Fans bothered making a custom server? All one of them?

Im not the ones ignoring definitions, and calling Valve a monoply is bad faith in the first place.

You mean those same “comprehensive” definitions that failed with my argument?

Other corpos who cry about Valve providing a good service.

I’ll probably use VR mostly to play sims. Elite Dangerous, X4, I also have a few racing sims.

But ultimately depends on the price. I’m not going to sell my organs for what is essentially a really cool immersive gimmick.

Depends on what kind of person you are. I know of individuals who practically live in VR.

Um… Yeah. Microsoft absolutely doesn’t have an OS monopoly, as much as they’re trying.

That has never been true.

You can even “buy” open source software on Steam that is available free from the home website.

You’re referring to the case with the developers of Lugaru, and they’ve been doing a great job of painting their fuckup as Valve barring platform competition.

So you’re saying Steam has a monopoly on the games people choose to buy on Steam?

…?

That’s not my definition. That’s just the definition. And you’re using a corporation that is actively monopolising the logistics market, even so far as breaking the law to kill any competition, as an example. Nicely done.

GOG is not a Steam competitor because they’re offering something different from Steam.

A customer that would buy a game from GOG is not a customer that would regularly buy something from Steam.

“Comodity controlled by one party”. Except it’s not controlled by one party.

Outsized market power, what left out are the actions taken to make such an outsized market power. Monopolies are not a passive that form all by themselves. They are created through expansion acquisition, and aggressive crushing of competition. Disney and Nintendo do these actions. Valve does basically… Nothing.

A single dominant seller, but again leaving out all the rest I have written above.

There is nothing Valve can stop doing to be less “a monopoly”. All they’ve done is provide a pretty decent service, and nobody else can be arsed to top that, even companies with the resources to do so.

That’s not a monopoly.

And where are those millions going, pray tell? Because they’re sure as fuck not going into the development of a good storefront.

Epic has enough resources to make competition against Valve. They would rather cry about how they can’t get away with being cheap.

Oh look, yet another person who doesn’t understand what monopoly means.

Likewise. I also passed around the message between my union guys; “don’t you dare buy GTA 6”.

They’re not competing with Steam. They’re offering different services.

Competition is like EA Origins or the Epic store.

No good competitors because they don’t have money? Excuse me? Are you seriously trying to paint Epic Games as some poor small underdog company?

Yes, Steam will eventually go to shit. But it’s not shit right now, and the competition can’t even be bothered to have a shopping basket feature in their store, something every online store already had since the dawn of online stores 20 years ago.

I mean… There are so many games that use Nexus as their preferred platform. And for older games Mod.db is still king.

Oh there’s plenty said about Valve, like their dirty skin gambling underbelly.

They literally never went a millimeter out of their way to negatively impact another competing storefront.

Valve’s success can be almost summed up as “does nothing, wins” because the competition to steam has been piss poor.

I don’t. I just recognise there’s a change and people didn’t like it. Nobody had issues with a woman being the main protagonist.

They changed her design to fit some arbitrary anti-beauty standard. I don’t find the change egregious, but it’s obvious why it was done.

If I’m going to need to install several different clients/launcher on my computer just to keep up with where games get published, I’ll just resort to piracy.

Being forced to install some shitty client to run a specific game has been a deal breaker for me in the past. And there is no guarantee that other “competing” platforms will bother making Linux versions of their clients.

No, that’s pretty wrong. There absolutely were exclusive store releases, or temporary releases where one store would get a certain game a whole month early.

Pretty sure Horizon Forbidden Dawn was well liked, despite having a woman speaking, but Horizon Forbidden West was hated on for changing the design of her.

No, that’s called basic. We’re not talking about a batmobile shaped RGB “gamer” mouse. We’re talking about the default requirement for a functional system.

I’m not normalising wasted resources, but 8 GB of RAM was a basic minimum standard to do anything on a computer 10 years ago… Perhaps even more.

Unless you’re running a very, and I mean a VERY, cut-down operation system for none-intensive tasks, there is no way 4 GB of RAM is useful for anything.

Are you still on a dual core CPU too?

Can’t play Stellaris through Heroic because of the launcher being broken.

Bypassing the launcher requires some convoluted setup, and it also removes the ease of modding.

Manually installing Stellaris through Lutris works, but Lutris isn’t well maintained, and even though it’s connected to GOG, doesn’t update Stellaris. Says it can’t find updates despite there clearly being one.

RAM eating we browser? What, you playing games on 256 MB?

Also, you can 100% customise Steam. There are various user created skins out there you can just plop onto Steam.

Mario Kart World.

Soundtrack is 11/10. But they dropped the ball hard on the entire open world aspect. Completely wasted the entire potential.

Instead we get lame ass intermission tracks that count as the first two laps of the next race, so you don’t even get to enjoy the new and remade tracks during championships, because you’ll blink and miss them.

But Steam isn’t a walled garden, or a monopoly.

Valve has done nothing that monopolistic corporations have done (i.e. Disney or Nintendo). They have kept themselves relatively small, private, and focused on providing one service really well.

Every other competition has only ever tried approaching what Valve does with Steam with shortcuts and quick money grabs.

It’s all fine and dandy to cry and complain about monopolies, but nobody even really tried. Epic’s store was, and still is, a laughing stock. That is what Valve is up against.

You put value in a like-dislike ratio and you think you can educate me?

You haven’t proven me wrong, you’re just another brainlet preaching to a choir of people who seem to be adamant at painting Valve as having a monopoly.

I mean, everyone has their preferred little dillusions, I guess, but an argument of popularity fallacy doesn’t make you right.

Very smart. You learned how to repeat words written in books. You’re probably very proud of yourself.

You still don’t know what a monopoly is, however, considering this is a discussion about Valve and Steam.

But keep trying.

You do not understand what a monopoly is.

It’s a free market, right? Customers choosing what they prefer and all that? And then eventually the one that provides the best price-for-service ratio comes out on top? Something like that, right?

If you want to stop Steam from being so ubiquitous with PC gaming, then create some proper competition. The only one that comes close in my eyes is GOG.

There is no open world that is too big. They can only be too small.

However, the quality of an open world is not predicated on the size of the open world, but rather what is actually in it.

And this doesn’t mean that open worlds must be drowning in content, as the quality of the content itself also matters, and certain worlds that are large and empty can still be interesting due to its traversal being good, or the sandbox nature of a large empty world.

Some of the worst examples of open worlds are the kind that are just filled with isolated little fetch quests; busywork that’s all marked on the map with no element of organic exploration. Or the kinds of open worlds where nothing actually happens “organically” without the player starting it.

The best kinds of open worlds are the ones that emphasise exploration and/or have background systems governing the world in some way (i.e. factions that interact with each other without the explicit involvement of the player).

“Gross misconduct” is union busting corporate speak for “workers trying to make a stand for their rights”.

Yar matey! 'Tis be a good life indeed!

Denmark has FH, which stands for “fagbevægelse hovedorganisation”, which is essentially a kind of alliance of unions. The only one not part of this alliance is Krifa and their Faglig Hus (Krifa = kristelig fag).

Same in Denmark, but here we also have overenskomster for specific work places, or kinds of work.

For example, I work for Just Eat. This puts me with 3F Transport Group. They have the transportoverenskomst, which is the groundwork for overenskomster of specific types of jobs, like bus driver, truck driver, or in my case, food delivery. So, based on the transportoverenskomst, we have the madudbringningsoverenskomst.