/board of directors will think it's because of the current strategy, and they'll engage in terrible rent-seeking behavior.
I just worry that if we keep rewarding them, as they get bigger (and especially if they ever go public), they'll be able to strangle the market more and more because everyone loves them, and then when most of the serious competition has been squelched, they'll change strategies.
To be clear, I like Valve in their current state. Steam is great, the Tenfoot/SteamOS software is great at converting a PC into a game console, Linux gaming is arguably better than on Windows now, and all of this is in no small part due to funding and effort from Valve. I'm not naive to this, that's objectively cool stuff. I hope they continue to be the same company.
Valve already owns the market. There is nothing left to strangle. Every attempt to break through has been a failure and none of those failures can be attributed to an anti-competitive action taken by Valve. They could have engaged in rent seeking a long time ago if they wanted to. They are managing their market position well by not abusing their customers or giving customers a reason to complain to lawmakers.
Epic's storefront is trash (only recently got ability to gift keys, still can't leave reviews), Microsoft already botched Game Pass by showing their cards too early via substantial price increases, and Amazon failed so badly that nobody even knew they tried.
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