I don’t know about a front, but when they have this kind of income, they have zero incentive to actually launch the damn thing, and every incentive to just keep dangling the carrot
In Spanish we say “música paga no suena”. Or “Paid music (service) won’t play”. As in, if you actually want the DJ, Mariachis, or band to stay the whole party, withhold payment until the end. If you pay upfront they will arrive late and leave early. They already have the money on the bag, and no legally binding responsibility to actually deliver any product. Even with this new round of crowdfunding, tomorrow they could just claim they already delivered what could be done with the money and disappear into a fiscal paradise. And not a single chump who backed up this decade long fraud would have any single recourse to fight back.
It’s now a season bundle. But it was $10 per fatality x 3. One for Halloween, one for Thanksgiving, and one for Christmas. That was a total of $30 for a whole minute of cut-scenes. They successfully Overton it, apologized and now it’s $10 for the three scenes. But yeah, now buying Fatalities is a thing, look forward for your Easter Fatality edition and an extra Bunny skin version for only $4.99.
I play mostly smaller games, and am very patient with my gaming habits. Haven’t bought a AAA game in a very long while. Still follow these kind of news because they trend set the whole industry and encroach everywhere with bad practice as big publishers represent the majority of the industry releases and also the grossest revenue.
There is this tiny company called Nihon Falcom. They make this game series called Trails that I adore. they have like three programmers work on each entry.
In the time since Star Citizen was announced they have released:
The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails 2012
Ys: Memories of Celceta 2012
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 2013
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II 2014
Tokyo Xanadu 2015
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana 2016
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox 2019
The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak
The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II
Ys X: Nordics
as well as a bunch of ports of older games to modern platforms and localizing them to the west. All of these are worth playing and some of these were GOTY material for me.
Its good to quantify how much time has passed, and how much you can get done with a smaller budget and focused scope.
Call me shallow but I enjoy the fanservice ( not the naughty type, I mean when characters from the previous entries come back/get mentioned) so I enjoyed them thoroughly, Kuro 1 and 2 are also great, they bring a lot of new ideas to the table.
I actually will only play a game with realistic sweat and tears. Oh, they are hard at work on that?! Well FINALLY, I’m SO fucking glad. Thank you SO much, Robert’s Space Industries. You guys are definitely NOT complete hacks.
I paid for star citizen a decade ago and honestly enjoyed it enough for about 2 days. It always felt exciting to see how ahead they were of early Xbox 1 / PS4 games in their scope with volumetric effects etc.
The trouble is, 90% of their innovative content has been long overtook by general game progression, they’re making a game that could have probably launched with the PS5 and been innovative and are already falling behind there. I genuinely believe that they were Innovating their game slowly over time and there were amazing things in the works, but they missed the moment that it was exciting and new by so many years.
Laundering? They’re not even entering as investors are they, so they are not really expecting any return other that a presumably finished game at some point?
That and they release their financial reports every year…
The people in this thread are astoundingly hateful idiots that are just doing the groupthink thing to be part of a group that lets them feel “smarter than you.” It’s really disappointing to see this every time star citizen is mentioned, but I’ll just continue to enjoy it and then welcome all these people when it’s completed as they suddenly stop hating on it because it isn’t fashionable anymore.
I’m convinced they made the game as a side project to their true goal of inventing dynamic server meshing.
We are talking about Chris “feature creep” Roberts here, though. The guy can’t stop himself from retasking a team with yet another “immersive” thing they need to waste their time on.
So who knows. Could just be bad management, but I wouldn’t put it past them to be doing this so they can license and sell the engine or something. That is, until other developers snipe their employees and use their knowledge to develop server meshing themselves.
A few of my guildmates play SC as well and they try to get other people to play, but every time an open period happens, the servers always shit the bed with instability and the play experience for the new player is awful.
It’s so funny trying to hear them rationalize bad servers and inability to do basic things as just part of the experience.
I’ve been part of some amateur game dev projects and SC has the vibe of an amateur project where the devs are constantly focusing on whatever catches their fancy at the moment, going back and tinkering with things they’ve already made, and sort of aimlessly scope creeping. There’s nobody to strongarm them into writing, much less following a game design document.
All of that is intuitive to me to understand.
Then there is “the dream” that is being sold to people who want this type of game. That level of very specific fandom is also easy to understand, at least from a distance. People get super into all kinds of games and spend outsized amounts of money and time.
Star Citizen is like the perfect storm of these elements.
