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Valve faces a £656 million lawsuit in the UK for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers'
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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A company that makes a billionaire out of its owner is overcharging you, no matter how much you like the company or the owner.
It's funny because if it was any other companies I'm sure a bunch of you would be happy about it, but it being against Valve you can't help but defend them.
Should I dig in everyone's comment history to show who are the hypocrites that otherwise act like they're left wing?
Valve doesn't set the prices for any of the products you buy through their store. The game developers and publishers do.
The exception is valve developed games which are mostly free to play and make money on useless cosmetics. Most of their successful games are built on mods that are only possible because valve takes the very consumer friendly position of supporting and encouraging modding of their games.
Hell, they even allow and promote fan made remakes like Black Mesa and unofficial sequels.
If valve is a monopoly, it's only because they're the only corporation in the pc gaming space (OK maybe include gog too) that respects their customers. They're not perfect but they're orders of magnitude better than the competition.
I was shocked when Valve allowed Black Mesa to be monetized on Steam. I respect the fuck out of them since then.
Unlike the shit heads at Nintendo, suing everyone dares to touch their overused decades old IP.
No matter the reason, private monopolies are a bad thing for consumers.
The game devs and publishers set the price by taking into consideration that 30% goes to Valve, without that 30% games would be cheaper as they wouldn't need to sell for as high a price for the devs and publishers to recover their investment.
No need to have studied economics to understand that if you need to have 30$/copy in your pockets in order to cover your cost and someone takes 30% from every sales then you need to sell to the consumers for 43$.
No matter how nice Valve acts towards consumers (in many cases because it was imposed to them, not by choice), in the end you're defending a billionaire while you make less a year than he spends running one of his yachts for a single day.
Bullshit. Games on steam that hit sales thresholds pay less to steam and the prices remain the same. Games on EGS only pay 12% and prices haven't dropped.
Reality does not comport with your argument at all.
I've been in product development and management for 10+ years. I know how pricing decisions are made. You're very naive.
Well no shit they'll look at the highest price on the market and use the same price everywhere, but the highest price is based on the fact that the distributor takes a 30% cut!
Again, you are very naive. What you're describe is cost-up pricing which hasn't been a generally used method of pricing goods and services for decades at this point. The reason is that doing cost-up pricing is a really good way to go out of business.
The way pricing works today is that sellers set pricing based on what they believe the customer is willing to pay. From there you work backwards accounting for retailer margin, cost of goods, transport, discounts, etc... To find your maximum cost per unit. If you can't produce the product for less than the maximum cost, you either need to scale back your features, add a feature that would justify a higher sell price, or abandon the project.
Your notion that companies would lower prices if they had to give retailers a small cut is not borne out by theory or by observed real world outcomes.
You're wrong. Doubling down won't make you less wrong.
So what solution do you propose then?
Ideally I'd like to see media distribution be nationalized. Video streaming, audio streaming, videogames, e-books. There have been multiple cases of companies selling digital goods, then ceasing to provide those with consumers left holding the bag. Multiplayer games whose servers are gone. Movies "purchased" on Amazon that become unavailable when their agreement with the publisher expires. I am concerned about what Valve will look like when they inevitably get new leadership.
But I suffer no delusion that nationalizing that is realistic. Certainly not in the US where I live, where even libraries are under attack from conservatives. I'm doubtful that would happen anywhere else either. So what's the next-best thing?
Seems to me like the capitalist response would be to try to encourage competition. A lot of companies have tried and failed, so I'm not sure what else can be done on that front.
It's just something I've noticed as these discussions started yesterday, a bunch of people defending a multiple yachts owner while also pretending to hate the rich in other discussions.
There are no good billionaires, it's that simple. If someone became one it was done through exploiting people that are just trying to make it through life. You've got people saying they "hope to be able to retire at some point" also defending Valve by gaslighting themselves into thinking that they get their money's worth when buying on Steam. Well, no, people just think they do because they were conditioned to believe that their money is worth a whole lot less than it really is in order to enrich people like Gaben.
These people aren't on your side, if they were they wouldn't be billionaires in the first place, they're on their own side and just want to become richer and richer.
And I mean...
https://lemmy.world/comment/10588480
That's from your own history so I guess you should be the first one wanting to point out when people are hypocrites, right?
Wait till you find out value can be subjective
I agree, but I think people who subscribe to this mentality should be focusing their efforts on more than just Valve.
Valve does plenty of unethical stuff, you're right, but the store isn't really it. Go after them for their shady loot box gambling and really predatory monetization in f2p games that creates secondary gambling markets. It's insane.
Valve has actual blood it's hands and you're complaining about the legitimate business front that covers for a deeply profitable and unethical core.
Loot boxes suck but I'd argue valve is still one of the better approaches. Makers of skins get cuts of sales, Dotas sales help the international prize pool to an extent, and it doesn't lock you into a treadmill just to unlock gameplay elements.
Every other company seems to be doing the same but somehow even worse.
I disagree. There's a deeply unethical core built into Steam that is distinct to it. Since you can sell your loot drops for actual money, they are more literally scratch tickets than your standard loot boxes.
https://youtu.be/eMmNy11Mn7g?si=u7fNSQI8WV8JNd4m
I don't know, I'm all for keeping people away from addictive behaviors and would rather micro transactions not be a thing at all full stop - but allowing users to get money out of games they have already invested in is also a benefit, so it feels weird to single out the one option that provides consumer value. Don't play CS anymore? Sell the AK Fire serpent you unboxed for 2.50 back in 2014 and buy yourself a steam deck and keep a gift card for a few games. Or a new set of skins in whatever game your playing now is.
As far as the API goes, Im pretty unfamiliar so Im not sure what responsibilities a company has when using their site as a login to another site. There's porn sites that allow me to sign in with Facebook / Gmail, if someone uploads CSAM to that site do those sites have a duty in some way?