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[–] 45 points 10 months ago (1 child)

Unless I'm missing something, "valve's own website's admission" is just a Steam community submission? That's like saying Facebook admits that the government is run by reptilians and birds aren't real and citing some boomer conspiracy theorist's posts as the primary source.

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  • [–] 40 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    Jesus Christ if these mf actually used AI to write the case I'll lose my mind.

    Why on earth you use AI without any fucking human intervention in a billionaire case like this? How a real human being will see a wiki as a factual evidence or worst, a random guide written by a random internet user on the steam platform.

    If anyone is curious How to install Ricochet version WON + expansions is archived. The fucking AI scrapped the internet and found this segment "In 2001, Valve acquired WON from Flipside.com and began to implement the Steam system in beta form. Over the next few years, as Steam was developed and tested, WON continued to operate. Valve shut down the last of its WON servers on July 31, 2004. All online portions of Valve's games were transferred to their own Steam system." hosted on a steam website and """thought""" this is a Valve admission.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Now antitrust the telecom and streaming services. I'll wait

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    ... why the fuck would proving Valve's superdupermajority market share hinge on WON?

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago

    Because they're trying to prove that Valve has anticompetitive tactics.

    If Valve is just the best and everyone prefers them, they aren't doing the part of monopoly where they put their competitors out of business so they can jack up prices

    And we're a long way from breaking up companies just because they're too big

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Reading about WON is looks like it was at the time the major service for hosting multiplayer servers and Steam was created to compete with it, I don't know why Steam as a service to play multiplayer is more relevant than Steam as a place to buy games in this case.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago*

    WON was a multiplayer service that was ALSO a early foray into online game distribution. Somewhat ironically as the platform on which Valve's Half-life was originally published.

    The modern era of online games distribution is pretty closely tied to multiplayer hosting because those were the games that were primarily targeted for online distribution in a world where MOST games were offline and physically distributed.

    Steam launched its own platform to compete with WON and moved all of its own titles over there. The biggest controversy associated with that was that Valve sent out a patch over the WON servers to move all the existing WON enabled games over to the new Steam platform.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    I'm sorry but whoever put together the text in the picture types like a goddamn jerk. It honestly frustrated me so much just reading it that I had to force myself to finish.

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  • [–] -4 points 10 months ago

    Second, Valve argues that the plausibility of Consumer Plaintiffs’ claims hinge on allegations that Valve acquired Sierra’s World Opponent Network (“WON”), which Valve contests with a single affidavit. That argument fails for multiple reasons. The Court must reject Valve’s extrinsic evidence, which is contrary to its public admissions, at this stage. Regardless, the Complaint does not turn on these allegations. Valve’s relationship with WON, whether by acquisition or otherwise, helps explain how Valve has had monopoly power in digital PC game distribution since the beginning. But it is not the only relevant fact. Independent of WON, Valve leveraged its enormous installed user base and popular PC game franchises to force gamers onto Steam, such that when Valve began selling third-party games in 2005, it already held a monopolist position.

    From the document you linked.

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