DarthYoshiBoy

First things first, you cherry picked the one thing from my link that supports your position intentionally ignoring that it is a single prong in a standard that has several. Second, I'm glad you brought the FTC link, because they also do not agree with your stance if you bring the whole context from your own link into the conversation:

As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.

Your definition only meets one portion of the FTC standard, which is why my comment addressed how Valve fails to meet any of the points of the standard beyond the dominant market position. YES STEAM IS MARKET DOMINANT, BUT NO THEY ARE NOT A MONOPOLY BECAUSE THEY DON'T MEET ANY OTHER PORTION OF THE STANDARD.

But Valve obviously has power.

To do what? PC is an open platform that they don't control.

Valve has the ability to do these things.

To make people raise prices or exclude competitors? Again, how or where?

Their competitors don’t.

Epic is LITERALLY excluding competitors right now for a bunch of titles, other competitors have done likewise until they recognized that customers didn't like it and decided that it wasn't in their best interest to do so.

Steam’s market share is so high, they could do whatever they want, whether or not they ever do.

Not to beat a dead horse, but how? They literally have no control over PC users beyond that which they've earned from being the best of MANY options, so how could they possibly parlay that into a power they could use to exert force over consumers or developers? Unless they did something that made them into not the best option, they have competition from every angle including from their direct competitors at Microsoft whose platform (as of March 2024) houses 96.67% of their customers with Windows being the dominant OS for Steam users by an absurd amount. There's incredible danger for Steam to try and pull anything anti-competitive because they literally live in the house that their competition built.

We are talking about a long-awaited critical darling of a game, and we are talking about how its sales blow, specifically because it’s not on Steam. Yes, it has sales, but it doesn’t have enough sales, unless it goes through this one store. Defending the store’s practices will not change that. Defending the conditions that led here will not change that.

You seem to imply that Steam being a monopoly has caused Remedy to suffer poor sales. However, we have the following problems there:

A) Steam fails to meet the legal definition of a monopoly. Just full stop. You attempt to take singular statements from a legal concept that by design has multiple prongs (specifically because we do not choose to harm companies who do no competitive wrong and come to their dominant position through the art of their craft being superior), but that's just willfully misunderstanding the concept of a monopoly.

and

B) A developer choosing to launch their game on the Evercade Vs and failing to see the sorts of sales numbers they might expect on Sony Playstation/Microsoft Xbox/Nintendo Switch is hardly a justification to claim that the game did poorly because Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are a oligopoly. The dev CHOSE to launch on a shittier platform, one that doesn't offer all the things that the current market expects. The devs are going to see lesser sales as a result, that's just how it works, they weren't harmed by a monopoly effect, they were harmed by their poor market choices.

It is a dead simple fact that Steam’s market share is real fuckin’ high. So high that everyone else barely counts. We have a word for that.

See, I think your problem may be that you think market share aside, all other things are equal, which is simply not the case. By your logic I should be able to offer you a nice shiny and new Evercade Vs in exchange for your Playstation 5 because it's only the market share that makes it so that the Evercade has less games to play? It's only natural where Steam is bringing more to the table, it has more customers as a result. EGS offers a pale shadow of what a consumer gets from Steam, so why should they count as much? Who owes them that? They need to get on that level if they want that credit due. They currently matter about as much as the effort they're putting into competing, which I'll agree isn't much, but is hardly relevant here.

Except, legally in the US where Valve is based, you've got 0 legs to stand on.

Valve does dominate the market they're in, but they do so without creating an unreasonable restraint of competition in that market. They are dominant by providing the best product, not because they have unfair business practices which burden the competition. Like I said, Valve will literally allow game makers to go and take 100% of every sale they make (assuming they can process payments for free) while still allowing them to use the platform Valve have built and pay to maintain so long as they'll pay Valve a cut for the copies that are sold directly through the Steam store. Valve allows their competition to sell games that package said competition's stores inside of those games. Every EA or Ubisoft game comes with the competitor's store bundled in. They create tools that allow their competitors games to run on platforms that the competition doesn't want to bother with and they give them away. HOW IS ANY OF THAT AN UNREASONABLE RESTRAINT ON COMPETITION?

