Comment on Steam Owner Valve Faces $900 Million Lawsuit Over PC Monopoly Claims, Following UK Tribunal Ruling - IGN

• michael@piefed.chrisco.me ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Steam has some upsides most take for granted.

  The wor they do to get all the strange controller setups working (and let others make configurations) is a huge time saver when all you want to do is play your games.

  Free cloud saves are a life saver when you go from device to device.

  The Linux work they do is fantastic.

  It goes on and on. But yeah the biggest deal is that if they ever go full corpo….we are in trouble.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’m going to nitpick the controller stuff too, because they could have done it in a way that was store agnostic, but of course, they benefit if they don’t do it that way.

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    • michael@piefed.chrisco.me ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Oh yeah totally. But it deals with proprietary drivers…so im not 100% sure what the restrictions are there. The mapping could be done open source if there was a need/want.

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      • luridness@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

        Believe you can download the this project github.com/Alia5/SISR and get what you want

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  • iamthetot@piefed.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Is there any launcher that doesn’t offer free cloud saves these days?

    (not neglecting that Stream normalized it, for the record)

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    • Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      GOG offers them, but they’re inconsistent and only work with their launcher. While I have some GOG games on my Steam Deck, they don’t transfer saves over to my PC.

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      • iamthetot@piefed.ca ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I mean, Steam cloud saves only work with Steam, no?

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• circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This is exactly why this shit constantly annoys me. Steam is not unique in how they handle their store. If you don’t want to pay Valve a fee as a dev, then don’t put your game on Steam. No one is forced to do that.

  Now, you will lose many sales. But a service being popular does not make it a monopoly. Other stores exist, and are even discussed in the article. All of them have some similar method of getting add-ons. Steam’s happens to be very easy – again, that doesn’t make it anti-competitive.

  Also: the fact that this is about “PC gaming monopoly” and “Microsoft” is not mentioned is just… wild. And sad.

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• justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Personally this reeks of being a shadow lawsuit by Epic games.

  With the end goal being to let people buy and play the games on Steam, but then buy the addons via EGS.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    If that happened, that would mean you’d be able to buy DLC for all of your free EGS games on Steam as well. Selling DLC for those games is probably just about the only money that store brings in outside of Fortnite.

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    • Maestro@fedia.io ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Hah, not from me! It won't be the first time that I buy a game on Steam that I previously played for free on EGS, just so I can buy the DLC. I will never spend a cent on EGS.

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• DomeGuy@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  While I don’t buy a lot of PC games, I did pick up Stellaris on GOG.

  The weird second-class status I get when it comes to betas and mods is enough for anyone to scream. Especially since if I wanted to move to steam, I’d have to re-buy every add-on I want to play.

  Add-on lock-in really is a thing. Even if it may be as much a lazy publisher as it is a greedy storefront.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s strange, because if I buy an expansion for a board game, I don’t have to shop at the same store that I bought the base game from.

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• hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Unfortunately that doesn’t help with multiplayer games that rely on steam

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    An extremely similar API exists in GOG, for better and for worse, because it functionally is the only DRM in GOG. And of course Epic offers the same thing, too.

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    • hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      How many devs actually take advantage of it though?

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      • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        It happens all the time. Sometimes it’s a disclaimer on the store page, or sometimes they just list “multiplayer”, and I have to find out via forums if the game is actually DRM-free or if they’re using the equivalent GOG multiplayer service. And the reason it’s there is to entice those developers who rely on the equivalent Steam services, but I wish those API calls could somehow be co-opted into actual DRM-free multiplayer.

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