Comment by safety1st

Comment by safety1st a day ago

No one is hiding anything. No one is pretending to be something they're not. Life is not a Saturday morning cartoon. There are no good guys vs bad guys. There are just businesses trying to earn more profits.

Valve is a business. When Microsoft introduced a Store they threatened Steam's market share. In theory Microsoft could one day update Windows so that it's hard to buy games through non Microsoft stores. Valve responded by investing in open source OS stuff. Their goal is to commoditize Windows, so that Microsoft doesn't wrest control of video game sales away from them. Commoditize your complement is a strategy as old as the software industry itself.

We've known all this for years, it's been discussed publicly and no one is hiding it. It always annoys me when people think we're in Lord of the Rings and one company is Sauron or another is Gandalf. It's all just business. To everyone who makes decisions, it all boils down to numbers on a spreadsheet. They want their number to go up.

What you SHOULD care about is competition. Valve would never have invested in all these OSS technologies if Microsoft hadn't tried to compete with them. They wouldn't be consumer friendly and they wouldn't make investments if they thought they could sit on their ass. They would just coast and enshittify (like Microsoft has in the OS space with its Windows monopoly).

We don't need good guy companies, we need strong pro-competition laws and strong enforcers of those laws. You can vote accordingly at the ballot box, and you can also vote accordingly with your wallet, buy stuff from the little guys.

stubish 3 hours ago

It is also doesn't even have to be about more profits. In Valve's case, I do think they like profit or they would lower their commission. But what Valve most needs to do is maintain market share. If they lose market share, they become as relevant to the market as GOG. Steam's market share is the only thing that allows them to dictate pricing in their favor, and that is the only thing stopping Microsoft from owning PC gaming.

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afiori 10 hours ago

The discourse is not valve good others bad, rather it is consumer/product focused good and next-quarter/short-term-profit focused bad.

With the context that a lot of modern enshittification, outsourcing, layoffs, anti-consumer practises follow from these short term approaches

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safety1st 2 minutes ago

My point is that is a shallow and not especially productive discourse. Companies respond to market incentives. If they have to compete for their market share they'll do stuff consumers want. If they don't because they have no competition, they'll focus on maximizing their profit margins at the expense of their customers, suppliers and everyone else.
These responses to incentives are in the DNA of every corporation and any solution which ignores that will fail. Competition for the consumer's dollar is the key and what you need to promote. These are basic economic principles that go all the way back to Adam Smith, a lot of problems would be solved if more people were aware of their significance and considered restoring competition to markets where it has been eliminated a main function of our government.

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