Shacknews Person of the Year 2025 - Ross Scott
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The founder of the Stop Killing Games movement brought attention to a key issue in gaming today.
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-310d

Till it goes public or his son decides to shit all over it for profit.

Credit to the people making the Linux software not the wealthy oligarch that happens to allow it.

DebatableRaccoon
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610d

Till it goes public or his son decides to shit all over it for profit.

This risks being true for any and every successful company and is a genuine concern, but this is why I only named Gabe in my comment. Being a private company and him as CEO, based on statements from him in the past, pro-consumer practices are his directive. What-aboutisms have nothing to do with it.

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-310d

And yet he still charges 30% to list on steam…

He could move it all to a non profit like blender and charge creators a reasonable price if he cared about the industry or players.

He’s just as profit minded as any billionaire. He’s just using Linux contributions to solidify their monopoly on pc gaming.

DebatableRaccoon
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310d

I don’t disagree with the 30% being too much. That said, Steam often provides more than just a sales pages for the fee, they always provide server access for multiplayer and cloud saving. That has to get covered somehow. I also believe in celebrating the good things going and there really aren’t many of those in the gaming market these days, certainly not in the AAA-money tier. I’m going to enjoy the wins we get. If you don’t want to do that, enjoy being miserable, I guess.

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10d

More entrenching of their services as a monopoly. Without a doubt the cost of a sales page and servers would be less than 30% of a lot of games sales. It’s a cost they are willing to pay if it means keeping their walled garden and 30% flat rate. (Like Sony selling consoles at a loss)

Any open source Linux contributions from steam (proton) are welcome because it’s not tied into their monopoly and people can use them freely.

You can enjoy the small victories while also being aware of future outcomes from these corporate giants.

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110d

Funny thing about 30% is that lowering it would probably kill off competition completely so that if that is one of the few selling points of alternatives it evaporates. Sort of like how it is hard to compete with the economies of scale of AWS.

GOG for example is 30%. If Valve were to lower it might make it even tougher to convince publishers to release there, and GOG even with the 30% had a period where they struggled to generate a profit.

And Epic games has been unprofitable with their 12% rate, so if they lose even that selling point then it’ll continue to be an unprofitable venture if there’s less of a reason to release there and hurt their hopes of being able to grow their market share enough to be profitable some day.

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110d

Yeah their monopoly already has fucked the whole gaming industry to the point of there being virtual no competition.

That fucking toxic shit needs to burn with the rest of the corporate shitheads.

A previously stated, eat the rich won’t make any exceptions for any oligarch let alone one running a monopoly.

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110d

They just sold games on the Windows platform to PC gamers. A platform called dead by companies like Epic for years. Windows never bothering to even consider pc gaming and fixating on consoles.

Not like anything unusual happened other than every other company thinking consoles were the future. Same things happening with Linux. All the other companies thinking Linux isn’t worth the effort and its all about Windows.

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110d

lol and that excuses their monopoly and blatant anti competition tactics?

They made their own monopoly where they saw the opportunity. Doesn’t mean we can’t do better and shouldn’t fight billionaires entrenching themselves into aspect of life.

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10d

If Microsoft had been smarter they would have leveraged their OS monopoly to position themselves to become the game launcher monopoly on the most used OS in the world, and been the go to place for every publisher. Would have made it easier to push UWP and added in additional DRM to make it more difficult to make Linux gaming a possibility with the game launcher being one run by Microsoft and made it more baked in to be reliant on the OS like Microsoft Store.

And even if game compatibility was worked out for Linux made it so people would need a Microsoft account if they wanted to play most PC games. That’s what Microsoft lost out on letting a non Microsoft company gain success with a third party launcher that is now leveraging their success to push a non Microsoft OS to the mainstream.

And about anti competition. All you’ve said is something about cuts and I pointed out that it would actually hurt competition, so you want them to make cuts so other launchers lose one of their selling points while making those that need a higher cut like GOG harder to stay alive as a business? I think you should get mad at other corporations for not also getting into the PC gaming market sooner.

You can complain about them making a lot of money, but other than that you haven’t really been clear beyond the generic they make a lot of money and are a monopoly euphemisms.

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110d

Yeah M$ fucked up their chances at the steam monopoly. Still doesn’t mean we need it to be a monopoly at all. Going from one billionaire conglomerate to another owning the monopoly, still leaves you with a monopoly. Neither option is good, you are still stuck in a monopoly that will enshittify.

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