No, there’s really no excusing this game’s development. If anything, Robert’s should have learned from Freelancer to have a tight core product that’s actually shippable.
At this point Internet nerds are locked into throwing money at Star Citizen’s development, making it the closest thing humanity has achieved to a perpetual motion machine.
Chris Roberts begin developing Freelancer with a similar aspiration of total simulation that Star Citizen now promises.
Freelancer repeatedly overshot development timelines and Roberts was running out of money. He had to go to Microsoft for cash. Microsoft gave money to develop Freelancer in exchange for Roberts being essentially demoted to a consultant, and Microsoft taking charge. Microsoft immediately began cutting features and mechanics to turn Freelancer from an amorphous project into a shippable game.
If you know that, then seeing Roberts in charge of a new game, with no oversight and essentially infinite development time, the resulting quantum superposition state of Star Citizen’s release should not be surprising.
ya, now it’s the people who play the game funding it instead of corporate executives, and honestly I think that’s a good thing, look at Elite Dangerous, No man’s sky (even after the patches) or Starfield, sure they might be “completed games” but can’t hold a candle to SC in it’s pre-alpha in terms of gameplay
If you don’t know what you want except a nebulous dream, you can’t tell that you’re dissatisfied with what you actually have, and don’t realize that what you’re doing isn’t actually getting you anything. This applies to both the devs and the fans.
As an anxious person who hates sweaty games, I actually really enjoyed The Finals for a few months and even bought some DLC for shits and giggles. But it got old quickly and I entirely forgot it existed.
I played and loved many games that were taken down or abandoned (Gigantic, Dawngate, Strife, Destiny 2…) to the point where I instinctively prepare myself mentally to ‘lose’ a game if I’m enjoying it too much. This is the case with The Finals, it just feels so good to play, but past trauma has made me wiser and reminds me that it will not last, so I’m enjoying every second of it.
This game will not succeed with the bare bones marketing they’re giving it, that, and Nexon is the publisher, and also the FPS market is oversaturated so how could it take off when the other options have cemented their position. But wow, what an experience it’s been while it lasted, probably the best shooter I’ve ever played.
It depends on how the studio signed the publishing contract and should they part ways, who owns the IP. But if the game loop is proven good and have fan base to sustain a studio, someone will take the torch if the game was shut by publisher.
as a casual PVP scum, I wasn’t able to get into it. The 3v3 with the non-stop chase and timers was too sweaty for me. I wanted to like it but I couldn’t even see a way to be supportive as a not-so-gud.
The ttk is ridiculous as well. I’m gunning someone down and it’s like 2 mags before they dropped. It had potential but not how it was when I tried end of last year.
Release on steam/GoG or go bust being an EGS exclusive. I’m not compelled enough to buy from that shitty platform ever. And I’m not starved for content. I’m having fun w/ Helldivers 2
I saw like no marketing for this game at all, and on top of that didn’t they restrict it to Epic? Definitely a dumb choice. Shame because I want Control 2 to happen. Hopefully this doesn’t affect that.
"I prefer a quality storefront that at least presents the pretense of caring about providing a quality product to one that just wants to separate me from my money"
They're not, actually. Just because you only see Epic (which still has market share despite every effort they've made to drive people away) doesn't mean there aren't other storefronts.
This is abuse. This is making up rationale, to ignore the actual fucking argument.
Standard Oil, the clearest trust-busting case in history, only had 85% market share at its peak. Me telling you to count to one is not somehow climbing atop my high horse and repeating a conclusion. I am making an argument - it is not complicated - the basis and reasoning are right there for you to respond to, or not.
Correct, acknowledging a fact doesn’t require a to-do list. There’s not magically The Good Store when you admit: this store has a monopoly. But for some god damn reason everyone seems to think shitting on Epic or talking up GoG will change that Valve has an overwhelming market position!
I am ONLY talking about Steam’s market position. Nothing else is required. If you think there must be a yeah-but: the answer is no.
What is so complicated about acknowledging this company dominates its market, in a subthread that begins by noting how crucial its sales will be, for a fuckoff-massive game, from a celebrated studio? The central topic is ‘game’s not making the numbers they want’ and the root comment is ‘lotta people waiting on a Steam version’ and my reply is ‘yeah it’s almost like Steam’s the one store that actually fucking matters’ and this blindingly obvious fact makes people lose their god-damn minds.
As opposed to Epic Games which literally has a contract saying only they can sell the game on PC. I like how you’re “opposing” monopolies by defending anticompetitive exclusive licensing deals.
