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I understand that you aren’t interested in responding, the only point I felt I wanted to clarify my own thinking about “is it justified just because they have the same service as any big company has?”

I would happily and readily say that I don’t know of any other single *gaming company that provides the same amount of services to the general population and to, if we follow the tenets of OSS, humanity as a whole. They provide code and money to KDE, Arch, the Linux kernel, they work directly with AMD on Linux drivers, they are working on accelerating what I believe are common-sense additions to Wayland, they’ve pushed VR on PC from being a futuristic wishlist item to having a section dedicated to games for their headsets and the countless others (including Metas, whom they also directly support) on their store and helping maintain and develop the open source frameworks needed to make them.

In my mind, Steam the storefront is how Valve does everything else that they’re doing, and I haven’t heard of anything that they do that I find reasonably objectable. I mean, maybe the TF2 stuff could count against them, and also given that there are 17 year old people who weren’t alive when that game came out any amount of work they keep putting into it is just wild from my perspective.

I’ll give my own experience as a Steam customer and aspiring game dev:

I’ve never had a problem with Steam that wasn’t quickly and satisfactorily resolved. Usually, in ways that go above and beyond Valve’s stated responsibilities. They have been quick to respond to the two hardware tickets I’ve raised over the years of owning a Steam controller, two Steam Links, a Valve Index, and my own Steam Deck.

In the many years that I’ve used all flavors of Linux and installed all manner of native games and non-native games, it has only been in the last 4 or 5 years that the process has become, in my own experience, painless enough for me to not only consider suggesting other less technical people I know to try Linux, but to enthusiastically recommend it. They were the strongest single driving force I am aware of in bringing day-one mass-market release games to Linux.

I have, over the years of my dealing with them, come to believe that money spent towards Valve is materially making my life better in ways that just playing games through Steam doesn’t fully encapsulate.

They provide development assistance and funds for open source projects in a way that truly gives back to the projects they work with, their company is run in a way that I find personally satisfying and aspirational, their leadership feels like they’re maintaining their relevance in the industry instead of being disconnected money-men…

I respect their decisions enough to consider their cut reasonable as compared to the services they provide both directly and indirectly to the PC gaming industry as a whole.

Do you have actionable advice

I’ve seen some arbitration agreements stating that you can’t collaborate with other customers who are affected by the same issue, requiring each customer to have a different attorney.

Oh no, I did it anyways and collaborated with other customers online. Oh well guess we gotta arbitrate that now.

Nano is the tool that people use when they don’t have a need for TUI editors in general and therefore don’t want to have to memorize how people with teletypes decided things should have been done 75 years ago and who also don’t want to get dragged into endless pointless bickering arguments about which set of greybeards was objectively right about their sets of preferences.

I’m glad people enjoy the editors they use and also I just wanna change a single fuckin line in a config file every once in a while without needing to consult a reference guide.

Clanfolk, a (very alpha and also very playable) game that draws clear inspiration from Rimworld, but has a kind of tech progression that feels spiritually similar to bootstrapping a factory in Factorio, while being set in the Scottish Highlands.

Man, I never knew that my ISP was working so hard for me.

Holy shit, you made Priiloader?

Kickass, thank you so much for helping 11 year old me not completely destroy his Wii in the name of boredom.

It seems like their pianist might be out for now, still flapping in the wind as it were. Should be able to get a firm handshake deal though, and hopefully that gets the pianist to come on stage again.

(This is all japes, no clue about the real answer.)

I don’t know what a solution would look like here. In your opinion, what should be done to stop Valve from being anti-competitive? What specifics should I be raising awareness of and looking into? What should be done by/about Gabe Newell?

I would like to know more about what you believe the solution here is, because at its core I see Valve as the end result of very talented and self-driven people doing an amazing job at delivering a very good product. I would hope that would lead to success, and I am given to understand that Gabe (to focus back in) is not a disinterested corporate figurehead as the position is with other software companies.