"Here you go guys, you so obviously don't understand what the audience wants. How about you give us a cut of the sales you make on your games via our platform and we'll let you install your platform on our customer's PCs? How unreasonable and diabolical of us to cut down the competition by letting gamers see what an open sewage pipe of fetid scum they'd be dealing with in our absence. BWAH HA HAH HAH! We have constrained the competition by our cunning craft of having a better product. Truly we are monsters from HELL! HAIL GABEN!" -Valve, The monopolists 🙄

Steam is the antithesis of anticompetitive, they're not the single seller of any good beyond "Valve Games" of which there are now 22(?) among millions of PC games, and they don't generally dictate prices in the market; which is the succinct way of saying that they don't live up to any portion of the legal standard for what constitutes a monopoly. Give me something factual that implicates Valve as a monopoly or get out of here with this nonsense.

Except Valve allows people to sell their own keys without Valve taking a cut. That system is why at least half the vendors here can exist at all. The dev/publisher cuts a bunch of their own Steam keys and dumps them off with these shops who take less than the 30% cut that Valve takes from sales within Steam and the dev/publisher gets to keep the difference or pass that on to the customer as a discount. Steam just isn't a monopoly. They allow sellers to use everything that their platform offers for nothing more than a percentage of what is made exclusively from sales within the platform. A seller can sell their game through their own website and take home 100% (less whatever their payment processor charges, usually a single digit percent) of the sale, while still using everything that Steamworks and Steam in general is bringing to the table and all without any lock-in or requirements that they stick with Steam. All of that is a HUGE strike against considering Steam a monopoly, but that's not even everything.

So far as "the competition does not matter" that's largely because the competition (Primarily talking EGS here, but it's apropos UPlay and Origin too) hasn't done anything to make for a better value proposition other than paying for store exclusives and giving developers a rightfully higher cut of sales for a shot at a much smaller portion of the PC market. If Epic offered answers to Proton, Steam Link, communities, workshop, meta-games in the store, quick UI, marketplace, etc... It might make for a real challenge to Steam, but as it stands now there's nothing in EGS that puts up anything approaching half of what you get for the same games in Steam. I've never bought anything in EGS, but trying to use their app with any of the free games that they've given me has immediately turned me right around and sent me back to Steam while it takes literal minutes for the app to get me signed back in and going (and often has to spend time updating a game once it does) while Steam was good to go 2 seconds after boot, never needs me to reauth once I've signed into a system, and keeps my games updated silently without my having to notice or worry.

Now GOG on the other hand, where I have spent a decent amount of money and own a good number of games has managed to make a proposition of giving me a barebones store that gives me barebones downloads of games that don't need updates, or a launcher, without any DRM so I can just download an EXE and get my games. They matter, they're bringing something to the table that nobody else does and I love them for that. I go out of my way to buy games on GOG when they're the sort of things that don't need any of the stuff that Steam is providing.

If any of the other publisher owned storefronts tried to do anything half as ambitious as GOG or Steam, they'd probably matter, but the fact is that they won't because they don't think like Valve or GOG, they think like MBA shitlords who's single trick is extracting rents for properties made by smarter people, often back in the days before those MBAs knew their multiplication tables. The same school of idiots who saw how Netflix had a really good thing going and thought that they could have the good thing themselves so now we have a worse situation than we had before Netflix destroyed the cable industry and we get all of these platforms that don't work as well as Netflix did/does where you have to go to 30 different shitty places to get what you used to find in one really good place. A whole lot of idiots who paid a lot of money to learn in fancy schools that you can personally get rich by convincing a company to kill the golden goose, so long as you immediately proceed to get out of town so it's the next guy's problem to solve before anyone notices that the golden eggs aren't rolling in anymore. It's incomprehensible to me that people are going to bat for those muppets when all they ever do is make things worse so they can line their 401k with another million.

https://www.patreon.com/Orioto

Might just be a me thing, but this guy puts out a new wallpaper almost every week and they're all amazing. The higher tiers allow you to participate in choosing the next wallpaper, but they're mostly for 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p. Buying in once gets you the whole lot of everything he's done until now.

