The number would be higher too, I doubt I was the only one who stopped playing months ago when Vanguard was supposedly going to be implemented imminently.

Spacewar is the app ID for testing Steamworks integration without having an app ID yet.

Google still controls the source, and so they have influence over the rest.

It’s like Ungoogled Chromium. Sure, it’s open source. Sure, if might have Google crap removed. Google still calls the shots on the direction of the browser.

Same still meaningfully applies to Chromium-based browsers.

Unless it’s a Java Minecraft server which I believe exclusively uses TCP still.

There’s a difference between calling Gabe Newell pro-consumer (not what I said), and saying he and his company make pro-consumer choices (moreso recently than in the past).

I can’t really come up with anything Epic has done that is actually pro-consumer, and no “trying to create a competitor to Steam” isn’t pro-consumer when the way they did it was very anti-consumer (just look at all the Kickstarters they swept up and made exclusives even after they had publicly promised Steam keys — it’s not like Epic couldn’t have added clauses to exempt Kickstarter backers from the exclusivity restrictions) or very intentionally locking people to one platform by force. Their support of anything non-Windows for anything besides Unreal is terrible.

Honestly saying that Steam killed physical ownership of games and citing HL2 is a poor example. Just off the top of my head Blizzard beat Valve to this with World of Warcraft. You could buy a physical copy but you couldn’t play it without their servers. Keys were locked to a single account as far as I’m aware.

Ultimately physical size constraints lead to the demise of physical purchases. That said, Valve in theory has a set-up to allow us to retain our games even if they disappear one day. How that works or how long it would take to happen is a different story, but they do apparently have something like a kill-switch in place.

TF2 was certainly the first major western game to have loot boxes, but extremely similar gacha systems already existed before this. It would be disingenuous to blame Valve for this, they just hopped on the train.

MFN clause is really only an issue if it can be proven that it is in place for anticompetitive reasons, and Steam’s rule is not completely inflexible. Also, if the copy is being sold without Steam integration, fine, I can totally see why you shouldn’t need price parity — but if you were to sell a Steam key price parity is entirely fair since the end user is getting access to Valve’s servers. Also if a developer sold a game for the same price with no Steam integration on somewhere like GOG, Valve wouldn’t be getting any cut, the developer would just be making more money (though ironically with less feature integration, it’s not like Steam doesn’t add value).

On the flip side instead of acting like we said all of Valve’s decisions were pro-consumer and cherry picking a few decisions that aren’t, I can cite:

• Valve’s work on Wine/Proton
• the open SteamOS
• repairability and part availability and compatibility for SteamDeck
• all of the features Valve adds to Steam and the improvements they’re making over time (it has gotten better), Steam is arguably easier to use and functionally superior to something like EGS
• the community marketplaces and discussion boards that Steam hosts
• their work to support users on a variety of platforms with things like Steam Link and even cross-platform support for their utilities and games

It’s really not like they do literally nothing that is pro-consumer.

I don’t think it’s Linux.

I think Tim Sweeney is just like all of the big publicly traded companies where they do not want the best thing for their customers and only want to control them.

Valve, and thus Gabe Newell, is actually making pro-consumer choices, which is success that Tim Sweeney wants.

I think the grudge is against Gabe Newell and Valve.

There is a chance that Tim Sweeney would actively shit on Linux anyway, since that would reduce control over consumers (and yes with all of the deceptive practices Epic does and how they fight lawsuits in court, they definitely are not trying to give control to the users).

Fortnite loads fine on Linux but closes after reaching the main menu. It doesn’t crash, it closes. They’re actively blocking the community from self-supporting.

The (my) comment that you responded to presented you a list of actual monopolies that have no alternatives on their platform. There was no “logic” presented, it was a statement of observation.

The existence of the lawsuit does not mean there is proof, it means that Wolfire has enough of a case to begin discovery on two of their claims that the court is interested to find out more. That’s it.

One of the claims is also very weird and I can’t actually find any information corroborating the claim besides the claim itself (re: Valve acquiring and shutting down World Opponent Network). The only thing I see is that Sierra was acquired by Havas who made WON into it’s own entity, then merged it with PrizeCentral under the name Flipside.com and the last WON game was released in 2006.

The only thing relating to Valve I can see is that Valve announced Steam in 2002 and then they removed WON from their own games, which they had every right to do so.

WG’s strongest claim is the MFN clause, and they actually have to prove that it’s for anticompetitiveness.

They are all monopolies in their ecosystem.

(Satellite Internet doesn’t reach everywhere.)

You got a list of monopolies, stop trying to move goalposts in order to slam Valve and defend a bunch of anti-consumer publicly traded companies.

Standard Oil was a monopoly, but using your logic there wasn’t because there was an alternative of not using oil-based fuels.

An example of a company that actually fits your definition of a pseudo-monopoly would be Nvidia in the GPU market.

Locked down App Store on iOS (EU is trustbusting this one)

Locked down PlayStation ecosystem

Locked down Xbox ecosystem

Locked down Switch ecosystem

Regional monopolies by ISPs

To be fair, Apple made audio sharing an absolute nightmare. I have never gotten my remote control software audio to work on Mac and have tried multiple non-Crapple solutions.

Discord won’t even make it as painless as possible though, and getting it set up requires downloading a third party thing now (from outside the app, before I could at least click a button inside the app).

I totally gave up a few months ago on Discord on Mac because I was sick of booting into safe mode. I’m not sure who is to blame for this but I imagine it’s Apple.

Didn’t EA shut down Origin or at least make it optional?

Remember Valve is the company and Steam is the storefront/launcher.

Epic is the company, EGS is the storefront/launcher.

EA is the company, Origin is (was?) the storefront/launcher.

I dropped my sub. Was paying roughly $7.50/mo for 2 years for the legacy bundle and they nearly tripled it to $18.99/mo.

Of all my streaming services, I literally do not watch ESPN, and barely use Hulu and Disney. I could justify $7.50 by stretching the definition of justification, but $18.99 is more than I pay for streaming services I use regularly.