PenguinTD

There is actually a case going on regarding the platform pricing parity.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action

And there are other articles that checks for if you can sell at lower price(without temp sales) on EGS, only 5 out of 41 did so. I take it with some handful of salt cause ars didn't actually list out the games and who is the publisher behind those 5. That's why I post the first link from a developer's stand point. We will only know details once the case developed more.

Regarding reviews, it's like manage or moderate a forum, but it has huge impact if your changes aren't communicated, I just list this one but if you are more interested you can dig up older/newer changes. Simply put, if it wasn't through backlash and developers pulling teeth to push some odd changes like this back to a more neutral place. (ie. Early Access Reviews, Product received for free, product refunded tags are all much later than this article.) Steam's reviews would be something like youtube shorts that I simply skip. Is it better in the end? I don't know, cause you can still influence how popular a review is by the upvote/found useful from marketing campaign. Extra costs from developer to marketing(and still subject them to exploits), harder to navigate for consumer(like Amazon reviews), it's really messy and not really consumer/producer friendly.

I put my points in simply because there is a overwhelming "worshiping" of Valve/Steam that make the 30% cut seems justifiable, and distribution for digital good seriously can't be more expensive than physicals right? you can go check how much average Amazon charges seller even given it's dominant position as digital market place. Or simply put it this way, youtube/netflix/social bandwidth consumption is bigger than game distributions for average user. It might be a case for triple-As that come at ~45G per game but vast majority of games are about 1~2 hours worth of streaming(<20GB), I'd like Valve simply provide a usage based charge like cloud providers and developers can pick and choose what features they wanted to pay accordingly. 30% cut is not normal just as lootbox is not normal, they did it simply because they can. (as in traditional brick-and-mortar shop like BestBuy charging extras for cables etc, even with Amazon as competitor.)

Sorry if I miss some parts to provide follow ups, simply too tired to focus on stuff. Mark my words, once Gabe passed gamers are gonna have the reckoning coming for them. All my purchases are based on how much money the developers can get at the end. I buy games on store/launcher even if I don't like them, but if more bucks goes to developer, that's where I choose to buy. That's the important part, we buy stuff to support the developer we like/love, not to support the "platform" selling them.

Valve's steam provides values to consumer but aren't entirely "consumer friendly". Some of their "give ins" are entirely because of competition.

Examples:

• self refund and refund window, directly copy EA's origin.
• allow big publisher to negotiate store cut, direct response to Epic's store cut.
• linux push is entirely for steam's own survival, not a pro-consumer move.
• their policy changes on steam reviews over the years.
• the Steam UI revamp multiple times and makes discovery pretty messy when they tried to gamify the discovery process. All for easier marketing campaign pushes. (I found it pretty annoying, but I also don't like the Netflix style on EGS or other store front.)
• Valve's market place and their key/lootbox and cross game drops are among the pioneers just shy of the scummy gacha from the mobile space.
• Valve's policy dictates that you can not sell at lower price on different store front. Ie. a game dev selling on EGS can take off 18% and get the same amount of revenue from the store front, but they can't price lower because of Valve's policy. That's not consumer friendly.

The fact that Valve can just charge 30% even if a developer didn't use "any" steam feature is simply because they can. And we are all eating the cost cause developers have to factor that in as well.

care to layout how he buy his way into his own monopoly?

• buy exclusives or studio? most big publishers do that.
• give free games out? It's consumer friendly.
• drive Valve or other store front out of business? lol
• make EGS/EOS so good and free that no one wants to publish on Steam? lol, any advance in that 2 department Steam as platform will respond way before they take foot hold. (EOS voice chat back end does work nicer compare to steam's one if the game build for it. BUT, many gamers just use discord instead.)

anything I missed?

Epic's capital is tiny compare to other big publishers.(MS, Sony, Tencent)

good luck with that angle, practically "all" creative industry software have a free learning or community edition until you cross certain threshold and they are also all very dominant software, not because there are no competition, but more like existing market share friction. Like asking Maya artist to transition to Blender.

There are also plenty of game engine out there that are free or cheaper, UE4 or UE5 aren't exactly click 2 buttons and you have a game. (in fact, people spend decent amount of time to trim features/plugins they don't use/need from the source to cut build time and memory cost for the shipping build.

I think the discovery aspec would come from these:

• links from your frequently visited sites, community
• recommendations when you ask in more niche group, the frequent there usually can point you to a better youtuber/reviewer.
• or some lazy effort when you just go to the default and search with keywords(while in a container tab) and navigate through the useless stuff.

I complaint because now my youtube feed are filled with other pseudo-science and auto-generated stuff, youtube's algorithm have failed me basically. Half are from my subs and another half are from people or program that are trying to exploit you with those "try this to improve ....." shit and just paste some sounding scientist names.

the day this combo no longer works is the day I don't visit youtube. Honestly if there are some alternative front end/extension that's better please let me know. I visit youtube for times like game award announcement(so trailers and official release), search for review benchmark while I want to buy PC stuff, and the rest mostly just game educational stuff from Digital Foundry and channel like PBS Space Time. I am doing the upkeeping(so tagging channel as not interested or straight blocking them), but recent generated clips are flooding Youtube like crazy. I want to have a page/frontend that only my subscribed channels and whitelist keywords to show up.

I agree, it would eventually have it's own ecosystem around that water usage if "fresh" water or not really drinking water related use is required. At this point I think it's just cost related, cheaper just to dump into ocean.

someone from a totally different thread mentioned that the water can't stay in the system because of whatever mineral stuff from the cooling pipe/anti-algae/anti-corrosive has to leave the system after certain cycles. So unless you have a treatment plant down stream it's not exactly "drinkable" freshwater. (and I doubt water regulation would allow that to happen.)

The consume here means that water is not usable for other application. How? I don't know, maybe it can be used for power wash?

I didn't design that system, and I think it is this way because in the past without forensic evidence, the witness role basically put the burden to people who are testifying or on the stand for questions. That's why nowadays when the suits wants to push shady things they go off record cause they don't want to keep any evidence. It's up to the minions to smart up to make sure you cover your own ass.

And, sometimes company make or break during trials. I don't want to see value flop, but I also think 30% is a lot if you don't even use steam features. (here I mean you only publish on steam, but you don't use their DRM/Friend/Matchmaking, workshop, lobby, etc. But if a dev do indeed use those backend service I think it's justified. )

I hope you understand the principle of putting down names and/or title in email for paper trails is a thing, you don't really think Valve is a "flat" structure as marketed, right? I've consider myself lucky that I didn't run into much political or ethical drama thing for my career, but simply put names down and confirm the decision in writing dodge me quite a couple big bullets.

whoops.

Did you followed the Debb vs Heard one? I know it's kinda special case with lots of video and court recorded footage etc. Gabe isn't exactly a celebrity that expose their private life, but if internal emails is on the table for discovery then it can also be very different. Cause they will just tell you "you said/wrote make a decision here from this email" then start off that. Like you said who is a better actor? Can you suddenly remember details with which "partial" quote are referenced without context from email 6 months ago for your argument? And then suddenly don't remember any details making a decision 2~3 weeks ago? From neuroscience, our memory is pretty unreliable as we can fill the gap all we want. But it's court case just how the judge/jury believed what part they saw/hear.