Is Chicago deep dish a pizza or a casserole?

No, Steam existed for a while before HL2. It was used for Counter-Strike 1.5, over a year before HL2 came out. Its initial purpose was for anti-cheat and anti-piracy. There was no inclination to block secondary market sales there.

What you’re describing there is anti-piracy mechanisms, not resale market blocking, which is indeed something Steam was built to tackle.

Now who’s nitpicking? My point was never that there was one killer feature that’s worth $100b/yr. Again, it’s weird you think there is one, a weirdness that can only be chalked up to a total ignorance of what Steam actually offers. The whole point is that the entire meme argument of “Steam doesn’t deserve the 30% cut!” is based on flawed premises based on the PR campaign of a competing billionaire trying to take much of that capital for himself, there is not a single way to make a reasonable point in that direction unless the argument is that nobody deserves a 30% cut but, given the features provided compared to every other retailer out there, Steam would deserve the highest cut (even if that’s something like 15% instead of 30%).

Accusing collusion, pretending Steam doesn’t have any extra features compared to other retailers or digital platforms, ignoring market and industry standards, and accusing any pushback as being a defense are not reasonable lines of argument.

It was made before HL2, and they supported physical console games (where pretty much all secondary sales were happening) for many years after (and including) HL2.

Unless you’re going to show that this price fixing was somehow agreed to and accepted by regulations decades ago with brick and mortar stores, and then there was an agreement from all the digital marketplaces to join onboard, you can’t assume it must be a grand conspiratorial cabal except, somehow, for Tim Sweeney and Epic Games, who are standing against literally everyone else.

Nothing you have said about Steam seems to indicate you’re aware of anything Steam does beyond distribute games. Even here, you’re not demonstrating any knowledge of its other features. It says quite a lot you think there must be one singular feature that makes all the difference, it’s like you have no frame of reference for how many other features Steam has compared to other stores and how they could all be of immense value together. You did, however, reference yet another piece of disingenuity: the bullshit MFN clause complaint. Yet another standard retail practice and agreement that someone is disingenuously claiming is unique to Steam. I’d chalk this up to another EGS thing but there’s no proof they’re connected to or, you know, colluding with this Dutch group behind the odd class action suit.

So much of this is just ignoring what the standards are and lying by saying they’re unique to Steam and nobody else. Standards are standards. There are other agreements in place to keep digital pricing the same as physical pricing too, we should be talking about standards more, not less. There’s no good reason to reject acknowledging and considering standards and how little they have been changed. This is Tim Sweeney’s whole push about lowering the fee to 12% too.

Pointing out the basis for your arguments are wrong is not nitpicking. The premises are the foundation of the argument and directly lead to the point. You don’t have a point if everything that leads to it is wrong. It’s also not defending anyone to say that you, and specifically you, are working on false information. If anything, it’s closer to being a attack on you than a defense of anyone else.

Speaking of not reading what is being written, you somehow missed I told you what you legitimately could grieve Valve, Steam, and Newell over and you somehow missed it entirely in order to keep up this lie that Valve or Steam are being defended by pointing out you’ve been played to believe something that isn’t actually true because you have little to no experience with the services in question.

Speaking of billionaire worship, I notice a distinct lack of you questioning why billionaire Tim Sweeney would be manipulating public thought and argumentation against his competition in the exact same way that billionaires have been doing for the last decade, and how you fell for it. If you’re really anti-billionaire, you should be mad that happened and actively untangling all of the bullshit away and moving on to more legitimate grievances and criticisms instead of doubling down on them by hoping yelling “collusion!” enough will make it real.

What I am getting at is that you are using another billionaire’s disingenuous talking points uncritically while thinking you’re being anti-billionaire. You heard something that sounded good but didn’t verify or research any of it.

This whole idea of “Steam takes 30%, that’s terrible!” is from Tim Sweeney’s anti-Steam PR campaign. The 30% cut was always the standard retail cut, and has been part of every retail store until EGS made a big thing about their lower amount and their disingenuous PR campaign that suggested that only Steam was taking an exorbitant cut. The fact is that all stores took that same standard retail cut. Steam makes a bajillion dollars more than everyone else just from the sheer volume of sales they do. The idea that they make all this money because they take a bigger retail cut is a lie.