Except Valve allows people to sell their own keys without Valve taking a cut. That system is why at least half the vendors here can exist at all. The dev/publisher cuts a bunch of their own Steam keys and dumps them off with these shops who take less than the 30% cut that Valve takes from sales within Steam and the dev/publisher gets to keep the difference or pass that on to the customer as a discount. Steam just isn't a monopoly. They allow sellers to use everything that their platform offers for nothing more than a percentage of what is made exclusively from sales within the platform. A seller can sell their game through their own website and take home 100% (less whatever their payment processor charges, usually a single digit percent) of the sale, while still using everything that Steamworks and Steam in general is bringing to the table and all without any lock-in or requirements that they stick with Steam. All of that is a HUGE strike against considering Steam a monopoly, but that's not even everything.
So far as "the competition does not matter" that's largely because the competition (Primarily talking EGS here, but it's apropos UPlay and Origin too) hasn't done anything to make for a better value proposition other than paying for store exclusives and giving developers a rightfully higher cut of sales for a shot at a much smaller portion of the PC market. If Epic offered answers to Proton, Steam Link, communities, workshop, meta-games in the store, quick UI, marketplace, etc... It might make for a real challenge to Steam, but as it stands now there's nothing in EGS that puts up anything approaching half of what you get for the same games in Steam. I've never bought anything in EGS, but trying to use their app with any of the free games that they've given me has immediately turned me right around and sent me back to Steam while it takes literal minutes for the app to get me signed back in and going (and often has to spend time updating a game once it does) while Steam was good to go 2 seconds after boot, never needs me to reauth once I've signed into a system, and keeps my games updated silently without my having to notice or worry.
Now GOG on the other hand, where I have spent a decent amount of money and own a good number of games has managed to make a proposition of giving me a barebones store that gives me barebones downloads of games that don't need updates, or a launcher, without any DRM so I can just download an EXE and get my games. They matter, they're bringing something to the table that nobody else does and I love them for that. I go out of my way to buy games on GOG when they're the sort of things that don't need any of the stuff that Steam is providing.
If any of the other publisher owned storefronts tried to do anything half as ambitious as GOG or Steam, they'd probably matter, but the fact is that they won't because they don't think like Valve or GOG, they think like MBA shitlords who's single trick is extracting rents for properties made by smarter people, often back in the days before those MBAs knew their multiplication tables. The same school of idiots who saw how Netflix had a really good thing going and thought that they could have the good thing themselves so now we have a worse situation than we had before Netflix destroyed the cable industry and we get all of these platforms that don't work as well as Netflix did/does where you have to go to 30 different shitty places to get what you used to find in one really good place. A whole lot of idiots who paid a lot of money to learn in fancy schools that you can personally get rich by convincing a company to kill the golden goose, so long as you immediately proceed to get out of town so it's the next guy's problem to solve before anyone notices that the golden eggs aren't rolling in anymore. It's incomprehensible to me that people are going to bat for those muppets when all they ever do is make things worse so they can line their 401k with another million.
What makes Steam a monopoly is market dominance. Nothing else counts.
The keys thing underlines how little their competition matters. They can effectively give away copies, to other platforms, and those other platforms remain irrelevant.
Shitting on Epic - however fun and well-deserved - does not change how we are talking about Steam.
Netflix is a great comparison, because Netflix was also plainly a monopoly. The streaming video market was Netflix. Their behavior as a monopoly was better for everyone, compared to this shit-show of vicious little fiefdoms… but defending a monopoly doesn’t make them stop being one.
Valve does dominate the market they're in, but they do so without creating an unreasonable restraint of competition in that market. They are dominant by providing the best product, not because they have unfair business practices which burden the competition. Like I said, Valve will literally allow game makers to go and take 100% of every sale they make (assuming they can process payments for free) while still allowing them to use the platform Valve have built and pay to maintain so long as they'll pay Valve a cut for the copies that are sold directly through the Steam store. Valve allows their competition to sell games that package said competition's stores inside of those games. Every EA or Ubisoft game comes with the competitor's store bundled in. They create tools that allow their competitors games to run on platforms that the competition doesn't want to bother with and they give them away. HOW IS ANY OF THAT AN UNREASONABLE RESTRAINT ON COMPETITION?
