In case you were not paying attention you said Valve has to remove abusive clauses, which there is only one in question here and that’s about price parity, so other stores could compete. At not point did you mention any actual laws and at no point did I mention anything remotely related to laws. I said you thinking that removing that one clause will make other stores competitive is delusional thinking.
EDIT: And I got blocked. I guess that says all there is to say about OP.
If you think removing those abusive clauses will have an impact on the market you’re delusional.
Third party sellers have no reason to have a lower price on a different store, unless the store itself is paying them the offset of a lower price. That’s only going to suffocate smaller stores that don’t have money to burn.
And the stores with first party games can already create a bigger incentive for their store by keeping their games store exclusive because it would be the only place to play that particular game (it’s why streaming services have gone down the route of exclusivity). Also having the game with a higher price point on Steam would just lead to a controversy which will hurts sales and damage the reputation of the company.
Removing the price parity clause will do nothing.
It had all sorts of weird exploits. There was an exploit where playing in windowed mode and resizing the window would effectively make you unkillable. That got used in PvP where you run into a capture point and then start resizing the screen keeping the capture point forever contested.
I completely forgot those games were on Steam. They’re in my ignore list so I never see them on the store page.
Everything about windows is misleading. There are windows settings that require doing some sort of an windows inception where you open one settings to go deeper into an older version of the same settings to go deeper into an even older version of the same settings until you reach something that was designed for Windows 98 and actually works. With every newer windows version the settings become only more and more convoluted. Thank god I’ve switched to Linux as my daily driver.
Steam doesn’t even fit the criteria of the FTC definition. It wasn’t Steam that raised the price of games to $70, it was actually done by Take-Two followed by Sony, Activision and Nintendo. And it was Microslop who first tried to normalize the $80 price tag before Nintendo swooped in and made it a reality. And Steam didn’t tell Team Cherry to raise the price of Hollow Knight which is why it released with a $20 price tag. In fact during it’s entire “monopolistic” stage Steam has never set the price of any game except their own (which they priced a market price). Even the 30% cut wasn’t pioneered by Steam, 30% was roughly what retailers used to take. Valve simply rolled with what was a reasonable cut back in the day because they were effectively replacing retailers.
As for the rest, I don’t know you’ve been living under a rock but some the most successful games today are not on Steam. Minecraft is not on Steam, Roblox is not on Steam, Fortnite will never be on Steam, Blizzard games (except Diablo IV and OW2) are not on Steam, Riot games are not on Steam. But maybe you meant indie games that haven’t made a name for themselves? We don’t know if those games would’ve been more successful had they released on Steam but Vintage Story seems to be doing just fine without being on Steam and the same could be said about Starsector. The upcoming Hytale game doesn’t seem to be releasing on Steam either. Steam is not a requirement for success. And of course you can always try to partner up with Sony or Nintendo and release PS or Switch exclusives.
Steam has a market dominant position on PC because Valve understands the market they’re in while their competitors in the PC space don’t. However in the wider gaming space Steam is hardly a monopoly. Steam Deck has sold about 4 millions units (numbers from Feb 2025) and people talk like it’s going to change the gaming landscape, meanwhile Microslop has sold almost 30 million units (numbers from the end of 2024) of Xbox series S and X and this gen of Xbox is considered a failure. The scale at which Microslop, Sony and Nintendo operate is completely different. In the wider gaming space Valve is in no position to set prices or exclude competitors because Valve has extremely low market penetration outside the PC landscape. Steam can’t even influence the PC market because it’s an open platform. Hypothetically if games on Steam started costing $100 then developers could just release games on their own and set their own price. Furthermore Steam is in competition on the PC marketplace and also in competition with consoles because at the end of the day people have a limited time to play games and they’re going to play games on whatever platform is most comfortable to them. If Steam stops being comfortable and Sony or Nintendo pull their sticks out of their asses (I think is Microslop beyond saving) why wouldn’t people slowly transition away from Steam and into console gaming the same way we’re seeing a trend of console players very slowly transitioning into console + PC gamers.
You have to put magnifiers on so the only thing you see is Steam and then add blinders to narrow view of the wider gaming space down to PC to be able to make some a statement about Steam being an monopoly. And if I just look into the horizon then the earth also seems flat. Just because I ignore all other evidence and focus solely on the perception that the earth is flat, it doesn’t mean the earth is flat. The same way just because you ignore everything else and perceive Steam as monopoly it doesn’t mean Steam is a monopoly.
EDIT: mentioned exceptions to the Blizzard example and cleared up some wording.
I know It’s just that the term has gotten even more overloaded and vague over time. At least in the 90s you could somewhat draw a really squiggly line where RPG-s had skills and classes and stats-boosting items and xp and all that jazz, and non-rpg games didn’t really have that. But 00s has some games implementing RPG elements into itself and it kicked into full gear in the 10s with AAA non-RPG games adopting xp, levels, skills, stat sticks etc and most AAA RPG-s simplifying by dropping classes and such. Whatever thin line there was in the 90s has been completely eroded in the 10s. If someone wants to call Horizon Forgotten West an RPG I can’t really say it’s not
That’s because Clair Obscur is directly influenced by the JRPG genre which is why it feels almost like not a RPG compared to something that is a western RPG like KC:D2.
But I agree, the term RPG is way overloaded and it needs a more stricter set of rules to define what a RPG is. But it’s been that way for almost a decade at this point and I no longer care to split hairs about it, I just laugh when Monster Hunter gets nominated as an RPG because in my mind I would never consider it a RPG.
