atrielienz

On one hand, Itch.io is supposed to be for indie games and while I personally have not got any experience with their platform their model does seem to be pretty incentivised towards developers if the only thing those developers care about is getting more profit from the games they are able to sell.

However, on balance, indie game developers don't often have the budget to create the kind of hype around a game that would push most consumers to buy it from just itch.io. So it's in the best interest of lots of indie developers to make their game as accessible as possible and go where the users are.

In that respect steam (and Microsoft and Sony) are the places to go. Of those three steam has less active competition from their company for games than either of the other platforms. Indies aren't competing against Valve games the way they are against Sony or Microsoft produced games on the relevant platforms.

At this point I've back 4 games on Kickstarter or in one case the developer site, and I am very happy with each of them. They have (all except one) offered keys on steam, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. Even when they didn't release on all those platforms at the same time. Two of them I have purchased on a separate platform after receiving a key on my chosen platform so I can play those games in multiple places.

On the other hand, I don't necessarily like that Indies probably won't see the same benefit of paying less per unit served after selling $10 million and again after an additional $5 million (Valve drops their percentage from 30% to 25% after a developer sells $10million worth of units and again to 20% for every copy sold after selling an addition $5 million sold on steam).

This I feel is a boon to big development firms that not a whole lot of Indies can take advantage of. So there is definitely room for improvement there.

I guess I'm trying to compare the bits and pieces that are the same across these platforms and that's why I was wondering about developing for things like the steam deck. I agree that providing a development space and tools for development when you are the entity providing the hardware is different than acting as a management and aggregation tool with appropriate included services. I'm still reading this https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home

And seeing if I can find answers to some of the questions I have about what services they do provide on the development side for the hardware they do sell.

You are giving props to the Apple store (among others) for a couple of things here 1. Good Development Tools. 2. Handling payments. 3. Handling downloads. 4. A good OS.

So okay. Let's break this down a bit. Apple is a closed system. It provides a lot of the tools you reference because you literally cannot get those tools anywhere else and meet the standards required to publish anything to their store. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it is important context in comparing steam to Apple and their ecosystem.

I'm also not sure what debugging tools you'd expect to get from Valve in regards to Microsoft as a platform. You have to pay Microsoft for help because they're the ones with the source code and other system elements. Steam doesn't have control over those. The same goes for Apple. So for the record I don't know that this is relevant unless you're specially comparing their steam OS and what it should provide as a platform for designing games for steam OS and working within the steam ecosystem with that of other players like Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

Steam handles payments and even refunds.

Steam handles downloads.

My understanding and use case is that steam OS is pretty decent as far as gaming OS's are concerned and I haven't seen them catch a whole lot of flak for that. However I actually don't know and can't speak to this but would be happy to have you or others elaborate on the experience of developing for steam OS specially or just Linux. I'm sure it has its own set of pros and cons.

Followup question. Do you receive any of this stuff from Nintendo? Sony/PlayStation? They also take an 30% cut. They also have closed ecosystems as far as development. They also appear to handle payments, and downloads. I know that devkits have historically been exhorbitantly expensive but don't know what the barrier to entry is now or how that compares.

What substantiates the claim that games will become cheaper? We already know games are one of the few commodities that are getting cheaper over time when taking inflation into account. I've seen this claim everywhere but I don't understand what makes people think it's true and nobody has been able to show me the logic or reasoning of it. Also, you claim that game development becomes more lucrative. It only becomes lucrative at all with a return on investment which requires that a developer be able to afford to make the game, market it, advertise it, and sell it to a wide audience all while handling the financial side of things (licensing agreements, handling the financial details of consumers in a secure fashion, providing refunds within the constraints of laws worldwide, etc).

These cases and the litigation process also cost money. You absolutely can lose by looking into it.

I haven't seen anybody else except the litigants included in the class action make these claims. Nobody seems to be able to substantiate them. I'm actively following this because I want to know if it's true. I'd welcome any proof someone can provide that these claims have been elsewhere substantiated.

Can I ask what you get? I'd like to understand what steam provides for a 30% cut vs what app stores like Google or Apple provide and what you value more from one vs the other.