"Here you go guys, you so obviously don't understand what the audience wants. How about you give us a cut of the sales you make on your games via our platform and we'll let you install your platform on our customer's PCs? How unreasonable and diabolical of us to cut down the competition by letting gamers see what an open sewage pipe of fetid scum they'd be dealing with in our absence. BWAH HA HAH HAH! We have constrained the competition by our cunning craft of having a better product. Truly we are monsters from HELL! HAIL GABEN!" -Valve, The monopolists 🙄
Steam is the antithesis of anticompetitive, they're not the single seller of any good beyond "Valve Games" of which there are now 22(?) among millions of PC games, and they don't generally dictate prices in the market; which is the succinct way of saying that they don't live up to any portion of the legal standard for what constitutes a monopoly. Give me something factual that implicates Valve as a monopoly or get out of here with this nonsense.
In a legal context, the term monopoly is also used to describe a variety of market conditions that are not monopolies in the truest sense. For instance, the term monopoly may be referring to instances where:
There are many buyers or sellers, but one actor has enough market share to dictate prices (near monopolies)
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
I’m not thrilled how every reply pretends I follow up “Steam has overwhelming market share” with “and they’re EEEVIL!!!”
I haven’t said shit about Valve, ethically. I outright said Netflix’s short-lived monopoly was better for consumers. I certainly haven’t defended Epic, whatever the hell that other guy wants to rail against.
But Valve obviously has power.
Valve has the ability to do these things.
Their competitors don’t.
Steam’s market share is so high, they could do whatever they want, whether or not they ever do.
We are talking about a long-awaited critical darling of a game, and we are talking about how its sales blow, specifically because it’s not on Steam. Yes, it has sales, but it doesn’t have enough sales, unless it goes through this one store. Defending the store’s practices will not change that. Defending the conditions that led here will not change that. It is a dead simple fact that Steam’s market share is real fuckin’ high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.
First things first, you cherry picked the one thing from my link that supports your position intentionally ignoring that it is a single prong in a standard that has several. Second, I'm glad you brought the FTC link, because they also do not agree with your stance if you bring the whole context from your own link into the conversation:
As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.
Your definition only meets one portion of the FTC standard, which is why my comment addressed how Valve fails to meet any of the points of the standard beyond the dominant market position. YES STEAM IS MARKET DOMINANT, BUT NO THEY ARE NOT A MONOPOLY BECAUSE THEY DON'T MEET ANY OTHER PORTION OF THE STANDARD.
But Valve obviously has power.
To do what? PC is an open platform that they don't control.
Valve has the ability to do these things.
To make people raise prices or exclude competitors? Again, how or where?
Their competitors don’t.
Epic is LITERALLY excluding competitors right now for a bunch of titles, other competitors have done likewise until they recognized that customers didn't like it and decided that it wasn't in their best interest to do so.
Steam’s market share is so high, they could do whatever they want, whether or not they ever do.
Not to beat a dead horse, but how? They literally have no control over PC users beyond that which they've earned from being the best of MANY options, so how could they possibly parlay that into a power they could use to exert force over consumers or developers? Unless they did something that made them into not the best option, they have competition from every angle including from their direct competitors at Microsoft whose platform (as of March 2024) houses 96.67% of their customers with Windows being the dominant OS for Steam users by an absurd amount. There's incredible danger for Steam to try and pull anything anti-competitive because they literally live in the house that their competition built.
We are talking about a long-awaited critical darling of a game, and we are talking about how its sales blow, specifically because it’s not on Steam. Yes, it has sales, but it doesn’t have enough sales, unless it goes through this one store. Defending the store’s practices will not change that. Defending the conditions that led here will not change that.
You seem to imply that Steam being a monopoly has caused Remedy to suffer poor sales. However, we have the following problems there:
A) Steam fails to meet the legal definition of a monopoly. Just full stop. You attempt to take singular statements from a legal concept that by design has multiple prongs (specifically because we do not choose to harm companies who do no competitive wrong and come to their dominant position through the art of their craft being superior), but that's just willfully misunderstanding the concept of a monopoly.
and
B) A developer choosing to launch their game on the Evercade Vs and failing to see the sorts of sales numbers they might expect on Sony Playstation/Microsoft Xbox/Nintendo Switch is hardly a justification to claim that the game did poorly because Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are a oligopoly. The dev CHOSE to launch on a shittier platform, one that doesn't offer all the things that the current market expects. The devs are going to see lesser sales as a result, that's just how it works, they weren't harmed by a monopoly effect, they were harmed by their poor market choices.
It is a dead simple fact that Steam’s market share is real fuckin’ high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.
