If you really like the nostalgia of old instruction booklets, or buying a game outside your spoken language, try Tunic. Fantastic game

This kind of lock in is even less relevant now with cross platform play and similar options becoming a common game feature. Take a game I play, Dead by Daylight; people can add friends on PlayStation and Xbox through BHVR (the dev) ID. It takes some work on the developer’s part, but they can provide their own tools to break that Steam lock-in.

So let’s say some public corporate emergency prompts a Valve exodus (eg, Gabe eats babies) - people would need to buy new copies of their most played games, but in many cases their account progress is on a movable ID, so it wouldn’t even be a huge blocker.

You’re right, in that you do need a “hook” - but that needs to be on top of nailing the absolute basics. UI is definitely one of the more basic elements. The key here is, good UI is not something that needs millions of dollars of investment - it’s generally sort of the opposite. It needs fewer managers over-designing things and finding the best ways to “marketing push” all the high-value product items.

To webpage developers, this motherfucking website is the best site in the world. It loads instantly, and barely requires any coding experience to make. Launchers are not websites (unless you want to bundle 800 MB of Chromium, as many sadly do) but some of the same principles of basicness apply.

The other, less factual observation to make is: With the wealth of frivolous lawsuits against Valve in the past months, as well as pushes against Linux for age verification, it seems very likely that there is a well-funded group conducting lawfare to de-value the company. Whether this is simple retaliation for winning a case against a patent troll, or a long-term strategy to find a way to turn the company public and aggressively take it over, I can only guess.

Other community moderators have reported influxes of bot accounts, and it’d be naive in the age of AI to claim that all forum participants are human. Given the funding behind the attacks on Valve, I’d conclude it’s entirely possible that some proportion (certainly not all) of the accounts responding on the topic of Valve are either paid astroturfers, or complete bot accounts seeking to generate negativity towards them.

To better explain the issue, I think, usually monopoly claims come from someone dominating multiple threads or connected elements of an industry. So, they don’t just own all the wheat fields; but also some of the best grain transport companies, as well as all the best bakeries - such that anyone offering wheat, transport, or baking, can’t compete with their integration.

That’s when a company would be divided. But in this case, Valve is just one thing; it’s the bakery. They choose to bake with flour and wheat because they’ve been baking for years. Everyone else is pouring billions into trying various mixtures of sawdust to cut costs, and no one is cutting into that industry as a result. Nothing has prevented them from building their own infrastructure from scratch, except for the fact that it’s a long-term investment, and the stock market hates those.

I’d doubt that. Each publisher signs their own terms to Steam, and they likely couldn’t all be forced into a new agreement. It would reach to some new games, but it would likely lead many to consider other stores (considering a lot of them use Denuvo, piracy fears are likely high on their part).

If you want the process to be pervasive, you could either lobby on a major level like StopKillingGames, or push more popularity of indie games that tend to be DRM-free by default (oh, and if you think there’s a lot of them on Steam, check Itch.io)

Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given.

OK. With you, there.

That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route

…and, you lost me.

I work in UI, outside the game industry. It’s plain to me very, very few publishers care about developing good UI or community tools. Epic is no exception. Perhaps that wasn’t what you meant, but if it’s a venue they intentionally ignore, it fits the OP picture perfectly.

I also think there are other features on which Steam has failed to compete, and an inventive competitor could investigate. Things like better game integration, better curation, promises against censorship to publishers of adult content, or creative uses of AI to improve player experiences, are all options. But I think that between the attempts of Google, Amazon, and Epic, it’s seemed that simply throwing money at the game industry without knowledge of what’s valuable to gamers, has not worked well.

I’ll point out, when I went to sell my book on Apple Books, they had this in their TOS as well - I wasn’t allowed to sell the same digital book for less somewhere else. It is not a new or unique agreement.

That is not a whataboutism. The claim was “30% is a huge cut for a virtual storefront”. The only way to qualify that comparison is to look at other virtual storefronts for games. If you have other cases of comparison to give apart from Sony, MS, and Nintendo, I’m open to look at them. Epic, so far, is a bit of a standout with its pricing.

So yeah, haul the parent to court, and then sit the traumatized child down and tell them “Good news! The law has correctly identified the negligent party in this incident. You may be eligible for up to $1mil in damages!”

while he’s sitting there crying over his dead sibling. Better, you want to extend this case to a school shooting? Go announce to 30 parents that “We worked out who is negligent!” You discover common, repeating human ignorance after the fact, and nobody is saved.

The fact that some people in our society are negligent is an expected outcome. That’s why your friend will yell at you one night when you take his car keys away, and then thank you the next day when he’s sober. The point is that society can plan better for that negligence, rather than just pat themselves on the back for spotting it.

This is pretty key. If they had added this field 8 years ago, absent any context of swarms of lawmakers salivating for personal info so they can find more children to fuck, or data to sell to their donors, then I wouldn’t have thought much of it. The timing is absolutely a critical element of the discussion. Heck, wait until CA has repealed its law, and admitted in embarrassment it was a terrible implementation of child protection, and maybe I’d even be okay with adding the field.

Putting it in now is very much like the nazi standing at your door, holding a hand close to your knob, insisting “I’m not actually searching your house and breaking your 4th amendment rights! I’m just standing here, for no particular reason!”

“C’mon, guys, they’re just ARMING the untrained soldiers. They’re not even sending them to your neighborhoods!”

Guns in America, to me, are a perfect representation of the fallacy of personal responsibility.

Let’s take a scenario that, while tragic, has happened in the USA; a small boy of less than 6 finds a gun, plays with it, and shoots their baby sibling. The common refrain from responsible gun owners is: “You should’ve kept it locked and trained your family to use it responsibly!”

But who’s “you”? The shooter? The victim? One was killed and one was traumatized. The parent? They didn’t suffer nearly as much as the others.

So it’s not even the only issue where I hear “We need parents to be more responsible!” but simply saying that won’t change the number of drunk deadbeat parents putting zero effort into their children; and potentially leading other real human beings to suffer for it.

I remember that day of the “general strike” where the simple idea was to not spend any money on big corps. I got confused, because to me, that’s a 365-day-a-year lifestyle thing for me.

Maybe I’m lucky that I don’t have lifestyle needs like pet food, baby supplies, etc, and markets have been cornered there. But there’s plenty of forms of entertainment and leisure without giving it to Disney or Amazon and the like.

Nope. The demand was made clearly, and they did not do it. This is a refusal. Even if you want to frame it as a road bump, it is one that can readily be misconstrued as a wall; and either way is absolutely illegal.

There’s a great YTP author I watch, and I hate how often an ego-driven mass murderer comes up in his videos edited to say silly things. I like the willingness to mock him, but I hate giving him attention. I hate seeing his face everywhere.

I play DBD, Arc Raiders, Wild Assault, and others just fine. Funny enough, it’s just a few specific big names with the most anticheat problems: Valorant, Fortnite, BF6, and COD. In some ways, I’m happy not to have to even consider them.

I understand the sentiment, although annoyingly enough Boston Dynamics kicks their “dogs” pretty often, and they’re build to adjust their balance very quickly.

“1v1 me in Warzone and maybe I’ll consider it.”
“But Warzone is a battle royale! Theres hundreds of players on the map, what are the chances I even run into you?”
“About as high as me listening to you tap about pokeemans, nerd.”

No, if they’re security conscious, then it may mean they only did a request that scanned the HTML for a <title> tag. That means one WGET call, but a far cry from a standard definition of “visiting” in which your device’s JS parser starts running their unknown code and page instructions.