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$843 million lawsuit against Valve already has its own website: "The Steam Claim" accuses the biggest store in PC gaming of "overcharging" players (www.gamesradar.com)

submitted 5 months ago by Dadifer@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

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[+] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works -29 points 5 months ago

Why do you think they're able to make that much money? Not by using their position as the store where the majority of people buys games from?

There's no good guys when profits are the goal. They might provide good service, the only reason they're doing so is because they see potential profit.

There's a major difference between making more than average and being a billionaire. You know what's the difference between making 500k a year and making a billion a year? About a billion.

[-] Nilz@sopuli.xyz 26 points 5 months ago

Steam didn't get to where it is because of market abuse but because of providing a good service, or at least a service that was better than anything else at the time by far. Valve are reaping the rewards now, but are also still providing an arguably better service than it's competitors. It's a bit odd that you want to punish a company just for being successful.

Valve isn't perfect and they're profit driven, but they're privately owned and the goals isn't maximizing profit, which isn't something you can say about most of their competitors.

[+] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works -15 points 5 months ago

I'm all in for punishing all billionaires and you're very naive if you think their goal isn't too maximize profit. If it wasn't there's no reason why they would accumulate enough surplus for Gaben to own six yacht, they would instead reduce their 30% cut and pass the savings to everyone and we would have cheaper games.

[-] Nilz@sopuli.xyz 14 points 5 months ago

Yes, the profit is excessive, but it's because they have a good product where the competition has not really been putting in much effort and letting Valve get away with it for so long.

Valve's goal isn't to maximize profit because they don't have shareholders that demand it. If they really wanted to maximize profits then there's a whole lot more to squeeze out of Steam and the games they made. And yes I agree Valve can lower their cut and still make bucket loads of money, but I highly doubt that if they did reduce their cut it would actually lead to cheaper games except for a maybe a few. Because just like Valve, the devs and publishers are profit driven and why would they turn down a potentially bigger profit?