See, I think your problem may be that you think market share aside, all other things are equal, which is simply not the case. By your logic I should be able to offer you a nice shiny and new Evercade Vs in exchange for your Playstation 5 because it's only the market share that makes it so that the Evercade has less games to play? It's only natural where Steam is bringing more to the table, it has more customers as a result. EGS offers a pale shadow of what a consumer gets from Steam, so why should they count as much? Who owes them that? They need to get on that level if they want that credit due. They currently matter about as much as the effort they're putting into competing, which I'll agree isn't much, but is hardly relevant here.
Pointing out which meaning applies is how definitions work. One is enough.
Cherry-picking is highlighting part of a paragraph, and ignoring that it begins: As a first step, courts ask if the firm has “monopoly power” in any market. The documents you picked are telling you, being a monopoly and doing harm are separate questions. The ability comes first, and that ability comes directly from market dominance.
Epic is LITERALLY excluding competitors right now for a bunch of titles
… a monopoly is not about who carries one specific game. It’s about the market. The market you know Steam dominates.
When Steam excludes a game, for any reason, that game usually sells a lot less. Orders of magnitude, sometimes. That is the power they wield over all games, as a game market. The fact they don’t abuse it is a defense against legal action - but we’re discussing legal actions that can only apply to monopolies. Determining whether they have that power comes first.
Those sales figures do not respond to price changes, either. Epic can offer whatever sale they like - for most sales, the price on Steam is the price. Y’know. Like in the definition I pointed out. The one that is the way that things are.
The dev CHOSE to launch on a shittier platform
‘Poor sales are your own fault for not selling through the one store that matters,’ says monopoly understander.
Pointing out which meaning applies is how definitions work. One is enough.
So which is it? Because the only one that might apply is the last and that one has a complicated legal meaning that is multiple parts of which you only seem to care about a single part: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly
Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident.
Does not in fact say:
Then courts ask if that monopoly was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident.
The standard has multiple prongs. You might have "monopoly power" without in fact being a monopoly because being a monopoly requires meeting a legal standard where being the in the leading position of a market is not the singular qualifier.
You’re quoting a sentence that defines anticompetitive practices, not a sentence that defines a monopoly.
Here is a sentence from the same page that defines a monopoly:
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.
The documents you picked are telling you, being a monopoly and doing harm are separate questions. The ability comes first, and that ability comes directly from market dominance.
This is not at all what those documents say, they state unequivocally that a monopoly has to create unfair conditions for competition AND they have to be dominant in their market. A company that creates unfair conditions for competition in their market is not a monopoly, a company that is dominant in their market is not a monopoly, it is both conditions combined that make a monopoly.
When Steam excludes a game, for any reason, that game usually sells a lot less.
Yeah, you're right, it was unfair of Steam to exclude Alan Wake 2 and cause them to lose all those sales. ಠ_ಠ
for most sales, the price on Steam is the price.
The entirety of the isthereanydeal.com website and their history for almost every game in the database proves that this is false, are we not going to require facts in this discussion any longer?
‘Poor sales are your own fault for not selling through the one store that matters,’
YES!!! FUCKING YES! If you choose to exclude the premier dominant platform that your product might appeal to, that is YOUR FAULT! Nobody owes you sales when you choose to do dumb things.
By your logic
Nothing sensible ever follows these words.
In your case you couldn't be more correct. Touché sir.
The existence of one premier dominant platform is called a fucking monopoly.
Read the first sentence of the Cornell Law Legal Dictionary:
A monopoly is when a single company or entity creates an unreasonable restraint of competition in a market.
Restraint of Competition links to the FTC doc that defines what that is in a page titled "Monopolization defined" and it offers a two pronged test which is exactly what I've been saying all this time, they have to be the leader in their market which they have to have "gained or maintained through improper conduct."
Your lay interpretation informed by feelings that it's bad we have a market leader (and even there I'm giving you a huge gimmie because Google Play, GOG, EGS, Xbox, UPlay, and Amazon Games all exist and sell PC games in a digital storefront entirely absent Steam, and for stores that aren't absent Steam, as I noted before even games sold for use on Steam may not net Valve any revenue thanks to the ability of devs to sell their keys directly) is just not the correct interpretation for whether Steam is a monopoly. EA alone made almost as much revenue in 2023 as Valve did, which isn't an apples to apples comparison since EA does business a lot of places, but they're just one of a lot of big fish who don't always put money in Valve's pockets in the Digital PC Games Distribution market. Many devs sell their games as Steam keys on Amazon, GameStop, Newegg, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and all the others I linked before and Valve gets nothing (Excepting maybe a freeloading user) from those sales.
