No prob!

Gacha trash. Let me know when they're making Portal 3 or Half-Life 3. And really, it doesn't even have to be those franchises, but I mean, a single-player game that you pay for once and that's it, and it has puzzles that make you think. What they were known for before they started making money off other people's work and stopped creating wonderful things.

I mean, I know they still work on their gacha games.

Might seem like I'm moving goalposts and maybe I did, but I'm just nostalgic for when they made unforgettable games like Portal and Half-Life 2.

... If I have a company, an llc, that is based in one state... and I do business in another state...

... the laws of that other state are applicable to me.

This is the concept of a State - Federal government legal structure.

This is a fairly common kind of thing that happens, a State AG suing bringing a suit against (EDIT: 'suing' is I think not the correct term?) some legal entity that legally resides in a different state, but does business in their state.

Fuck Bethesda.

Literally everything they've done in the last decade has been a downgrade or cashgrab or outright joke.

... and they still, fucking still can't fix their garbage engine, they're still, still relying on modders to fix all their problems, and then they just fairly regularly do some kind of re release or major overhaul that breaks all of the mods.

MSFT's gaming division is dying: They're gonna get eviscerated.

Ah yes, Saudi EAco. Because they weren't scummy enough already.

Battle.net, with the feature to run partially-downloaded games and stream missing assets in on demand.

This one is actually a game changer if you play WoW for a bit every few years lol

Game's like 100 gigs by now, but you can get started after just a few gigabytes downloaded. Like 5 minutes on even my mediocre 150 mbps downlink.

In contrast, it used to take me several hours to get into it on a slower connection before this feature.

Each Valve employee also makes about what 10 GameStop employees do, salaries at Valve are often mid to high 6 digits.

Which is not to say that GameStop is cheap to run, but hey, neither is Steam.

Okay, so you're just a nostalgic hater. Deadlock is a masterpiece.

I’m just talking about the talking point of them taking a cut of sales, it’s the exact same as a store adding markup. A store is adding way more than 30% on most physical goods. Data storage and bandwidth are fucking expensive and 30% honestly isn’t that much.

Not all gambling is banned, and they are specifically calling out games targeting kids

Yes, I understand what makes it legal and the commonality of the legal dynamic. It just feels like very inopportune infighting.

Excelent, it would be great if valve would allow Counterstrike to die and go back to making real games.

Inopportune infighting?

What do you mean by that, I genuienly don't understand.

State AGs often bring consumer rights based suits against businesses.

Sometimes those businesses are based in other states.

How is this infighting?

Do you think that like NY and WA are legally fighting or something?

That's not how this works.

Valve largely stands as one of the last vestiges of consumer positive industries, save for stuff like this, which I think everyone agrees is not good. It's definitely gambling, and it definitely eroded and continues to erode gaming and civilization, in general.

However, in a world of cutthroat wolves and truly evil entities and secret boards of oligarchies, Valve alone sits as a private company, not behaving primarily as a dark pattern machine.

Attacking them needs to happen, but in a political time of rising fascism around the world, and especially as it takes hold in almost all of the federal government and many powerful institutions have recently taken radical nosedives, a power vacuum where, at WORST a grey company once stood, is the last thing we need.

Attacking Valve should happen. But not right now. "My enemy's enemy is my friend", and valve has historically stood protecting gamers, and business and industry, against many of the worst behaviors, as basically a grey paragon of hope.

Tearing them down right now is such a fool's errand where the best outcome is unfortunately a weakening of the company that gives SO MANY PEOPLE hope and peace at the end of the day.

You obviously aren't a fool, and seem quite aware of the dynamics, both legally and really. But, going off the average .ml values and rising industry of communist country gaming companies, I can only assume a motive to weaken the most powerful and successful institution that stands in the way of foreign entities gaining more momentum, be it deliberate or not.

The damage and negativity of allowing the structuring of gambling in this past time is undeniable.

But cutting off one of the hands of one of the few institutions and leading companies that isn't a brazen flagrant late stage capitalist machine, bowing and tithing the fascist federal government is fucking stupid.

Sue EA or an actual auto shitty company instead. Valve will take notice. And if they don't change their ways, wait until there isn't a Nazi sympathizer as president who's being very successful replacing the heads of all information and power throughout the country.

