How dreadful, I’ll have to review all the deprecation warnings I’ve been ignoring for the past 3 years.

Consumers aren’t the only consideration. Even if Epic sucks in many ways they’re much more better for smaller devs because they don’t take anything until you make $1M. One would think that this would be enough for indies to publish there but they don’t want to split sales between platforms (they need all sales to happen on Steam so that they rank better there, it’s the only store that matters).

It’s a viscous cycle where smaller competition like GOG or Itch.io have no chance in hell to compete. I’m pretty sure anyone considering competing with Steam has done this math, hence you get only competition backed by big $$$, which usually is the worst people imaginable.

It’s not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time. Valve owners were rewarded handsomely for this already, there’s no reason for this to continue until heat death of the universe because there’s not that much value added that they provide now.

It’s cool that they pay salaries of like 3 Linux devs and piggyback on Wine work that Codeweavers funded for the past 30 years. You’d think there’s so much more they could do with 30% cut of nearly all PC game sales however which is why they need competition.

Details of such breakup can be ironed out but it’s important to keep in mind that this option exists and was used before successfuly.

I just don’t like people throwing around terms they don’t understand, leads to weird outcomes like people saying Meta would EEE ActivityPub back when every instance decided to defederate Threads.

Enforce interoperability, lower Valve cut as abusive and punish abusive clauses in developer agreement (you can’t price your game lower than Steam on other storefronts).

Ideally you’d treat Valve like a telecom monopoly, meaning you’d have to break it down into two companies - Valve infra (handling license ledger, storage, bandwidth) and Valve store/developer. Allow other stores to notify that user owns a game and allow access to Valve infra with third party stores. Valve infra can’t give preferential treatment to Valve store.

If Valve is as good as everyone says they have nothing to fear, they provide better service after all. Where I live this approach killed monopolies and prices dropped quickly.

I imagine it’d be more like Android/iOS. Lock down bootloader so you can’t tamper with the OS, enforce notarisation requirement so that apps have to go through them. But Microsoft can’t do that, they don’t have any users vendor-locked to their application store. Valve on the other hand is in a much better position to do this.

That’s not what EEE is.

What standards would Microsoft EEE in this case? POSIX?

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If gambling can be regulated then why not monopolies? This was more to point out Valve won’t behave unless forced to.

Android is a Linux distribution like that and once notarisation requirement is implemented it’ll be indistinguishable from iOS. SteamOS will also likely become gradually more like iOS to appease creators of popular multiplayer games.

Has been predicted for almost as long as the year of Linux on desktop.

Windows NT kernel was never an issue, Microsoft would encounter exact same issues they’re facing now since the pressure to monetise remains.

Indies don’t release there either. I wrote about an observation in this comment thread - small devs are no longer releasing their games outside of Steam because they need all sales to go into one pot - if they split it between stores they rank lower in the only store that matters.

Aren’t you bothered by the fact that most Valve games these days rely on gambling for monetisation? Aren’t you bothered they don’t make an effort not to advertise gambling to children unless forced to like in Netherlands or Belgium?

Even if GOG gets Linux support it won’t make the devs come there.

I saw what it looked like. We had native ports and Wine (rebranded as Proton by Valve so that it looks like their own product).

EGS is just one store. Devs don’t even bother releasing games outside of Steam and you can’t make the same argument against GOG or Itch.io.

„Gabe wouldn’t do that to me”.

There’s GOG, there’s Itch.io. What’s wrong with them?

Nobody cares about Linux, it has user share close to a margin of error in a poll of 1000 people. Valve employing 3 Linux devs doesn’t offset damage to consumers and devs.

I’ve done so in this community it repeatedly over the course of ~2 years. If you don’t want to make an effort why would I.