> The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.
Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing. The actual written rule, from the Steamworks documentation, says: "It is important that you don't give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers." It even allows discounts at different times on other stores, as long as Steam gets a comparable offer within a reasonable period. There is no written policy preventing a developer from selling a separate, non-Steam-key version of their game cheaper elsewhere. The claim that Valve informally enforces broader price parity beyond Steam Keys is the unproven allegation at the center of the lawsuit.
And the broader claim, that lower commissions would lead to cheaper games for consumers, has already been tested and disproven. Epic exclusives like Borderlands 3, Control, Metro Exodus, Phoenix Point, and The Division 2 launched with no Steam version at all, complete pricing freedom, and a 12% commission. They were all priced at full retail. The hypothetical £35 game you describe has been possible for almost a decade. Nobody has produced it because developers and publishers set prices, and they choose to maximize their own margin regardless of what the platform takes.
> We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends.
Steamworks matchmaking requires a Steam account and Steam does not force developers to use Steamworks. This is how every platform-specific networking layer works: Xbox Live requires an Xbox account, PlayStation Network requires a PSN account. They offer a free matchmaking service if you want other platforms use other platforms. But i guess it is because of:
> Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront.
Yeah this sounds a lot like:"How dare they deliver a better service in the pursuit of user retention."
> taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026
This lists surface features and ignores the infrastructure: global CDN serving petabytes of downloads, payment processing across dozens of regional payment methods, fraud prevention, Workshop mod hosting, cloud saves, anti-cheat, regional pricing tooling, Proton development, Steam Deck compatibility, discovery algorithms. But the real test is simpler: developers are not forced to use Steam. If the value were as thin as claimed, the lower-priced competitors would be winning. They are not.
> 30% was set when they were handpicking every title ... they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%
The "handpicking" era was a walled garden developers spent years protesting. Greenlight was a direct response to developer demands for openness. The "slop" you complain about is what developers asked for. Valve then built discovery tools (reviews, curators, personalized queues, Next Fest) to handle the volume.
> they whittled away the value they provided time and time again
Since 2003 Steam added multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, Remote Play, game recording, Steam Families, regional pricing, refunds, the Steam Deck/SteamOS ecosystem, and ongoing VR investment. The effective commission dropped to ~24% for successful titles through tiered reductions. The rate went down while the platform expanded massively. That is the opposite of whittling away value.
> leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship
Valve grew from 78 employees in 2003 to ~550 today. Revenue per employee is high because the business is efficient. A company "extracting every dollar" does not fund Proton to make Windows games run on Linux at its own expense, develop VR hardware, or sell the Steam Deck near cost.
> gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is
Sweeney himself explained the difference in 2019:
"It's nearly perfect for consumers already... There is no hope of displacing a dominant storefront solely by adding marginally more store features or a marginally better install experience. These battles will be won on the basis of game supply, consumer prices, and developer revenue sharing."
He admitted Steam was already an excellent product. His conclusion was not to build something better. It was to buy exclusivity and remove games from Steam, forcing consumers onto a store that lacked basic features for years. Epic spent $444M on exclusivity deals in 2020 alone. It wasn't an affinity for some gabe cult that consumers rejected Epic but because Epic offered them fewer choices and a worse experience.
> make $1,100 PS4s as a side hustle
Valve sells hardware to establish new platform categories, not as high-margin "side hustles." Valve's hardware strategy has always been about expanding the Steam ecosystem, not milking unit margins and current hardware shortages fucked them.
1) This is a legit point although i don't see Valve as a big problem in that area. They invented lootboxes but refused to be as bad as others who followed them. Today with valve these things are restricted purely to cosmetics.
2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo.
Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.
Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.
The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.
>As I said in a different thread[0], the fact that some subscriptions are predatory doesn't mean subscriptions are necessarily predatory.
"Some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Subscriptions are structurally designed to extract payment for non-use. the whole point of the model is to be predatory.
You pre-pay for some allotment of resources but get nothing back for unused resources. And the main profit comes from the gap between what you paid for and the actual usage. And that's just in the best case scenario there the company is not running at a loss just to squeeze you later even harder. The entire model only works if people throw their money into the void.
If a provider genuinely wanted to cover the costs my usage imposes on them, they would bill me for usage. That's the honest version: you used X, here's the bill for X.
Instead, subscriptions deliberately decouple what I pay from what I consume, and they always decouple it in the vendor's favor, never mine. I never (well i think Kagi[0] actually is different, one outlier) get a refund for the month I didn't watch anything or the API calls I didn't make.
By that definition, every write() call that doesn't check for EAGAIN is a concurrency bug you're racing the disk controller. The term stops meaning anything.
Isn't that like saying there can never be a language with safe concurrency since the code could interact with C code that segfaults?
I dunno this kinda reminds me of the 10/10 Rust CVE that turned out to be cmd.exe on Windows not sanitizing inputs and languages like Java just labeled it "won't fix".
Thanks for making me check. Did not know this:
"Offline Vault sessions will expire after 30 days.
Except for mobile client applications, which will expire after 90 days."
But for me that is enough time to feel safe, still will do backups regularly.
Me and some friends have each been hosting vaultwarden casually for years now. What problem do you see? I mean if the Server goes down and gets completely corrupted, worst case, all my devices still have the version of the vault they recently used. Technically every device has it's own backup of the vault.
Aren't you agreeing with him?
He pushed the boulder up the hill, thus he is responsible and liable for what happens. He is the author of the work of pushing the boulder up the hill.
In your analogy: He was driving the car, he is liable for the death. He is the author of the work of driving the car.
You are kinda unnecessarily introducing the creation of an object used for the work. Whoever did create the car/boulder is not liable for what happened.
So whoever made the LLM is not the author but the one who used it to create the code.
Side question. How come it is always the most incompetent people who get put in charge of implementing things like that. Over and over apps and services are developed in Germany and completely fail at what they are supposed to achieve. Where are these people recruited from?
Proton is quite the bad example. Technically european but not in the EU and thus horrible privacy and data security regulations while claiming that being in Switzerland makes them trustworthy.
Yeah, impossible to read this site. Let me place the content where i want. If your screen is big enough you can literally not scroll on this site because it just jumps to the next chapter.
This thread is about the find-and-replace, not the evaluation. Gambling on whether the first AI replaces the right spells just so the second one can try finding them is unnecessary when find-and-replace is faster, easier and works 100%.
Man there's a rising amount of people who don't understand hypotheticals.
How can you think that your comment "...I don't chose everybody?" is a valid answer to "If you chose everybody..." ?