I don’t think it had a big marketing strategy, but it definitely marketed itself through word of mouth because it definitely deserved all the praise (and now awards) it got.
I don’t think Tencent cares that much about Chinese nationalism to push for a China themed AC. It seems to me like Tencent just likes to stick their hand in every pot and make money. At least that’s what I think, I don’t know what they’re doing behind the scenes.
I’ll rephrase it more clearly then. Selfhosting focuses on the hosting aspect of software. !programming@programming.dev focuses on the development aspect of software. This article talks about the architectural decision made during development. It doesn’t talk about how to host serverless. It doesn’t even talk about why you wouldn’t want to selfhost serverless. It talks about bad software patterns the come with serverless. It also talks about the cost of running those things but even that is geared more towards enterprise level devops people.
It might be an interesting read from the software developer perspective but it’s not interesting from the selfhoster perspective, because the article has nothing to do with selfhosting.
The discussion is off topic for the same reason web development software patterns or the benefits of choosing one language over another aren’t really relevant to the selfhosting community. Because most self-hosters don’t develop the software they host, they set up existing software. Serverless technology itself might be relevant, if there was a project using that, but how the architectural decision impacts software development is not really relevant to self-hosters.
I’m not sure how that’s relevant. I even considered the possibility of them ordering the list based on revenue instead of units sold but even then it doesn’t make sense that there’s no Silksong in the top 20. One of the most anticipated title of the year in its release month makes less revenue than RDR2? And it doesn’t explain any other anomalies, like Helldivers 2, which has been out for over a year, selling better than Snake Eater, which is considered one the best MGS titles?
I’m not calling them liars but I do think their data is incomplete.
Absolute trash source.
No Silksong in the top 20
Konami said MGS Snake eater sold more than 1 million units on the first day so according to the list Helldivers 2 had to sell more than 1 million units last month because it apparently has sold better than MGS?
Had to check what the fuck is a Kickoff Bundle and it’s apparently NFL 26 and some college football 26. Okay fine, but the list also has NFL 26 brought up separately so NFL gets 2 places in the top 20? Never am I going believe people bought the Kickoff bundle for college football.
And then there are some really sus entries like RDR2 (which is a good game but is it really one of the best selling games of last month?)
When you make a statement it’s your responsibility to provide proof because what if you’re talking out of your ass? How would we find any proof in that scenario when it literally wouldn’t exist? How would we know if you misinterpreted a source? How would we know we misinterpreted the correct source? What if we think what you’re saying is so stupid we don’t want to waste our time looking for proof? There are a lot of reasons the burden of proof shouldn’t fall on us, which means the burden of proof should fall on the person who made the statement. They know if what they said is factual and if it’s factual they know where they found this fact and thus it would be significantly less effort for them to find and present the source.
And a few years back you could get the same deal for half the price and in a few years it’s going to cost even more. You’re getting slow boiled because you’re thinking “I’m still getting a good deal”. You’re getting a good deal until you’re no longer getting a good deal and then what? Best case scenario you simply won’t have any of the games you paid to play. Worst case (if Game pass becomes successful enough) gaming is fucked because it’ll become streaming services 2.0 where you have to have 4 different subscriptions active just to play the games you want to play, and good luck trying to buy games when they’ve been priced into high heavens just to make the subscriptions seem reasonably priced (MS already tested that with Outer Worlds 2).
Doesn’t matter how good Game pass was or is, it’s a poisoned chalice and it will irreversibly fuck up gaming if people continue using it.
Now factor publishers cut and the cost of development. At 50% they probably didn’t even recoup their costs.
Of course you’re going to have a hard time finding anything on Google because any game that fails to be a success also drops from search results. But to give an example, Arco. It’s got positive reviews from pretty much everyone giving it a review and yet it didn’t even get more than 200 concurrent players on Steam. I’m not saying it’s some unbelievable gaming experience, but it is a good game. If there’s nothing wrong with the game why was it a failure? Am I supposed to believe they made a game for nobody?
But great things have mass appeal outside their niche. Metallica is an excellent example of that because it’s not only metalheads who listen to Metallica. Same thing with games.
I think we can agree that soulslikes are not for everyone. Lies of p and Lords of the fallen give a rough estimate what the core audience for soulslike is, which is pretty small. But it didn’t stop Elden Ring from being the biggest release of that year, because Elden Ring transcends the genre it’s in. Great games will pull people from outside their niche the same way great songs, shows, movies, books and paintings can reach well outside the box people have put them in.
In gaming we’ve seen the same thing happen with Silksong. Same thing happened with Clair Obscur and the JRPG genre. Same thing happen with BL4 and the looter shooter genre. Hades 2 will most likely pull people outside the roguelite genre. Silent hill f will most likely pull people outside the horror genre. When you have so many great games pulling players from outside their niche and hogging all the limelight, how are you going to discover those other great games that don’t get any of the limelight? You won’t, which is why this is a discoverability issue.
I mean there’s nothing preventing them for doing the same thing here. But if we could get a more even split of users between instances it would arguably be harder for them to pull the same thing because a) the admins can intervene and ban those accounts because the admins are not corporate slaves, unless they are in which case b) other instances can just ban the instance that is letting corporations go wild. We’ve already seen that level of “moderation” with Lemmygrad being ostracized from the wider Lemmy/Piefed ecosystem. It wouldn’t work with a disproportionate instances because defederating lemmy.world would be a massive hit on users feeds and the higher user count would make it harder to moderate against these actions.
It’s going to require more work from mods and admins, but I imagine we’ll fare better than Reddit. After-all Reddit has an incentive to support this kind of behavior.