. . . Anyone read "Darths and Droids", the webcomic that does the Star Wars movies as a tabletop RPG campaign? In that, they don't call it the "Death Star" . . . it's the "Peace Moon". This "Star of Peace" really reminds me of that.

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Google has had quite the trajectory. At first, they were just purely a search engine, and a good one, and that was OK. And then there was a time when if I heard that Google was announcing some new thing they were doing, I'd be sort of pleased and interested, my assumption being that chances were it would be something interesting or useful. After a while there was a phase where if Google announced something I'd be kind of dubious, both over whether it was a good thing and over whether it mattered because probably they would abandon it soon anyway.

Now we've reached a point where if I hear Google is doing some new initiative my instinctive reaction is more like "Oh, God, what is it this time?" and hoping it won't do too much harm.

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Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

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".

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous! The morally repugnant issue is sex with underage girls, spending money on it or not is irrelevant.

Uh, yeah. Go look at what you said.

Your point was that if people were spending "their own hard earned money" on something, that meant we shouldn't be morally indignant about it. This appeared to be an admonition completely independent of the content of what those people were doing with their "hard earned money". I pointed out the absurdity of this. You have just confirmed it--yes, whether someone spends "their own hard earned money" on something is in fact irrelevant to whether we should feel moral indignation about it. So, your initial statement was ludicrous.

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Quoting: GeamanduraWhat is the purpose of this project morphing into a bundle of their initial vision engine plus more and more unrelated random shit?

Well, from a user's perspective, not having to keep track of ten thousand little projects is kind of valuable.

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Quoting: Arehandoro

Quoting: suchHardware will be the least of our concerns when this bubble bursts.

As long as I can get shelled roasted sunflower seeds to sit on a bench and look at rich people jump from big buildings, I'll be alright.

I fear they will be getting massive government bailouts, like in 2008. "Risk" is for us little people.

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I was expecting this. If anything, the months of zigging up, up, up without a zag down were starting to make me irrationally nervous.

We still have to get the Chinese onto Linux.

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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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