Out of curiosity I went to check out my account to see what I had bought "from Valve" vs "not from Valve" on Steam and it turns out that I own 1724 games on Steam. We can break that down in the transaction history, but I'm not going to go line by line to figure out which are DLC and which are games so this next part won't add up to 1724, but I'm providing the number to give some context for the remaining numbers so it doesn't just look like most of my transactions are MTX or something silly where Steam is actually getting something. I think it is illuminating to show that I have only made 718 purchases through Steam, I have been gifted 70 games, and I have 209 transactions which were indicated to be "Complimentary" where most seem to be DLC but there are a few games in that mix, so let's be charitable and give Valve the whole lot those as sales even though they were likely nothing of the sort. I have in my transaction history 1152 transactions that are listed as "Retail" which is Steam's way of showing that I didn't get the game or DLC from them. In 16 years of using Steam, Valve has charitably gotten a cut of 997 interactions, while I have given Steam 0% of a transaction 1152 times. That means that Valve has gotten a cut for only 47% of the content that they provide me at the absolutely most charitable interpretation of the data. So far as my account is concerned, if they're monopolizing the market, they're doing a terrible job of it by letting everyone else out there take the majority of the money while bearing none of the costs for Steam's infrastructure and development.
You can dismiss the fact that there is a historical record of Steam often not being the cheapest place to buy a game, or you can claim that just because there is a dominant player we defacto have a monopoly, or any of the other insane claims you've made but the fact is that there isn't a finding of law anywhere stating that Steam is a monopoly and it's unlikely there ever will be because they just don't meet the standard defined even if you cut down the market to the slimmest possible framing.
Unfortunately, we have clearly reached an impasse where you refuse to acknowledge statements of fact as written and will just "blah blah blah" away inconvenient facts, so I suppose this is where we part ways. Hopefully the next time we meet will bear better fruit.
Restraint of competition defines anticompetitive behavior by a monopoly… not whether a business is a monopoly. You keep saying “two prongs” when it’s two separate things. Some monopolies are legal. Some monopolies commit restraint.
This is abuse sprinkled with lies. Like following up ‘Steam can be beaten on price,’ which is irrelevant or worse, with ‘it’s insane to claim monopoly is about market power!’ when that’s the definition on these pages you fucking chose. Earlier you were screaming that Steam has market dominance. Now that you’ve figured out that’s all we’re talking about, you’re trying to haggle down how dominant they really are.
This wall of text is the only way you can disguise how you gave it away and can’t accept being mistaken.
I was going to get to this but my last comment ran over the 5000 character limit and had to be trimmed back. I was just going to drop it, but on reflection it is important to drive the distinction home, so here it is:
It is a dead simple fact that Steam’s market share is real fuckin’ high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.
We have a word for that.
Yeah. We do. That word is dominance. It is not monopoly because monopoly has qualifiers beyond dominance.
Can I say as a non PC gamer who follows game news. PC gamers all have different machines, isn’t optimising the games extra costly? In addition, I can imagine the annoyance of getting bad reviews on steam because some Dingus is trying to play the game on a 10 year old PC.
Also, something like 30% of PC gamers pirate their games, so that doesn’t sound like an attractive market to me.
What does this post have to do with anything when it launched on PC the same day as PS5 and XSX? As well, a 10 year old pc would likely have a GTX 1070 or better and that’s enough to run the game just fine?
These days compilers can optimise it for the hardware mostly on their own.
I can imagine the annoyance of getting bad reviews on steam because some Dingus is trying to play the game on a 10 year old PC.
Yeah, that’s the great thing about PC. You don’t have to upgrade your hardware more than once a decade, and you can give feedback to games publishers that chasing ever increasing graphics trends is alienating their customers. You console gamers have to take whatever slop you’re given, but us PC gamers don’t have to worry about a publisher not supporting backwards compatibility, so we have more market power. We can apply greater pressure on the industry to apply pro-consumer business practices.
Also, something like 30% of PC gamers pirate their games
So you are advocating against user driven reviews the alternative which tends to be corporate relations driven reviews? You don’t want consumers to have a voice or user based resources?
They didn’t release a physical version for ps5 so i didn’t buy it. I’m guessing I’m not the only one who ended up disenchanted with this game’s distribution.
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