https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

What about that is unreasonable considering you’re using their platform to deliver your software and their multiplayer framework. Steam makes no money on the sale of your keys.

Also, if your issue is that steam is a monopoly, then go make accounts in other places and stop supporting that monopoly you’re mad about…

I got a ton of my games through humble bundle, Which distributes steam codes. I’ve also gotten steam keys through Itch.io.

As for your price argument, price matching is only for the lowest price steam has ever sold the software for. So you can sell your games at steam sale prices 100% of the time and have a higher price on steam. So you’re literally just wrong.

But steam isn’t trying to be monopoly. They don’t pay developers to only sell on their platform. Games that are only on steam are only on steam because steam is the only place that developer wants to sell the game.

That lawsuit is ridiculous and misses a ton of huge boons to developers. The fact is , valve only takes that sales cut for games sold on their platform but they never require you to make that sale on their platform. In fact, they are totally cool with you making the sale elsewhere and giving a steam code out which means steam makes nothing on that sale and they still host the software distribution for said sale. You can use their multiplayer infrastructure, their distribution infrastructure, and their communication infrastructure without paying them a dime if you sell your game on your own website. And it’s by design that you can do this.

As for consumer benefits, steam has a system that allows you to give your friends and family members access to your library. They are constantly selling games at steep discount (after getting permission from developers to do so). They allow a huge range of content with very light handed censorship policies. They have a robust multiplayer system and communications platform that integrates seemlessly with the games they sell and distribute. I won’t get into the Linux stuff but all I will say is Proton wouldn’t be where it is without valve and steam.

Steam is single handedly the most pro-consumer and pro-developer platform on the market. When developers put their games on steam, everyone wins. And it’s never a requirement that those games only exist on steam. When steam is the only place a developer sells their game, it’s because steam is legitimately the only place that developer wants to sell it anyway.

I think that’s fine. The whole point of getting TSMC to start manufacturing in the US was to ensure that Taiwan want the only place making the chips the world is using considering China has been actively threatening to take Taiwan back for decades. If TSMC can be sustainable in the US and other countries, even if Taiwan falls off the map, the technology is not China’s alone. If I were TSMC, I would be trying to build plants in Australia and in Europe and South America to diversify and secure preservation should worse come to worst.

TS has always, and I do mean always, been garbage.

Have you ever power cycled a server? It can take over 10 minutes depending on the machine.

They’ve literally had 2 of them. The Vive, built by HTC and sold by Valve on Steam and its sucessor The Valve Index. Anyone who would consider themselves even mildly interested in VR Gaming probably knows about at least one of them.

That’s assuming I have $237 laying around to play a game id also need to spend $70 on.

It’s finally happened … my 1070 is finally below minimum requirements for a game I want to play. Guess this will be an Xbox only game for me because I am not paying the insane prices for GPUs.

Statistics of players being updated and new character models being added. Nothing that couldn’t be done in an update. Honestly most sports games should literally just be games as a service already.