How is steam a monopoly? People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG, except EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.

I fear for valve in a post gaben world, and they certainly aren't blameless. They also aren't a monopoly. Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.

>How is steam a monopoly

It has 90% marketshare and has been shown to use its monopoly uncompetitively to force price parity on devs. Textbook definition.

>People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG,

People "like" GOG. I woildnt say they are "excited for it". The revenue of GOG these years don't reflect the supposed enthusiasm.

>EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.

Anticonsumer isn't anti competitive. Especially not as a new player in the game. They can't brute force this stuff with money like a trillion dollar company could.

> Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.

I'll believe that when they release a full distro with all the feature the Steam Deck enjoys.

I think sweeny is an awful person overall. The lawsuit against apple and google is a net positive for consumers though. Having someone as big as Epic stand up to these digital silos is a good thing.

I think he's still at heart a developer. That's why all his initiatives that aren't Fortnite are so developer friendly.

But he still is a CEO. So there will naturally be some evils he seeps into to make the company (and himself) richer. He still has his own interests, but my second hand experience is that even these layoffs are relatively respectful compared to most of the industry.

I recognize that CEO side. But it's a real shame many people mostly turned on him in order to defend Steam. Steam sure isn't a saint either.

Assume for one moment that they were all great people over there.

I suspect that they would STILL be in the same boat that they are in. You see a silo where I see a service provider.

Does apple make money on doing what they do.. You bet.

But the lesson here is that they make that money because of scale, and without it replacing payment processing, fraud management, and the customer service you need with it is a HARD problem. Epic needs more than Fortnite to justify running all that on their own or it's going to turn into a black hole: because payment processing for "digital goods" is a nightmare.

I suspect that both apple and googles extension into payments at point of sale, has contractual ties to their App Store payment processing. Something Epic will always lack.

The real pain in the ass here is the incumbent card processors, and their fee structures.

I suspect that the industry is going to need to go back and re-visit micro transactions in the coming years.

They're all fungible if you aren't addicted to your phone.

Yeah, day old account too.

The companies have made this bed. They are upset its finally a mor even playing field.

Everyone is upset because the situation is a trash fire.

Yeah, the playing field isn’t leveled as much as it’s simply on fire and turning into garbage. In a way it’s similar to the eternal September, but on a much broader scale.

They patched that out many moons ago. If you havent updated in a few years you might have a shot, but most people cannot.

I disagree that accessibility is a detractor here.

There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.

Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?

I'll second this.

It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.

You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.

The contract to rebuild it will mean huge profits too. The circle of life (MIC).

This is a Keynesian argument, which has largely been disproved. Keynes famously said if you just paid people to dig holes and fill them back up again, that this would be net stimulative to the government. It works until it doesn't work, because digging holes, as you can reason from common sense, does not actually create value.

This U.S. operation is meant to bomb the Iranians into the Stone Age, so presumably THAAD-level air defense wouldn't be needed again. The Qataris, Saudis would have sold off to South Korea, Taiwan if they wanted.

Unfortunately, NOT accepting them and actively blocking things also makes you extremely identifiable.

USAA works. They detect there is not attestation and warn you, but give you the option to continue.