Quoting: F.UltraWell in the sense that the public at large is the government, they are by definition the only thing that allows the business to exist in the first place and therefore also have a say in how they conduct their affairs. One such say is e.g outlawing predatory and unfair pricing.

The main issue is instead (in my view) that no one so far have managed to prove that 30% is either unfair or predatory.

Corporations, certainly, exist at the government's sufferance but, at least here in Canada, the various levels of government don't say much about sole proprietorships. Some local governments require registration to do business in their district but for the most part all levels of government are somewhat indifferent to businesses of that nature. Taxes are filed via your personal income tax filing as a form of income with certain allowable deductions (whereas, corporations file as a distinct entity of their own).

Predatory pricing wouldn't apply in this case. Typically, that is a long-term strategy to create a monopoly and violates antitrust laws.

Definition: (noun) a strategy of selling a good or service at a very low price so as to drive one's competitors out of business (at which point one can raise one's prices more freely).

Unfair pricing is a little more nebulous to define. It can include practices such as price-fixing. It has to be shown to be anticompetitive, with a predatory, exclusionary, or disciplinary negative effect on a competitor. From what I can see, it tends to occur more often at the wholesale pricing level than at the retail to consumers level.

So, yes, I agree that it will likely be difficult to show that a 30% commission fee (which amounts to a 30% margin from the retailer's point of view) is predatory or unfair.

FYI - 20% to 30% margin was pretty typical for software around the time I ran my computer retail business.

Besides, as I understand it, this lawsuit is not a government action under antitrust or anticompetition laws.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI said Valve wasn't a natural monopoly,

I was thinking about that natural monopoly thing as it relates to these lawsuits. I wonder if part of the problem is that some people are actually thinking of Valve's Steam store as if it is a utility that distributes video games rather than the for-profit business it actually is? A side affect of being the best-known and pioneering player in digital game retail, perhaps?

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: CaldathrasThe fact that the library administration is getting rid of all the self-help / how-to books troubles me, however.

I wouldn't care at all about getting rid of the self-help books, but the how-to is a different story. How-to books are useful. Self-help books are for the most part a racket, and one which is actively bad for people both psychologically and politically.

Yea, I was thinking more of the "how-to" and "do-it-yourself" categories and somehow "self-help" fell in there. Definitely meant how-to and DIY. Thanks for catching that.

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Quoting: wytrabbitAt least 90% of the games on my Steam wishlist and in my library are recommendations from GOL 😀

My backlog is rather daunting though.. 😅

I was going to say the same thing. I ignore social media and advertising.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, can't resist getting my final points in, sorry.

Sure, taxation is distinct from profit . . . taxation is much more legit, because it gets used for the public good. But you and I both know the sense in which people describe the such-and-such-company "tax", e.g. the "Microsoft tax" on (nearly) every PC, so there's no point in a semantic argument that ignores what's being said.

I said Valve wasn't a natural monopoly, like a power utility. You're a good guy so I don't think you were intending to twist words there. Valve certainly has sufficient market dominance to be able to have a significant ability to set prices and create barriers to entry. Antitrust law, when it was a real thing, never required 100% of the market to deem something a monopoly. There was certainly a time in the US when Valve would have been long since broken up . . . also Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet, Meta and plenty of others. I happen to like a lot of things about Valve, certainly compared to many other dominant companies, they have quite strongly resisted the process of "enshittification" that most dominant platforms embrace, but that doesn't make them not a dominant firm with a huge percentage of their market.

As to the right to decide profit levels . . . yeah, governments get elected, businesspeople don't. I might be willing to say Mohamed bin Salman shouldn't have that right . . .
Businesses operate in and depend on the legal and physical infrastructure created and defined by the countries they exist in, most need the educated workforce governments educate, and so on and so forth. This goes right down to the level of defining what businesses are--limited liability corporations in specific were created and defined by the state and cannot exist without state charter, but the same thing is largely true, if less dramatically, for other forms of business. Business as we know it cannot exist without government. Where government disappears, businesses don't make profit, paramilitaries just take their stuff. And abusive levels of profit are bad for countries and the people in them. It is totally a good idea to regulate them and it has been quite normal in many countries a good deal of the time. The current political climate in which business can do no wrong is a historical anomaly . . and one that we can see in real time generating more and more instability.

