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Steam :: Introducing Steam Families (steamcommunity.com)

submitted 11 months ago by Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world

177 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta.

Features:

up to 5 members
game sharing
parental controls
- allow access to appropriate games
- restrict access to the Steam Store, Community or Friends Chat
- set playtime limits (hourly/daily)
- view playtime reports
- approve or deny requests from child accounts for additional playtime or feature access (temporary or permanent)
- recover a child's account if they lost their password
child purchase requests

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[-] Spedwell@lemmy.world 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Sigh... I'm getting tired of the Valve apologetics in every thread. They make good products, yes. They also abuse their market share to implement anticompetitive policies. The first doesn't absolve them of the second.

Truth is, no one has any idea what it would look like if there were actual competition among the PC games platforms. Steam may be the best possible world, or maybe we don't know what we're missing.

To learn more about Steam's anticompetitive practices:

See the complaint from the pending class action case Wolfire Games v. Valve (at a minimum items 204, 205 on pg. 55) for how Steam's PMFN clause affect publisher pricing.
See Cory Doctorow's Amazon's financial shell game let it create an "impossible" monopoly as a starting point for how a PMFN affects the market unfairly and harms the consumer.

[-] ALostInquirer@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago

What is a PMFN?

[-] Spedwell@lemmy.world 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

"Platform Most Favored Nation". It's a type of clause in platform/marketplace agreements that prohibit a seller from listing their product for a lower price on a different sales platform. Specifically, it prevents selling on a different marketplace with lower fees (e.g. Epic Games or a publishers own website) and passing the difference as savings to the consumer.

[-] ALostInquirer@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago

Oh, I hadn't read of it in that form, thanks!

[-] mightyfoolish@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Doesn't Amazon have the same stipulation on every item listed on their site?

Edit: I think I misunderstood you here. I thought Amazon's game division was complaining about Steam. That would have been very hypocritical.

[-] mightyfoolish@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

Epic gives me free games and I still don't like them... The "problem" is Valve is Steam-rolling the competition because people want to give them money.

[-] Spedwell@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Yep. Because honestly, Steam is better than Epic in almost every way. When you want to buy a particular game X, you get a lot more from your purchase if it's on Steam (workshop, friends, multiplayer, etc.). There is strong inertia and network effects that keep us all preferring Steam.

Epic can't compete with the Steam experience. But if Epic was able to list everything 18% cheaper (the difference in fees between Epic and Steam)—then they would rightly be able to compete on price.