What does that have to do with anything here?? I don’t know about you, but my likeness is not permanently located in a public space…

Freedom of panorama (FoP) is a provision in the copyright laws of various jurisdictions that permits taking photographs and video footage and creating other images (such as paintings) of buildings and sometimes sculptures and other art works which are permanently located in a public space, without infringing on any copyright that may otherwise subsist in such works, and the publishing of such images.

Same scam as before, just made a lot easier by AI bullshit unfortunately.

What “better right for consumers” are you advocating for? The false claim that Steam bars anyone on their platform from selling cheaper is easily proven false by looking at any of the numerous websites that track prices of games from various storefronts and is the key point used by Epic’s legal team to try to garner support to break up steam in order to gain market share themselves and make the industry markedly worse.

Your post is thinly veiled “Valve bad, give money to Epic instead”, whether you realize it or not. So what is your plan to make the industry actually better?

True, which is why it is so easy to tell which one you are doing. :)

There is open source software to run a stream deck, OBS is native (as you mentioned), and my Scarlett audio interface Just Works™. I’m not some big streamer or anything, but I dabble and nothing I could do on Windows is missing in Linux. Even my wacom tablet just works by plugging it in.

When I made the switch, I spent the money on a new ssd and literally pulled the windows one out and had it stashed away something like an “in case of emergency, break glass” type of thing. I realized recently I hadn’t touched that in 4 years and decided to format it and install Cachy to try that out on my laptop; everyone just won’t shup up about how good it is so I figured I should give it a chance.

You’re just simping for a different billionaire out here regurgitating Tim Sweeney’s talking points verbatim…

Make it so I OWN my games if a dev isn’t okay with that they can sell somewhere else.

I feel like we might be more likely to be successful lobbying Valve to make this a thing than we are the government. Fingers still crossed as hard as they can be for Stop Killing Games going somewhere productive in the EU.

The interesting thing about Steam being a monopoly to me, is that the complaints are always that they charge too much… They aren’t undercutting all of the competition in order to maintain massive market share at all. The biggest complaint seems to be “they charge so much money, but I have to list my game on their platform or else I will get basically zero sales and visibility to my game!”

Yea, Steam is huge. The eventual total enshittification of Valve terrifies me, but not enough to just nuke them today and hope a better alternative materializes out of thin air tomorrow. From what I can see, their market share is purely a factor of offering a better product, so smashing them to bits just sounds like being forced to use even worse products.

What is and isn’t a Monopoly varies from country to country, and always turns into the same circular debate every time it comes up anyway. That’s why I was trying to avoid getting bogged down is “is it or isn’t it” and focus on “if it is, then what?” because I’m not sure a lot of people have thought that far ahead. Myself included.

Their policy is not that you aren’t allowed to sell your game cheaper on another platform, their policy is that you can’t sell Steam keys on other platforms cheaper than you are selling the game on Steam. Basically, you can’t use Steam’s infrastructure when undercutting “Steam customers”. Games that are on Steam go on sale on other platforms when they are not on sale on Steam all the time currently.

I mean, it definitely isn’t going to happen in the US anytime soon… We haven’t had any teeth behind our anti-trust laws in decades. In my lifetime we have basically seen Bell Telephone get rebuilt under AT&T.

What’s your point?

Are you saying that Microsoft being split up made no sense? If so, what would you suggest instead?

Or are you saying since they “almost” did it to MS, then they could do it to Steam? If so, where do you make the split that effects any change? You could split Valve the game dev company from the Steam platform, but I don’t think that makes Steam any less monolithic in their space - they don’t get their market share from the games Valve has made.

I’d be completely in agreement of what you are saying if it wasn’t for the fact that there are so many people acting like Steam is the worst platform in existence every time they get brought up. People are awfully quick to suck Tim Sweeney off for only charging 12% and fill up the comments with whatever the opposite of “fangirling” is.

Here’s what I don’t understand… Say we all agree they are a monopoly, what do you do about it?

It doesn’t seem feasible to break them up into smaller companies, how would that even work? What are the dividing lines between what portion of the company goes where? Does that even solve anything?

Force them to charge less money? Okay, now they charge the same as Epic (or even less). Basically every other store is now being undercut by the biggest player on the scene. There is now even less reason to use a storefront that isn’t Steam. It doesn’t feel like that solves the problem either.

It seems like all the courts have tried to do so far is charge them money for existing, not get them to change what they do, which seems a lot less like the government trying to stop the big bad monopoly and more like the government wanting to get their cut. What does “stopping the monopoly” even mean? Are we happier and better off as consumers if Valve is forced to shut down Steam entirely? Is that the goal?

in Our Daily Lives

Right… Most of us fly every day. That’s a daily occurrence for sure. It isn’t seeing them at diners or patrolling neighborhoods that affects our “daily lives”, it’s the airports. The place that has been a totalitarian dystopia where we all know we have no freedoms or rights and haven’t for 25 years.