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Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
I’d be interested to see what Wolfire’s case is, if there’s more to it that I don’t know about I’d love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately…
claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract “an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store.”
…then I don’t think this will work out because Valve hasn’t engaged in monopolistic behaviour.
This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That’s it.
Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren’t suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven’t enshittified for so long is probably because they don’t have public shareholders.
To be clear I’m against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were “private and not public”. Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he’s gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I’d love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don’t see this case achieving much.
ActionHank@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Gabu@lemmy.world 11 months ago
If anyone could sell the thing you just spent time and money creating for free, there would be little incentive to create the thing
In one sentence, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t understand artists at all.
QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 11 months ago
In one sentence, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t understand how artists subsist at all. You’ve also confused the word “incentive” with “motivation”.
Gabu@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Guess what I do for a living. You have 1 guess.
BURN@lemmy.world 11 months ago
No, he understands just fine
Artists might create out of love, but they’re not going to share it for free so someone else can make a profit
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
Copyright is a tool that gives creators the ability to commercialize their work. That its spirit, nothing more.
That’s what we are told is the purpose because otherwise we wouldn’t accept its existence. In practice it doesn’t work that way. The persistent story is that artists get very little compensation whilst whichever large entity is acting as the middleman for their copyright - often owning it outright despite doing nothing to make it - takes the vast majority of the profit.
It is a tool of corporate control, nothing more. Without copyright there would be no way a middleman could insert themselves and ripoff artists, take their money, and compromise their work with financially-driven studio meddling.
And the idea that the “spirit” of copyright is for artists, that completely falls apart when you understand that modern copyright terms exist almost entirely to profit one company’s IP - Disney is just delaying the transfer of Mickey Mouse into the public domain. That’s why copyright is now lifetime +75 years, or something ridiculous like that. That is not for artists to be compensated. Mickey Mouse isn’t going to be unmade when that happens. If Disney can’t operate as a business with all the time and market share they’ve built then they should just go under. There’s no justification for it beyond corporate greed.
Also without copyright there couldn’t be monopolies like Disney buying Fox, Marvel and Star Wars. That is an absurd situation and should be an indication that antitrust is effectively gone.
And as for artists getting paid, we’re transitioning more and more to a patron model, where people are paid just to create, and release most of their work for free with some token level of patron interaction. You don’t need copyright for that.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
At least in the US, we have a lifetime for exclusive rights, at which point the material moves into the public domain. It really seems like a good system to me.
It’s not a good system to have it be 50 years past the death of the creator. Having access to content in public domain has historically caused art to flourish by serving as a base for creators to build off of. But for the past few decades companies have been plundering from pu lic domain while not contributing anything back.
Our original copyright system in the US gave a baseline 17 years of copyright, with an additional 17 years extension that you could apply to. 34 years is a perfectly fair span of time to get value out of your creation because nobody is going to wait that long to get access to art they want. But it also ensured that the public domain continually had new content added that wasn’t completely antiquated. This is the system we should be pushing to return to.
Jarix@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t need to sell the things you make and could just give them away.
So copyright is only useful to protect your profits. There are many people who put effort into many things not because they expect to make money but because of the act of doing it.
Just something to think about, not really sure what point im trying to make
Spedwell@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I was under the impression that the policy required a game’s price to be the same on all marketplaces, even if it’s not a steam key being purchased. I.e. a $60 game on steam must sell for $60 off-platform, including on the publisher’s own launcher.
I just went to double check my interpretation, but the case brief by Mason LLP’s site doesn’t really specify.
If it only applies to steam keys, as you say, then I agree they don’t really have a case since it’s Steam that must supply distribution and other services.
But, if the policy applies to independent marketplaces, then it should be obvious that it is anticompetitive. The price on every platform is driven up to compensate for Steam’s 30% fees, even if that particular platform doesn’t attempt to provide services equivalent to Steam.
Rose@lemmy.world 11 months ago
According to a Valve quote from the complaint (p. 55), it applies to everything:
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
Wow, that’s some good research! I’ll edit my comment about this, I don’t think my glowing description of their policy should stand without this info.
Spedwell@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Thanks, that clears it up. So yeah, I think Wolfire has a case to make, then.
Maalus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Does it though? It seems like Valve is targetting the fact, that you can’t run the same game on a different platform for different amounts. So if Valve gets 30%, and some other store gets less, then they ask you to not run it cheaper. I.e. you can’t sell on both stores for $40, and then set a permanent -30% sale there.
MrSqueezles@lemm.ee 11 months ago
This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam’s software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.
Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they’re being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.
I’m dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I’ve definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.
Spedwell@lemmy.world 11 months ago
As I said, Steam would be in their rights to enforce that pricing policy for Steam keys, because they provide distribution and platform services for that product after it sells.
But as @Rose clarified, it applies to not just Steam keys, but any game copy sold and distributed by an independent platform. Steam should not have any legitimate claim to determining the pricing within another platform.
spark947@lemm.ee 11 months ago
David said in a blog post that the suit is specifically alleging price fixing tactics for other platforms that aren’t key sellers, but sell the whole game. Whether that holds up in court - we will see.