This is propoganda. Valve is a privately-owned company, and therefore not a lackey of the olgiarcs, that’s why they are being attacked. Valve is good at business and listens to it’s customers, and Microsoft can go fuck itself sideways.
Valve’s policy is not anti-competitive. If you want to offer your game somewhere other than steam for whatever price you like, you are free to do so. If you use the steam platform to offer the game, then Steam requires you to not offer it for a lower price elsewhere AT THE SAME TIME.
That is not a monopoly, that is a clause of business contract. If a company doesn’t want to do business with valve, then they don’t have to. The 30% fee is large, but the value that comes with is massive.
I agree with most of this, and I vastly prefer Valve over anything else, and as long as there’s competition Valve will probably keep being the best of the bunch. I have a massive appreciation for their work on Linux gaming as well.
That said, Steam requiring that you don’t sell elsewhere for cheaper can definitely be considered anticompetitive, just not anticonsumer, which isn’t always the same thing. Anticompetitive behavior becomes a problem when markets consolidate and then the consumers have to pay whatever the dominant players say. Until then, consumers usually benefit (like buying stuff for much cheaper in Amazon until they make their competition go broke).
Man, we have the most beautiful game ecosystem ever imagined, literally 10s of thousands of games at a click of a button, shared between all your family, not a single issue with cross-platform game saves… and someone always has to shit on it.
Yeah, but a handful of extremely wealthy people can’t make more money because Steam offers the people what they want, and really, something should be done about this.
