Quoting: benstor214Valve should charge them!

The amount of hoops you are forced to jump through as a modern gamer keeps baffling me. It is a sign that these companies couldn’t care less about the troubles their customers have to go through as soon as the credit card details landed in the inbox.

You're Valve's customer. Your system is not supported by many developers. Why would you expect anything at all?

Quoting: benstor214The 30%-cut was established for decades, including the storefronts on consoles. It's only after Tim Sweeney started pushing this false narrative of 30 percent being 'too much', that the cut gets this undeserved scrutiny.

Having sold succesful games, Sweeney can make an estimate on what the platforms are earning. Which insights can you share to call it undeserved?

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Quoting: CanonicalFurthermore, the Snap Store team has placed a temporary manual review requirement on all new snap registrations, effectively immediately.

Different emphasis.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI'm happy to be corrected.

There's a review forum.

Quoting: slaapliedjeThis is the second time it's happened. Flatpak actually labels stuff as unsafe if you're using the UI. I always check to see if it's made by the upstream project or not. For example, Discord flatpak is not from Discord, you should download the .deb/tar.gz from their website.

Labeling doesn't help in such a case. You can steal a wallet's content with almost no system access (network & display are obviously required).

The labels are just a general indicator about the sandbox. Most proprietary applications are unsafe since they don't support Wayland.

But apps like Discord are maintained by known Flathub contributors & should be safe. You can check the build manifests online.

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Quoting: omer666You can't buy Postal Redux in Germany at all for example, even if you buy a legit key and try to activate it on Steam.

AFAIK this is not required by law, blocking happens either by Valve or the publisher. The requirements are very high (banned must not be sold, indexed requires a actual age verification, both must not be publicly advertised) but "ownership" is not illegal & activation should not be equivalent to sale.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismThey call it "anti-cheat" -- but what it really is -- EMBRACE, EXTEND, EXTINGUISH ... namely their competitors.

How does their anti-cheat embrace anything from any competitors?

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualNow, if only governments would outlaw region locking with DVDs and Blu-Rays.

The ruling does not condemn region locks, they must only comply with the law.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualRegion-locking shows on streaming services is bad enough, but region locking physical media is incredibly greedy.

Isn't the same true for any DRM?

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualWas anyone allowed to publish a hardcover book which would combust if a customer attempted to open it in Australia?

That analogy doesn't work, you can still use the mediums in the foreign regions. You simply require a device compatible with the region.

Quoting: omer666Good job fining Valve for region-locking, while Germany continues censoring games and Microsoft buying Activision is tolerated.

Only one of the three broke the law.

Germany does not censor games. Certain presentations are banned but that rarely happens (only 40 games - if the list is complete - were ever banned, 11 bans rescinded). Many games (but even that now rarely happens) were indexed which imposes major restrictions but technically it was still possible to buy the games. Publishers then censored games to allow a mainstream release. This happens in the US, too: e.g. movies are censored in production for an R rating & avoid NC-17. But unlike German releases this usually affects all releases.

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Quoting: JordanPlayz158I mean I doubt Valve actually likes DRM, it is more so the industry that requires/likes it, just like iirc HDMI won over DP because it implemented DRM/Copy Protection (and at that time) DP did not, unfortunately, to stay on top, you need to bend to the will and demands of greedy game companies […]

Valve introduced Steam for DRM. All other functions would've worked without the DRM.

And I don't see how there's demand to restrict access to games when there are many DRM free games. The restriction comes solely from Valve. Besides: Steam is too important, all the big publisher returned after leaving. Valve could enforce the user's freedom.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy[…]

I replaced "absolute" with "definitive/clear/unmistakable" for a better understanding.

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Quoting: wytrabbitI guess you're unaware that DRM free games that don't require any Steam services, can be launched outside of Steam... it's not illegal

Even if that's true: That's not thanks to Valve. What does this change about Valve's absolute definitive/clear/unmistakable Pro-DRM stance? It's not about what's legal or not but their intentions & actions. They do actively restrict the access to the user's games.

Besides: It's still a huge PITA to do this on the Steam Deck, you have to work around the whole system.

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Quoting: wytrabbitYou can still have your physical media and ownership... many games on Steam are DRM-free, and don't require online access, so if you lose your account you keep those games.

Steam always enforces it's DRM, it doesn't matter if the game is DRM free or contains third party DRM. You can work around it if the game is DRM free. But then why use an "anti consumer" service like Steam in the first place? And the workaround works really poorly on the Steam Deck.

Quoting: wytrabbitYou can burn them to a physical disc if you want a hard copy. After that you could lend it to someone else, but keep in mind that selling or distributing your physical copy is a loss for the developer. It may not mean much for a big company, but indie teams need that revenue to stay afloat. Just food for thought.

I don't see the relevance of this information. Copying & lending is not allowed by the EULA (maybe it's even disallowed to run the games outside of Steam). The point about revenue would be true for physical releases, too.

Obviously a digital store can be good from a consumer stand point, it simplifies distribution. But this works very well without Steam's DRM (even if a game itself requires [Steam] DRM).

The point is: Valve actively restricts users, I don't see how freedom was ever an important concern of Valve.

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Quoting: Kuduzkehpanhe decided to choose his own path for humankind on perspective of freedom.

Absolutely. For humankind he decided to create a DRM platform! Freedom to the people to not run their games. What a disaster it would be if I could decide when & where I'm allowed to start games!

Quoting: finaldestValve saved PC gaming when retailers gave us the 2 fingers in favour of consoles. At least prior generations had the advantage of physical media allowing game ownership. Now they want to kill the physical games media market also.

Valve was the company which killed physical media & took ownership away. Prior Steam you owned a copy you could lend or sell. With Steam you only received the license attached with additional constraints.

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Quoting: NeptNutzNintendo knows they have already been beaten in the hardware race (<-- Steam Deck).

How is the Steam Deck beating the Nintendo Switch?

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