Bluetooth headphones are not modernity, they should of course be an option, but increasingly they are the only game in town. Wired is still king for loads of things, not the least of which is reliability.

You wanna know how many times my wired Sennheiser's have been unable to put music in my ear holes? Never. They always work. Care to guess how many wireless headphones have been able to provide sound every time I've wanted it without delay or failure? None. I've owned more than 2 dozen wireless this, that, and the other, headphones & earbuds, and none of them have been even a shadow of the reliability offered by my old wired headphones. Which is to say nothing of the fact that the wired experience usually sounds better (Still don't think you can get any comfortable phat 600ohm monster cans that don't have a wire) and has no issues with making sound when you're in a space that is saturating the 2.4Ghz band (my Costco is usually so full of idiots on Bluetooth that you can't get a reliable experience for anything from any wireless audio device.)

You seem to think it's "backwards rhetoric" to want a feature that will never be offered in a wireless setup, and that's just fucked man. There are a wealth of reasons why wireless does not fully replace wired. It's why anything that doesn't have to move generally gets a fixed connection, it's just more reliable and often more efficient. That's not backwards, it's just a priority that you don't value above others. If landlines or floppy disks offered any advantages over anything else they'd still be around today (and arguably they are in some limited niches,) but the replacements for those technologies have had no downsides against their replacements while wireless tech still has some significant downsides (again, maybe you don't weight the pros and cons the same, so this may not apply to you) against the technology they are meant to replace, and will likely never see 100% capture of their role as a result.

TL;DR: Stop trying to frame this as some sort of crusade against the future, there are legit cases where wired is just better than wireless.

At this point they’re only wagging their fingers to make it appear as though they’re considering regulation.

Again, it's disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors. What are the left supposed to do? Pull a Trump and pretend that the laws and systems that make our country don't exist and just say that what they want is law and ignore that half the country is electing morons who will fight them at every turn? That's not how it works and frankly I wouldn't want it to work that way because it's just incredibly dangerous. They're trying to work within a system where the right has learned they can con half the country into believing they're doing their job while they sit back and do their damnedest to ensure that the government doesn't function at all because that's the only way that conservatives can stop progress at this point with their platforms being as unpopular as they are.

The left is definitely more open to considering regulation. It's not even close. The right thinks that regulation is a four letter word and they're generally not a fan of those either. It's disingenuous to both sides everything. Much of the time where the left allows a carveout for vampirism, it's because it's the best compromise they can mange to a given end given that the right is out there swabbing their throats and getting all hot and bothered waiting for daddy Drac to come and give it to them, not because it's their preference that we allow unfettered late-stage capitalism to destroy lives. Again, it's disingenuous to claim that their pragmatism in the face of unreasonable actors is the same as being the unreasonable actors (and I am well aware that there are exceptions that prove the rule on both sides of the isle, so 🤷‍♂️)

...and lest anyone think that this problem isn't solved with government regulation, I invite you to look at the medication situation in nearly any other country in the world where by and large they are not afraid of regulation for the same drug companies that are fucking us sideways in the US and see how much cheaper and better their access to medications is solely because they're willing to support that maybe there is a greater public good than shareholder profits.

This is of course their MO. They were making Insulin for pennies per vial for years and selling it for hundreds of dollars per. It's funny how they're allowed to keep doing this to us and they probably always will because the US right thinks the immoral thing is not letting vampires have a suck whenever they want it. Obesity and Diabetes are a couple of the largest killers around, to say nothing of the losses in Quality of Life they cause. It's just insane that we refuse to regulate prices for drugs that would relieve immeasurable suffering and death because CEOs gotta have a nicer Yacht or how is life any fair?

It depends. In the early days of the Android ROM scene, Twitter was the best place for news. Cyanogen and all the crews basically announced their new releases exclusively on Twitter. There has been a similar vibe for other scenes over the years as well. Discord is largely taking over that space these days, but I miss the simplicity of following one or two people whose updates I cared about a bunch over the new reality where I'm in 30 Discords and they're all chock full of notifications for endless nonsense I care nothing about.

They did

It's a pretty great game. Really good music and one of those gameplay loops that is easy to pick up and difficult to master. If you like Tetris and the like, Lumines is worth your attention.

Lumines