I notice that the allegation in the blog post says nothing about the actual contract wording. He claims that a threat was made, presumably by someone with the power to enforce it, to kick his game off Steam if he didn't stick to price parity, even if no Steam keys were involved.
There are a couple of problems with that when it comes to mounting a lawsuit. First, it could be very hard to prove. If they have emails or something then sure, but if it was a threat uttered in a non-recorded Zoom meeting, then they deny it and what have you got? Second, even if the specific threat was proved, it could be very hard to prove that such threats represented company policy. It might not even be the case that it represented company policy. Valve disavow the loose cannon, say that their conduct in no way represent Valve's practices and they will redouble their training efforts to make sure such misinterpretations of the company's position by staff don't happen again, and that's that. I suppose if you were lucky you might be able to go on a Discovery fishing expedition and shake loose some internal memos directing people to pull that kind of stuff, but I would figure that to be a long shot.
If as F.Ultra says this stuff isn't in the lawsuit, on a positive interpretation it could be that it's true but they realized they couldn't get anywhere suing on that basis.

On the other hand . . . the other thing about an allegation like this is that, well, it may be true, but if it's not true it's a great way to lie precisely because it's almost impossible to either prove or disprove. Nobody expects you to come up with the evidence because there may well not be any. And the victim can't refute your claim, so you've tarred them forever.

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Trippy. You know, cyberspace has looked the same since William Gibson. I think it would be amusing someday to have a game where you're an elite hacking ghost in the machine . . . but the visual representation of cyberspace that you're navigating through looks like Stardew Valley or something.

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Quoting: denyasisThat's an interesting point, although I think looking at only the cost of duplication might be a little narrow. There's the cost of development. I think, to some extent, this isn't dissimilar to other industries like other media production (wasn't always digital), or R&D.

Oh, I'm not saying that costs don't exist. But the thing is that there's a fundamental mismatch between a cost structure that is almost entirely up front as a sort of single thing, and a revenue structure that is based on price per copy sold, which in one direction or another is likely to bear no resemblance to the costs. Ideally, you'd want some kind of arrangement where proven game developers could be just paid a solid wage to develop games, and then everyone would have the right to download copies of the results for free or some minimal downloading charge. But that would be hard to arrange within the existing structure of markets.

Quoting: denyasisI would reckon there have always been some industries where production isn't nearly as expensive as the development. I think digital just exaggerates this ratio; although does not eliminate it.

The pharmaceutical industry comes fairly close. There are large up-front costs to developing new drugs. As compensation, companies are given a monopoly (patent) on drugs which they invented did the clinical trials for, and charge orders of magnitude more than the cost of production. The resulting compensation tends to be wildly out of proportion to the costs of development--but also, that mismatch between fixed development cost and per-unit revenue leads to perverse incentives. Companies gain hugely if by any means they can sell more units of a given drug rather than start over with a new drug; hence they tend to aggressively push to expand what a drug can be prescribed for whether it's appropriate or not, tend to spin the data to discount dangerous side effects, and pull various tricks to extend the life of their patents. Not to mention the genesis of the opioid crisis. If the drug companies were instead paid lump sums for the drug development, but then were not awarded a monopoly but had to compete, the prices of drugs would fall towards the price of production, and drug companies would gain little from misrepresenting a given drug's capabilities, arranging for it to be prescribed inappropriately, and so on.

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I don't have anything against deck-builder type games in theory--I used to play Magic cards like crazy back in the day. But this is the first one I've seen in some time that really makes me think "Huh, that looks like I want to try it."

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Quoting: ProtektorI find it hilarious that you think just because something is digital that is somehow special and different

But it is. The cost of a copy approaching zero makes a fundamental difference. When it comes to physical goods, scarcity is real and costs are based (more or less) on cost of production. When it comes to digital goods, costs are arbitrary and scarcity is entirely a social construct which we have created because we don't understand how to do any other models and anyway we fear trying other models would undermine the status quo.

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Quoting: iiariBummer, 16:9 screen... I can't go back to it after having had many years of 3:2 laptop screens. I think the only vertically larger native option are the Lenovo Thinkpads and the Dells....

That gives me a bizarro-world idea. So, for a lot of things you want to read/look at on a computer screen, you actually would want it to be taller than it is wide. Part of the reason they go with wider-than-tall is tradition dating back from TVs, and on laptops part is that they have to match the bottom half, with keyboard layouts having natural reasons to be wider than they are tall, at least if you're doing any fast touch-typing.
But how about a laptop design with a screen whose primary orientation was vertical? I can think of a few ways to manage it:
1. Strange keyboard layout. The screen simply hinges on a short side, and you have a keyboard that's laid out much more vertically. Not going to be winning any typing competitions, but if you're OK with that you've got this tall screen.
2. Screen opens on the short side, but has a narrow attachment to the base which you can slide around the edge to the middle of the long side, where it locks again and has contacts to power and so forth. You have a normally oriented keyboard with an odd looking vertical screen rising from it; to close it properly you slide it around again (because if you just folded it down from where it is the screen rectangle would be at right angles to the keyboard rectangle). Finicky, probably not durable.
3. Screen is detachable, basically a tablet, which you can have vertical or horizontal. But there's attachment points/clamps so that it will stand up, and be charged when attached to the keyboard.
4. Screen is attached on the long side, but it's actually attached to a hinged arm, not directly to the bottom half. So you open the laptop and it's a normal screen, but you can slide it up the arm and then pivot it vertical. The result is slightly "lumpy" when it's closed because you have this arm running down the back of the screen, but you could make the thing pretty flat.

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Wasn't Eudora an email program?

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Quoting: s8as8a

Quoting: Interknet

Quoting: s8as8aFor what it's worth, the 30% (or any percentage) cut doesn't seem bad to me (even if they didn't "give back" anything to the community, but in our case, they do, and a lot). What does seem bad to me is the "clauses Valve have that prevent developers selling at cheaper prices on other stores" (because that improperly reduces competition among stores, and that likely is the point).

That sounds like a myth honestly. I'm sure I've seen games available elsewhere for less many times.

Maybe they were violating Valve's license agreement? To be honest, I'm not sure if that's true either, but what I meant was that if it is, I'm against that.

I seem to remember from last time there was a piece here about a similar lawsuit, that the agreements in question (probably) were about regular price (or "sales" that went on for so long that they were de facto the regular price). So it didn't stop people from putting their stuff on sale for a week on some other store, but it did stop them from having the price at Itch or Epic be 20% lower on an ongoing basis.
This may not be true, though--that info seems to have been based on speculation and perhaps a bit of fact-based gossip, since the agreements themselves are not public and nothing has yet been hashed out in court. So we know the allegations and a bit of "people in the know say" but no solid facts.

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So there is no longer any Justice at Google. Well, no big surprise.

To be fair, they announced a while ago that they aren't developing any more products. So like, what do they need a head of product for?

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"they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled"

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