We ever going to do something about Visa? Because that shit is getting spooky.

*steam price the same as external price only if the external sale is for steam keys. And you have some time to offer an equivalent sale on steam.

But sweeny mad no one lieks epic store

Any of those places charging 30% on a product they're only publishing electronically is using walled gardens and monopolistic practices to do so.

I'd rather they go after Steam last, but Steam belongs in that group with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It's extraordinarily difficult to sell your PC game without Steam. A few large studios can do it, but not many others.

Still notas egregious as Apple, and now Android with their restrictions on side loading.

How do we tax Gabe that much without necessarily watering down his share in the company and ensuring that outside investors enshittify it in the process?

I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.

I wonder if there's a future where every game marketplace uses open standards/APIs that 3rd-party launchers (like Heroic) can consume for downloading games, checking DRM status, tracking achievements, friends, and so on. DRM is probably the hardest part of that, though maybe there could be closed-source blobs downloadable to enable a store's DRM. It's obviously not in the interest of companies solely focused on profit and dark patterns, but I wonder if Steam would ever consider using its weight to do it anyway.

Being anticompetitive is far from the only way a company can be shitty.

Steam had to be sued by the Australian government into following the law regarding refunds for faulty products.

They have always been at the forefront of shitty gambling mechanics in video games, with their random loot boxes and tradeable skins.

And until recently, the hyper-consumerist FOKO-inducing structure of Steam sales was pretty awful.

I do buy games off other platforms and import them into Steam all the time.

I'll admit a 30% fee is egregious these days though, extortionate. I think it should be capped at 10%, then a further smaller cap planned every decade as technology improves.

monopoly laws they violate

A monopoly is holding a large marketshare. It is a label determined by courts. That the marketshare is from consumers picking the product is irrelevant to being declared a monopoly.

In the late 90's Windows was the overwhelming market leader for OS's because the alternatives weren't good. Linux didn't have good consumer focused distros and was therefore used on servers. MacOS at the time was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from almost 20 years earlier. So Microsoft was declared a monopoly and had restrictions placed on what it could do despite all other competitors already doing what Microsoft did (like including a web browser). That's why years later Apple was able to make Safari the ONLY web browser (all "alternatives" were just reskins of Safari) whereas Microsoft was forced to include support so that you could switch the default web browser.

This kind of lock in is even less relevant now with cross platform play and similar options becoming a common game feature. Take a game I play, Dead by Daylight; people can add friends on PlayStation and Xbox through BHVR (the dev) ID. It takes some work on the developer’s part, but they can provide their own tools to break that Steam lock-in.

So let’s say some public corporate emergency prompts a Valve exodus (eg, Gabe eats babies) - people would need to buy new copies of their most played games, but in many cases their account progress is on a movable ID, so it wouldn’t even be a huge blocker.