Have you considered maybe Valves monopoly is natural?
Yes that changes literally nothing.
All monopolies, be they natural or otherwise, need to be heavily regulated or else they can:
a) easily do stuff to prevent competition. Stuff like preventing developers from selling their game for cheaper on other stores.
b) charge exorbitant markups, markups like 30% of all revenue for a listing in a store.
I do not understand why gamers have such a hard time grasping that Valve taking a massive cut off the top of every single game sold, just enriches the already rich for doing nothing, at the expense of consumers and creators.
That’s has absolutely no chance in hell to happen while these right wing fucks are in charge. Any “regulation” would be a secret dick in the ass while they make everything worse and somehow we all end up paying more.
I think the problem you’re running into is that Valve isn’t doing nothing with that pay.
Like valve is actively making my gaming experience better by developing cheap hardware and a good system for gaming on Linux.
All the games I’ve ever bought, regardless of if they still sell them are in my library.
My save files are cloud synced for free.
I as the end user am having a good time.
I also have a sunk cost thing going on. I’ve been trying to buy and play more GOG games but I just have so much that works already on Linux without any work that it’s hard to justify the tinker time to get it working otherwise.
They provide such a good service I think we’ve all forgotten about the children casinos for CSGO2 skins, but even that they’re fixing (kinda).
Maybe its just nice to not be mad about something. Like its just video games, I don’t really care if Valve has a monopoly on that since 1) Experience is good 2) they’re not trying to have like a monopoly on water or something important. Bad take maybe, but there’s enough going on that I just don’t know if I could make myself care that valve is like 90% of videogame sales. Or whatever it is.
Heroic games launcher basically makes gog stuff click and play but even that isn’t enough for me to really use it over steam.
What I need is a good launcher that makes the process of using different stores seamless, that works well on all my devices (heroic’s controller support is infuriating to use and doesn’t support steam)
Yes that changes literally nothing.
All monopolies, be they natural or otherwise, need to be heavily regulated or else they can:
a) easily do stuff to prevent competition. Stuff like preventing developers from selling their game for cheaper on other stores.
b) charge exorbitant markups, markups like 30% of all revenue for a listing in a store.
I do not understand why gamers have such a hard time grasping that Valve taking a massive cut off the top of every single game sold, just enriches the already rich for doing nothing, at the expense of consumers and creators.
That’s has absolutely no chance in hell to happen while these right wing fucks are in charge. Any “regulation” would be a secret dick in the ass while they make everything worse and somehow we all end up paying more.
I think the problem you’re running into is that Valve isn’t doing nothing with that pay.
Like valve is actively making my gaming experience better by developing cheap hardware and a good system for gaming on Linux.
All the games I’ve ever bought, regardless of if they still sell them are in my library.
My save files are cloud synced for free.
I as the end user am having a good time.
I also have a sunk cost thing going on. I’ve been trying to buy and play more GOG games but I just have so much that works already on Linux without any work that it’s hard to justify the tinker time to get it working otherwise.
They provide such a good service I think we’ve all forgotten about the children casinos for CSGO2 skins, but even that they’re fixing (kinda).
Maybe its just nice to not be mad about something. Like its just video games, I don’t really care if Valve has a monopoly on that since 1) Experience is good 2) they’re not trying to have like a monopoly on water or something important. Bad take maybe, but there’s enough going on that I just don’t know if I could make myself care that valve is like 90% of videogame sales. Or whatever it is.
Heroic games launcher basically makes gog stuff click and play but even that isn’t enough for me to really use it over steam.
What I need is a good launcher that makes the process of using different stores seamless, that works well on all my devices (heroic’s controller support is infuriating to use and doesn’t support steam)
Maybe when playnite finally gets ported to Linux