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.

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Quoting: Caldathras

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 ...

Well, 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.

I 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.

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Well, nice of GOG to make everything nice and clear. /s

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Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: williamjcm

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe basic question is whether the 30% cut generates windfall profits. If it does, then lawsuits that successfully reduce that cut will leave Valve in place but reduce costs for the consumer.

It most definitely will not. It's not a "tax" that gets added on top of the game price like Tim Sweeney would want you to think.

Really? What is it then? Monopoly money?

Profit?

Good, old-fashioned profit.

By which you agree that yes, it is a tax.

But anyway. How much profit? There are levels of profit that are not OK. This is one reason that monopolies were traditionally held to be a bad thing--competition on price was supposed to cause companies to keep their prices low, limiting their profits. That's what market efficiency supposedly is. Where it is agreed that there is no such competition, regulated utilities used to be given like 6%; in this age of regulatory capture it's probably a bit higher.

Now. If it costs a platform 10% of sales to offer their service, and they are collecting 30%, that means they are making three times their costs . . . So, 200% profit? I think that might be a wee bit on the windfall side. We don't know just where Valve's expenses fall between the lowest bound anyone usually suggests of 10% and what they actually charge, 30%. But I really don't think it's unreasonable to want to find out, and to hope maybe the courts might have a shot at doing so.

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In my youth as a tabletop gamer I of course consumed vast quantities of ham-and-pineapple pizza. So much that I grew to hate the sight of it, and wholeheartedly joined the anti-pineapple faction. But decades have passed and I have mellowed, come to an accommodation with the sins of my youth, and now I don't mind a bit of pineapple-and-bacon pizza now and then.

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I will be pleased to see this when it comes out because chocolate.

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Quoting: pbIf valve's cut inflates the prices, then how come games that are not on steam (ubi/origin/nintendo exclusives) cost the same? $60/70 at launch? They're selling on their own stores, so shouldn't they be 30% cheaper or something? Or how about epic exclusives? Dead Island 2 was $59.99 at launch (one-year epic store exclusive), and a year later it launched on steam at the same price. Shouldn't they take advantage of epic's lower cut and give the consumers a better price in the first year, before the alleged steam price parity was enforced? No? Anyone?

Certainly pricing on things like software is tricky, because you have to charge for it like you would for a normal commodity where there is a unit price to produce, when for software, including games, there effectively isn't, copies cost zero. The cost of producing the game is basically a single lump, and you are trying to make enough money on (unit price * number of sales) to pay for that single lump and ideally a bit more. Epic store is not going to get you much number of sales, so I expect there's a need to get as much as you can per unit. On the other hand, I understand Epic store exclusives involve a payment up front from Epic. And then on the third hand, there is generally going to be some relationship between price and how many people will fork over that much money. On this, Steam's system with sales and discounting works pretty well to catch buyers willing to pay at different price points. But, so, pricing is tricky, sure--there isn't going to be an immediate one-to-one correspondence between the cut and the price.

But still, that 30% is coming off the top and it is real money; it increases the number of sales or the price level needed for a developer to break even on a game, and there's no way around that. If, say, the store's expenses are only 10%, both developers and consumers are ending up with less money in the end than they could have. I don't know how much of Valve's take is pure profit, because they play those cards very close to their vest. But it would be worth finding out.

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Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleI find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative.

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous. So, Geoffrey Epstein spent his own hard earned money on sex with underage girls. I am morally indignant about that. Not you, though, that would be "performative".

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Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleCopyright law is very outdated for current technology.

So is capitalism. But if we're going to insist on capitalism, then within that framework I'm not sure what's going to stop anyone who creates anything from starving without copyright. We can fix copyright if we fix the overall system it's in.

For me, the strongest case for sticking with markets is the historic drop in extreme poverty: from high 60s–80% globally in the 1970s down to under 9% today.

Oh, sure, the drop in extreme poverty. So first of all, I've heard plenty about the supposed drop in extreme poverty, but I've never heard anyone mention a figure that extreme, that's just in the ridiculous propaganda realm. Don't know where you got it, but I'm pretty sure it's nonsense even in terms of the official stats that are generally bandied about.

Second, "extreme poverty" is defined in these sorts of statistics as "making less than $2 per day". That's in purchasing power parity with the US dollar. So then, if you're an American, and you make more than $60/month, you're not in "extreme poverty". Homeless people can starve to death in the US on way more than that. It's ridiculous. And since it's purchasing power parity, it is equally ridiculous everywhere else. Masses of people are, in real life, extremely poor, but the statistics claim they are not. They are quite simply statistics built to generate reassuring lies.

Third, much of this drop in "extreme poverty" represents the destruction of the peasantry. People are driven off their subsistence farms by various modern "enclosure movement" equivalents, they move to the cities and live in shanty towns where they are half starved, scraping by on whatever informal ways to scratch out a living they can find. But! Before, when they had adequate food that they grew themselves, decent shelter and generally were poor, but more or less OK, they weren't really in the monetary economy, so they made less than $2/day. Now that their lives are precarious and they can barely eat and their homes are made of cardboard or some damn thing, they make more than $2/day so they're not in "extreme poverty". Lucky them!

Fourth, another massive proportion of the drop in poverty is China. There was a period where China represented more than 100% of the drop in extreme poverty . . . which is to say, in the rest of the world extreme poverty was increasing, but it was decreasing so much in China it more than made up for it. This is not exactly a triumph of free market capitalism.

In any case, "markets" and capitalism are not the same thing. You can have markets without capitalism, it's easy, just replace all the firms owned by individual rich people and stock market investors with firms owned by governments and worker co-operatives, but leave the markets in place. Badabing, markets but no capitalism. And, you can have capitalism with no markets--we see this in US military contractors, who are often the sole source of a good which they sell only to their sole customer using cost-plus contracts which define the price paid as a function of how much it costs the firm to make the product, plus a percentage for profit. That isn't a market. And yet they are capitalist firms--private individuals own them, capital is invested in them for the purpose of generating a profit which can be reinvested.

Maybe you should talk about things you know something about. Nobody who, confronted with the term "capitalism", responds with the term "markets", knows much about either.

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Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman

Quoting: PaldinoXWhats wrong with Fedora?

Quoting: AsciiWolfWhy? Fedora is one of the best polished and easy to use distros nowadays.

The better question is, what is not wrong with Fedora. But also I am not willing to discuss this with random strangers in the GoL comments section. Sounds like a waste of effort.

That's real bitter, man.

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