There’s some amount of anti-competitive behavior that is just… Doing business in a space with competitors. I write private code that I use myself and within the company I work for that I choose not to share with my competitors, is that anti-competitive behavior? This is a dumb example, but also I haven’t seen a direct convincing argument as to what Valve is doing to deserve the label.

In many ways, to provide my viewpoint, they’ve directly supported both unofficial modifications to their storefront by users (Decky Loader, for loading steam deck mods), modifications to their hardware (OLED screen mods, replacement parts on iFixit for reasonable prices), and even support Windows on the deck and are beginning (through reading commit logs) to support competitors’ hardware in their custom OS. They’ve singlehandedly pushed gaming on Linux into the mainstream eye and are doing well with it.

All that to say that I don’t think the way that Gabe became a billionaire was bad, and while I would prefer he use his personal wealth to better society I both don’t know enough about what he does with his money to know whether or not he’s already doing that and also think that any solution here would genuinely go against fundamental liberties and personal freedoms that I personally agree with. I’m not an absolutist on this, but enough of what I do know about the history of Valve and Gabe in specific lead me to lend him some amount of goodwill, because he has through his works and actions earned it from me.

I don’t disagree that billionaires are bad. Personally, I strongly believe in a Star Trek post-monetary future.

I wouldn’t call Gabe Newell a friend, although I suspect I don’t disagree with many of his opinions.

You are able to email him at gaben@valvesoftware.com, as is anyone else. I’ve emailed twice. Once when I was 13 to inform him of a bug in portal 2, and once a few years ago to inquire about steam being ported to arm.

There was a lot to explain about my position there and it may be a bit disjointed. If there’s anything I can clarify on my thinking, I’d be happy to.

I don’t see how posting to lemmy in general is going to influence people that disagree with you both because I don’t think there are many people here that do and also I think that your comment in particular is so far removed from the topic of this article that it borders on being a non sequitur entirely, and I’m worried you may get the feeling that the people downvoting you are against your message and not the fact that your message isn’t relevant beyond being a knee-jerk reactionary cry against Valve, one of the only privately owned companies that seems to listen to user feedback as thoroughly as the article demonstrates.

I don’t believe Valve is a monopoly and I’ve directly been able to talk to Gabe Newell via email multiple times over multiple years. Maybe some of their inter-business dealings could be better for their business partners, but as a lifelong steam user that so far has felt comfortable buying almost every hardware product they’ve put out I continue to feel comfortable supporting them because they seem to actually care about their customers from what I have directly experienced.

I don’t mean any of this in a confrontational tone, and I apologize for the general shill vibes of that second paragraph. I’d be happy to continue the discussion, I think your message is correct and good and I think there are better more effective ways of acting on it.

I mean, comments are free. If you believe that’s a decent enough use of your limited time on this Earth, who am I to argue?

This would’ve been a useless comment even if it were relevant.

What?

I mean this sincerely, I’ve been loosely following this project and the OS it is from and would like to know more about what you know, because this is the first time I’ve heard such accusations.

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Life support for a monster set aside as insurance against the day that the monster needs it.

Agreed entirely, Mozilla doing nothing would be far preferable to me here then them helping extend our current experience with advertising by working towards a future with a minimal set of meaningless concessions that Meta’s involvement with suggests would not meaningfully negatively impact their business in any way.

To my mind, fixing advertising means making advertising a much less lucrative business. Doing anything else is only making the already dire problem worse.

He would’ve liked that. He was a real nice guy, always said I had a face for radio.

As my father always said: you may be a funny person, but looks don’t count for everything.

God, if this ends up with the steam deck 2 powering a standalone index 2 with redesigned knuckles 2 that can be used standalone as a Steam Controller 2…

It’s a fantasy, absolutely. The controller part especially probably wouldn’t work. But… I can dream.

Ah gee dang, you’re right. Thanks!