No problem. I just didn't want to get into a lecture about business bookkeeping details and the math involved.

Taxation: I suppose, when you think of it informally, like the "Microsoft tax" euphemism, I can see where you're coming from. Of course, that was a contractually enforced fee on sales of hardware, regardless of whether it actually shipped with M$ software (if I recall the controversy correctly). As opposed to a commission fee on every legitimate sale of the game on Valve's platform. A bit more honest if you ask me and less "tax-like".

Monopoly: Thank you. Now that you mention it, I can't recall the last time a business faced an antitrust investigation in the US. Has Canada ever pursued it up here? The last I remember was IBM wiggling it's way out of being broken up by restructuring. I think I recall some talk about going after Google at one point.

Profit Levels: Well, you're thinking of corporations (which probably shouldn't be allowed to exist) while I'm thinking of single proprietorships or partnerships. Very different business structure. Really, though, the government has little incentive to limit the profit level of a business. They tax the net profit of a business. The more net profit a business has, the more taxes the government collects.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI do care that you're in business; it puts a certain perspective on what you say. It means you have a certain point of view, one belonging to a particular self-interested community, and after 35 years, one that it will inevitably be hard for you to see. I've worked in a library for 35 years; at libraries, our bias is towards public service and finding out the truth.

Ooh, that could be taken as somewhat harsh, but I don't think you meant it that way. It might surprise you to know that I am actually quite jaded about the business conduct we see these days, particularly with corporations. My entire working life, I have made a point of working for small, locally-owned businesses when I wasn't a business owner myself. The three times I have tried working for a large corporation, the experiences were absolute disasters.

This "growth at all costs" business mentality that kicked in in the eighties has always troubled me. I think a business can and should be content with breaking even, or maybe just a little extra profit above that to reward the owner for their efforts (and, believe me, we sacrifice a lot of ourselves for our businesses). I'm a big fan of the idea of employee-owned businesses. I am a firm believer that there is such a thing as "big enough", after that a small business should encourage sharing the market with other small businesses in the same field. Cooperation rather than competition.

"Finding out the truth," eh? Sounds noble. Of course, the truth is always relative. 😉 I have a great deal of respect for our local librarians. The fact that the library administration is getting rid of all the do-it-yourself / how-to books troubles me, however.

Edit: Corrected use of the wrong word - wrote "self-help", meant "do-it-yourself". Thanks @Purple Library Guy

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Quoting: tmtvlYou loved The Spirits Within? I was baffled at why it was called Final Fantasy aside from 'we have the trademark, might as well slap it on this completely unrelated project and try to get more eyeballs' (the Baldur's Gate 3 strategy).

Having no experience with the games themselves, I enjoyed the quality of the animation and the story really resonated with both my wife and I.

I have to admit that afterwards I started to look more closely at the games and was somewhat confused because there didn't seem to be a counterpart in the games themselves. It had nothing in common with Advent Children, which I bought on DVD and only watched once.

I am surprised to learn that Advent Children was considered the highly successful movie while The Spirits Within was deemed a failure. I guess because I am not invested in the Final Fantasy franchise, I've always felt it was the other way around.

Looking back at it now, they should have just titled it The Spirits Within and left Final Fantasy out of the title. I see your point there.

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I've never played any of the Final Fantasy games. I always thought of the franchise as mostly a console thing, and I've always played my games on PC. Never got around to it once there were PC releases.

Loved the first animated movie, though!

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Quoting: MarlockIIRC the code is opensource, but "Bazzite" is a trademark and he is part-owner of that trademark.

The trademark is not held by the open source project but by the individuals contributing to it? How strange.

Given that he was technically no longer a member of the project, I wonder if GPD can sue him for misrepresentation and fraud?

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyBy which you agree that yes, it is a tax.

