How are the decisions taken by the highier-ups related to workers unionizing?

I give up. Are you an American or something?

There you go: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwwyj6v24xo

At some point you’re so entrenched in the market you don’t have to do anything anymore. I was quite surprised that Valve somehow evaded EU Digital Markets Act gatekeeper criteria.

I’m accelerating late stage capitalism by being critical of monopolies? What???

My work PC is affected. Nice!

Yes, it’s a nice cage.

Boutique shop successful, therefore Amazon is not a monopoly.

If EGS mandated those things it would be as successful as GOG. Which is irrelevant compared to Steam. Steam didn’t become successful because of tags. It’s because they were first.

Those free games weren’t actually free, Epic paid for them, you know.

EGS would have all this in that hypothetical scenario, why wouldn’t it?

Those things are up to developers / publishers, not the marketplace.

Leveraging dominant position to keep your monopoly is illegal even in the US.

Yes, developers are also victims of this monopoly. It’s obviously better (“worth it”) to pay 30% for visibility on the biggest marketplace.

You don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. Having some small competition that’s not ever going to threaten you because you can leverage your dominant position is also a case of a monopoly.

Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it. How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on? This is why they need to be broken up or brought to order via regulations. Companies are not your friends.

Yeah, I gathered as much while trying to figure out who that is :)

The cut would be less if competition was possible. I will bet my arm, first child and souls on this.

Pain tolerance to prices, how good the support is, how snappy the app is etc. Within the space of game marketplaces they’re average and that’s because every one of them kind of sucks. If Epic was first to monopolize PC game marketplaces people would be defending them like they defend Valve now because they want all of their games in one place.

Linux gaming was stable before Proton. It was never big but mainstream titles were getting released. These days there’s nothing. Titles could be broken at any moment by a developer and nobody will have any responsibility to fix it. I very much doubt that a for profit company does anything because they “like” something like Linux. They’re there to make money, period.

I’m not saying Valve should port their games to ARM or update them, it’s up to them and they don’t seem to be interested in developing games all that much these days. My point wad that plenty of games run via Rosetta2 fine. Steam doesn’t run fine because essentially it’s a web browser and that’s where you can say that 80 developers might not be enough to support this money printing machine.

I’ve been reading Ars Technica for over 20 years now but that’s because I like their points, not because I write for them xd

Their cut is mathematically fair but the inputs for this formula are mostly pain tolerance levels of consumers and producers. I meant fair for having a monopoly. Either you’re a utility or need to be broken up so that actual competition can take place.

Steam Deck and Proton killed Linux gaming because nobody bothers to do native ports. While I don’t agree with that approach it kinda works but it’s not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They’re scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.

There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them. Not having ARM client though means that you’re running a dynamically recompiling web browser through a translation layer resulting in terrible performance.