Lemmy is meant to be a direct alternative to reddit and it copies plenty of design and user elements from there that don't necessarily fit with the overall user use case here. There are whole instances without downvote buttons for example. This is an over-arcing statement that lumps together a bunch of instances and user bases that don't necessarily comply with such a notion.

There are several companies (Microsoft) who fall into the same category (being entrenched in PC gaming as a platform and intermediary between gamers and publishers). But Microsoft while more successful overall is not being considered to be a gatekeeper in this instance. They have further reach generally (they are the dominant platform for PC gaming as a whole, and have a competing game store). However you stipulate that Valve simply existing makes them a gatekeeper which runs afoul of the law put in place for economic reasons to provide a fair landscape. Why has Microsoft not pulled ahead of Valve? They take the same cut, have more exclusivity, provide more and arguably better hardware, have the Xbox game store and other competing services. They aren't being considered in this space to be gatekeepers (the two core platform services noted for them are LinkedIn, and Windows OS).

Nobody is forcing game development companies to do business with Valve. If they didn't (as an industry) they could absolutely exert enough leverage to push Valve off the top spot. Microsoft could almost definitively do so by themselves. They provide a great deal of the same services and products.

Valve only really seems to be guilty of innovating in a space that other larger companies ignored and being successful at pricing a product that people prefer. I'm not sure that's enough to warrant them being lumped in with companies that obviously use anti-consumer and anti-competition business practices to exert control over the digital market place.

The Digital Marketplace Act was created seemingly to force economic fair practice and provide a level playing field for businesses (startups or industry titans) to operate. Valve seems to be operating within those constraints and you haven't actually proven your supposition that they have done anything wrong to achieve what they have achieved.

Further I am going to say that you don't understand that "cornered the market" actually has a legal definition. "In finance, cornering the market consists of obtaining sufficient control of a particular stock, commodity, or other asset in an attempt to manipulate the market price. " - According to Wikipedia. So, how are Valve attempting to manipulate the market price of games?

We know already that they only enforce the price of steam keys (meaning that you cannot sell a steam key for less on any other platforms than you do on steam). But that's a steam key, and doesn't translate to the price of any other licensing key provided by any other license agreement.

What else are they doing that you feel or can prove is cornering the market. Getting to market first and offering goods at the same or a similar price as competitors with better service isn't it.

They don't. Look at the first paragraph you quoted. "Significant impact on internal market" what significant impact does Valve exert on the internal gaming market? Specifically, what do they do that Nintendo, or Epic or GOG don't do that exerts pressure on the gaming platform market?

Even if they were to meet those requirements and actually be a gatekeeper in the space, you still haven't answered the second question. Look at the do's and don't's. What don't's are they actively using to hurt other platforms in the space? What part of their business practices specifically do you feel falls afoul of the Digital Markets Act?

I read the article. You don't expect me to just take the quote at face value? You asserted that they fall into this category. So show us your work. How and why? A quote is not sufficient.

Sync doesn't do this by default (I haven't changed any settings to this effect). I'm currently in settings now looking for a setting to change just to see.

Edit: Under settings there is an option for setting comment views (settings/comment options/comment views). However it defaults to new. Additionally it does the same thing in my bed browser using Alexandrite.

The point is though this doesn't work for everyone using Lemmy and it's definitely a carry-over habit from reddit and similar messageboard style sites.

It's not slightly high when you realize that someone has to pay for bandwidth, advertising, licensing fees etc. IGN (please take that with a grain of salt) has an infographic about this from an article awhile back. I feel like it explains fairly well that the industry standard is 30% and that only a handful of stores actually provide anything below that. And Nintendo particularly is reported to take 30-40% depending. I can appreciate that people are naturally distrustful of any large company. I can appreciate that steam doesn't get it right 100% of the time and there are valid criticisms of it's business practices and decisions over time. But on the other hand, this has always seemed like a nothing burger to me.

When you buy a digital key at Walmart or Best Buy or Game Stop, they get a 30% cut too.

It's not even 30% of all sales: "Valve even adjusted Steam’s rates late last year in what seemed to be a response to the pressure from Epic, but this change is likely only impactful to major developers. After $10 million in sales through Steam, Valve’s cut drops to 25% on all new sales, and drops again to 20% on sales after $50 million. For reference, earning $10 million would mean selling just under 170k copies of a $60 game, and far more for independent games that are rarely that expensive."