And, in case this hasn’t been made clear enough to you yet: you don’t seem to know what Steam is if you think it’s only a service to download games and doesn’t offer anything else to users. It has a huge amount of features for users, games, and communities beyond just that, far more than another other retailer or store is offering. It is completely disingenuous to pretend like Steam does none of these to force the argument that they are just taking money and offering the most basic of a singular service. So if you want to argue that Steam specifically doesn’t deserve the 30% cut that every retailer takes, then you’ll need to demonstrate how Steam offers less than every other retailer. If this requires ignoring all the features and advancements Valve and Steam have done, then that really shows the quality of that statement, doesn’t it?

Taking a step back to assess situations fairly and accurately isn’t a defense of anything. There’s so much to criticize Valve and Steam for if you took the time to be informed, most notably with the lootboxes and gambling aspects (which is also where much of its profits come from). So if you’re really as anti-billionaire as you claim to be, are you going to go and examine these assumptions you held and figure out why you got misled so deeply by another billionaire, and make sure it doesn’t happen again?

If that’s a nit, and not a main point, then why is that first line even there? Why mention profits again in the last line if the point is just “We should regulate them more!” When did directly disagreeing with a statement become a “nit” to launch a completely different main point?

And what do you mean “pretend it isn’t their main product”? I’m literally telling you that Steam does more than you’re saying it does, which is the whole basis of your disagreement with the OP above. I am sticking to the product in question. The only way to think I’m avoiding talking about Steam is if you really don’t know what Steam does beyond offering a place to download games, and aren’t aware of any of its features.

Is it defending a store to point out that your description of it only hosting downloadable files and nothing else is very incorrect?

Valve pioneering into digital distribution in 2002 because they saw an opportunity to distribute in ways publishers hadn’t considered is not the same thing as Sony choosing to end physical media distribution in 2026 to kill off used games sales and control pricing.

You’re conflating two different somethings. Anti-AI mob is not the same as AI. Being against mob mentality doesn’t make you inherently pro AI.

It’s possible to be pro or anti mob mentality and AI in various different combinations.

Does it sound like the state of SC has much critical thinking skills?

Pretty sure the Nazis at Twitter do just as much virtue signalling. Every play in the right wing playbook these days is to pretend to care about a value and then do nothing for, or the opposite of, it.

Montana farmers trusted Trump to look after them?? Are they the dumbest people on the planet?

Considering the results, their problem was that the US electorate wanted much worse politics than just bad.

Which jurisdictions have this regulation? I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a leading retailer having to implement a disadvantageous sales agreement for the sake of their competition.

Again, this is a standard retail clause that has existed long before Steam. It would apply no matter what combination of retailers they choose to sell at because they all have this. This is why digital games are sold at the same price as physical copies when they cost less to distribute: the brick and mortar retailers have this same clause.

There’s no good reason to treat this like a Steam-specific thing. Every retailer has such a clause, big or small. This entire idea is based on a frivolous class action suit that is not going anywhere because it’s launched on the shaky grounds of the belief that Steam exclusively uses the MFN clause and that they think a 30% cut is too much.

That’s a pretty standard retail agreement clause that’s been around for decades before digital distribution. It’s not unique to Steam at all, letalone them doing it uniquely.

This would be the comment I would write if I was promoted to respond like the most stereotypical reddit gamer possible.

I just can’t stand these fake leftists who just use terms they don’t understand and outrage to look cool for other fake leftists on the internet.

You’re assuming his apologia is not disingenuous. The notes he added in the commit messages and the extent to which he blocked users who were indirectly implicated in his accusations don’t line up with his explanations.

There’s also the fact that much of it is caught under a very broad net of “promoting violence” without any examples provided of what constitutes such a thing. He used that exact explanation to justify banning blahaj.zone, where he said that some users did so and the admins did not act on it, which prompted him to blacklist the entire instance and the admins specifically.

This isn’t even getting into the intentional inaccuracies about the nature of his “Toxic Mode”, or his entire rant on db0 which is not only dishonest and weirdly personal, but also straight up lying about what happened and why. There’s zero way to say that exposing his blacklist is “going Karen” like he did, and it’s a straight lie to say that nobody had a problem with his blacklisting until db0 complained when the situation is that db0 made the existence of the blocklist known.

The philosophy of federation is that such whims should be openly handled on the federation level, not in a secret blacklist of a front end that was openly available to all.