But until then, people need to see attacking Valve for what it really is: attacking virtually the last industry leading and extremely powerful company that stands against everything Trump stands for. As grey and imperfect as they are, they, alone, stand above as a Paragon against the darkness.

Uh...

Ok.

So... I consider myself to generally be quite the Valve fanboy, but I try to base that as much on reality as I can.

... Video games are less important than the concept of an impartial, fair and just legal system, than the idea of having a society that does not permit massive exploitation of children.

Nobody with a life spent in law knows dick about how Valve being basically the only major gaming company that isn't publically traded and doesn't have a bunch of investors and stock holders to answer to means that it functionally is the least evil major gaming company.

(Beyond Valve's lawyers, I guess.)

I get where you are coming from, but you're acting like everyone cares about and values Valve as much as you do.

You're not wrong to see them as the best overall corporate force for good in gaming... but that you think any entity that tries to broadly do good, conflicting with another... is infighting?

No, these are completely different groups of people, who focus on completely different realms... its very strange to me, that you see the world in a way where its all so conflated.

....and Valve can't be grey and imperfect and also paragons at the same time. Paragon literally means without flaws.

Let me offer a ... slightly different way of looking at it, that's about as cheesy/overwrought as you are being:

...Valve's the flawed hero gamers deserve, but not the one they need to prioritize right now. So, let the heroes hunt them, because Valve can take it.

Not 10 times the employees. 10 times the nunber of stores as Valve has employees.

Let's look at the cost of just floor-level associates. If Gamestop employees made an average of $14 an hour and they have 2 employees working and were open 11 hours a day an average (standard is 10am to 9pm - they actually work shorter hours on Sunday, but there's also time spent opening and closing the store and extra hours on holidays other than Christmas, so 11 is low). That comes out to over 100 grand per store just in nominal hourly wages for floor associates.

Valve would have to pay 7 figures on average per employee to have the same staffing cost as Gamestop's lowest-paid employees.

I've worked in retail and in tech. Tech infrastructure is expensive, but they save a metric fuckton by not requiring physical space. You could fit the entirety of all of valve's Tech infrastructure in a single building. Of course, they don't do that - they have it distributed in data centers all over the world. But they are renting space in server racks, whereas Gamestop is renting thousands of retail spaces for 100 grand a year, another 100 grand each on staffing them, and a metric fuckton on inventory. And their cut of the sales is tiny.

People saying they charge 30% are wrong. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo charge 30%. Gamestop's margin on a new game is like 10-15 percent. They make more on used games, but only if they sell. Their 100% markup on used games versus what they pay doesn't mean as much when lots of those games go unsold. At least new games can be returned to the manufacturer.

That is not true, they have multiple data centers. I completely disagree on the costs as well. A single high capacity switch can cost tens of thousands (of which they have probably hundreds) and that's not even mentioning storage, electricity, rack space, server cost ($$$$). The land is the cheapest part of data centers.

Have you worked in or with a data center? It was most of my job for 6 years.

I didn't mention Steam's cut of sales, but I do want to mention that you can refund steam games as long as you don't play them for longer than 2 hours. This is actually better than GameStop or retailers who normally only accept returns of sealed, new copies. So I'm not sure why you'd being that up when it defeats your point.

Hundreds of things that cost tens of thousands of dollars versus thousands of things that costs hundreds of thousands a year.

You're literally saying that Steam's server costs are orders of magnitude less than Gamestop's retail store location costs.

That is literally what I'm saying, yes. I take it you have never worked on the operations side of data centers?

This is a very bad comparison. Valve has by some estimates the highest profit per employee of any corporation in the world. Reasonable markups in a competitive market are a far cry from the ludicrous extraction tax Valve (and Apple, and Google) impose as monopolist app store operators.

CIA bot out here defending capitalist exploitation as reasonable lmao

STOP👏DEFENDING👏MONOPLIES

Oh fuck off, out of all the fucking companies out there fucking raping the world steam isn’t one of them

Valve represents the acme of capitalism, with likely the highest profit per employee of any corporation that has ever existed, and you’re out here sucking them off?