Valve’s not a good guy, but your attempt to “reframe the perspective” is lacking a major detail. If amazon were to simply GIVE you the product after you’ve paid the competitor then it’s quite a different story… yet that’s what steam will do.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
I’ve pointed out Valve doing basically the same thing; games can’t be priced lower than Steam or competing game storefronts (not Steam key resellers), or Valve will threaten do delist your game.
But personal loyalty goes a long way.
I’m trying to reframe the perspective here, not drag into an argument about Valve. A whole lot of people feel good about finding “deals” on Amazon or about Amazon services that have helped them. It’s easy for Lemmy to hate on Amazon, but for the average person, I think this is a harder sell than most of us realize. They’ll dismiss it as the “market working” or California sensationalism or, more likely, just filter it out as noise in their feed.
NannerBanner@literature.cafe 20 hours ago
emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
Since when does steam just give away games just because you bought them from another storefront?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I think they’re talking about Steam key resellers, which I wasn’t referencing. That’s a whole other thing (and can indeed be priced lower than the main storefront, I believe).
TronBronson@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I boycott pretty much all the big corporations. I can’t really boycott Amazon because I am in a super rural part of the US and run a small business. Like most small businesses I purchase a lot of random doodads and thingamabobbers from china. Amazons monopoly on the US post office and their logistic network that gets bulk goods from china to my house is hard to live without. They fix more than prices, the whole economy is stacked in their favor. They basically won globalism and it was bad for the globe.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yeah…
That’s how Amazon worked at first.
blankwire@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
The Valve example sounds similar, but I think Amazon is comparably more nefarious:
Amazon has a few different tiers for sellers, but in general, they charge:
Valve is kind enough to offer free promotion on the home page (if your game is popular, or has a sale), and digital games are much easier to scale, versus manufacturing and holding physical inventory. They also do a lot of nefarious shit, but I’d argue at least their partners aren’t being squeezed quite as much.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
This is exactly my point; it’s easy to jump in and defend Valve for their good points when, at the end of the day, they take a third of all profits for themselves and have a pseudo monopoly with their platform.
One can make similar points about Amazon, about how much they can save retailers, especially before they enshittified so significantly.