Not at all. Taxation is something done by government (usually on net earnings, property values and/or final purchase price). It is a gross misinterpretation of the meaning of "profit" to associate it with taxes.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyBut anyway. How much profit?

What gives the public the right to tell any business how much profit they are allowed to make? As long as the business pays its taxes, it's none of the public's business. Yes, most countries have laws to deal with monopolies, but Valve is NOT a monopoly. You said so yourself.

How much experience do you have with business operations? Not that you likely care but I have nearly 35 years of practical business experience in all aspects of retail operations (not that corporate bureaucratic nonsense they teach at academic institutions). From your comments here, your knowledge of business practices and business math seems rather lacking. What you are talking about has nothing to do with the retail distribution channel, which is what governs Valve's business model (and any retailer, for that matter).

I don't want to go into a point by point analysis, so this is the last I'm going to say about this matter. You are, after all, entitled to your own opinion, whether or not I agree with it.

As always, it was good debating with you ...

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: pb

Quoting: drenAgain this is misleading. Once you download your game from GOG, you can completely remove them from the scenario of installation at all. You have the files, you can install it on as many computers as you want and you don't have to login to play the game. You absolutely cannot do that with Steam.

You absolutely can. There are lots of DRM-free games on steam and downloading the files is the only thing you need to do in order to run them. Obviously you can't do that with games relying on Steam DRM (at least not without using workarounds), but that's something the developer put in there, and not valve. Valve does not require any kind of DRM for games sold on Steam.

Have you read the link you provided? Steamcmd is nothing like a GOG offline installer. You are not downloading the game installer through Steamcmd, you are installing the game! It is just an incredibly convoluted command line version of the Steam client (for which, the client is likely the GUI). Yes, you can run some of the games without the client but that does NOT make it the equivalent of an offline installer. There is one fundamental difference: if you lose Internet access or Valve's servers go down, you cannot install the game!

This is not entirely true. Once a game have been downloaded but before it has been installed, there is a game installer.exe in the game path. If the game is released DRM free by the publisher you can copy this .exe to wherever you like and install it there instead.

Quoting: dren

Quoting: pb

Quoting: drenAgain this is misleading. Once you download your game from GOG, you can completely remove them from the scenario of installation at all. You have the files, you can install it on as many computers as you want and you don't have to login to play the game. You absolutely cannot do that with Steam.

You absolutely can. There are lots of DRM-free games on steam and downloading the files is the only thing you need to do in order to run them. Obviously you can't do that with games relying on Steam DRM (at least not without using workarounds), but that's something the developer put in there, and not valve. Valve does not require any kind of DRM for games sold on Steam.

@Caldathras is absolutely correct. GOG provides standalone executable installers, steam has no such feature. Games being DRM-free on steam isn't normal. Devs can and sometimes do add Steamworks DRM after initial releases, etc. The permanence of the Steam install being DRM-free isn't there. Also the Steam installation doesn't include other necessary dependencies, such as DirectX or C++ redistributables, that are included as part of an actual installer. Steam also doesn't advertise or tell you which games are DRM-free. On GOG EVERY game is DRM-free with all dependencies included as part of the installer (both Windows and Linux). In a lot of cases, these DRM-free directories still need the Steam client to act as a wrapper or handle activation. With GOG, you don't even need to use Galaxy, you can just download the installer from the website and install it where you want. This is why Heroic is able to provide direct access to your GOG library and is able to install everything you need for a game. It just feels like you are trying to make an equivalency argument that isn't actually equivalent.

But they do (if the game publisher have decided to release their game DRM free on Steam). In that case there is a perfectly fine old time .exe installer at the game location in Steam.

Well, see, this is an important tidbit of information. I was not aware of that. Here's a question or two. Does the installer remain on your system after the game is installed? If not, with the installation being automated, how do you get to that installer and back it up before it is removed?

Finally, while this is closer to parity with GOG's offline installers, it is still not the same. It is more like obtaining the installer through the back door whereas GOG is giving it to you upfront. At best, it is a loophole in the process. Most people are not going to be aware of this factoid, so few would be able to take advantage of it.

Thank you for telling me about it, though.

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