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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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Wow, you're starting to get it, maybe we should start doing something about it instead of defending those who profit, right?
the solution to that is taxes, not suing successful business one at a time.
Or breaking them or nationalization so profit goes to everyone instead of a single guy.
And you want to start with Valve, which is one of the smaller game companies and is one of the few players not guilty of buying up their competition, instead of Sony, Microsoft, other Big Tech players, media conglomerates like Disney, ISPs like Comcast or AT&T, or meat distributors who are price fixing algorithmicly?
Who said I want to start with them?
Why even buy games period? Why risk giving money to any of them since things that become popular risk making the people selling them to become wealthy? Not like indies are immune to it looking at Minecraft becoming too popular that too many people wanted to buy it making one person then a corporation wealthy, so why not just not buy period to prevent the issue from even becoming a possibility?
The best solution is prevention. Don't buy anything.
Who said I do?
You don't buy games?
Not on Steam and not in ways that enrich billionaires. If devs don't make their game available another way then too bad, they chose to deal with the devil, I don't have to encourage them, won't keep me from playing their games through other means or by getting them through giveaways.
So which non billionaire associated company or publisher.
Ever heard of... Indie Games? Itch.io?
Average sh.itjust.works IQ be like
bruh, don't lump me with this idiot.
Oh will you look at that, an hypocrite
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/11183086
Yeah bud Steam having decent game sales is literally like a corrupt government contract boss gets a pay rise at a corpo dumping sewage into rivers and polluting drinking water and making people sick.
Stop defending a billionaire and his company, you'll never be one of them, all billionaires need to go, none of them became one by being moral, if it was any other company you would be talking about guillotines.
Pretty freaking high to realize that you must be an idiot to defend the people who are the opposite end of the food chain.
What would be the solution here that could drive the prices down? Limit profit levels per company?
I feel like it's not even capitalism itself being the problem alone, but also the entry cost for all these services. Building a competitor to Steam is pretty much equal to building a competitor to Youtube which means it's almost impossible due to the running costs of the service AND you would have to be somehow wildly better as in not gather as much money from your customers. It would be lovely to see some resolution to these problems without going full communism first.
Break it down, it clearly has too much power over the gaming sector. Impose a maximum share for distributors because clearly 30% is way more than they actually need.
Okay, but who gets to decide what's the maximum profit margin allowed? How would it be determined so that it wouldn't also prevent new competition from growing up because that 30% is the only thing that allows the companies to make some money from their service and use that money to develop said service.
Base it on market share and revenues.
Nothing really. Publishers already all want to go up to 70 base price, and most bigger games already effectively cost 100-200 between pre-orders, deluxe editions and mtx (I don't know the designed price point, but years ago I was talking to the team of an in-dev game who planned for 110 being spent on average per buyer for their game).
If there was no method by which people could ever profit from a system like Steam, why bother building it?
There's a difference between making profit and becoming one of the richest person in the world, in the second case it means you clearly made too much profit by selling for a higher price than required.
Let's play ball here too. So by definition there's always going to be a richest person in the world - let it be with a difference of 100 dollars to the median or a billion dollars or 100 billion dollars. Who gets to decide who is the richest person and by what means? Clearly it shouldn't be a business person so would it be a politician, a dictator, a president or who? And how should we restrict entrepreneurs getting there without destroying every company and therefore making everyone unemployed because there's no incentive to run a business anymore? How would we balance risks with gains if we are not allowed to make a profit?
You're definitely right that you picked apart their argument because ackshually there will always be a richest person. But clearly the sentiment is that someone shouldn't get excessive wealth past their threshold.
How do we define excessive wealth and how do we limit it? Well there are lots and lots of proposals I would suggest reading up on some (you can Google that question to get 10 op eds that suggest 20 different solutions). I wouldn't mind defining it as a certain percentage higher than the median wealth of the country. It would be funny to give Gabe Newell a "you won capitalism" trophy and taking excess wealth he gains.
As for motivation. It's a much murkier subject than you imply. In an economy where the state takes every penny of a successful business's wealth, yeah it makes sense that there's no motivation to make a successful business. But if one could still get rich off of running a business (just not god-tier level wealth) I'm sure there would be plenty of motivation. And hell, if we give them prestige like we do now there's tons of people who do what they do just for the fame with no profit. There's tons of evidence that people aren't purely motivated by the infinite profit of business people all over the world work their asses off in jobs they enjoy or respect that will never pay them Gabe Newell bucks.
A richest person will always exist, there's no reason why that richest person couldn't have 500k in their bank account while the median is at 250k though.
The fact you're setting an arbitrary limit of cash in a bank account shows how little you've thought about this. Rich people have money in the bank, sure, but the vast amount of their wealth is in stocks, property, and other assets. Also, assuming rich people have one bank account they keep all their money in is foolish. You have to spread your cash around to multiple accounts and even banks in order to not exceed the amount the government is willing to insure.
I dumbed it down to the level of the people who are defending billionaires. No one should be allowed to have multiple millions or billions in wealth while people are starving even in rich countries.
Ah yes, the old "I was only pretending to be dumb" excuse.
1.5 million is not a lot of money when you're talking about the richest person.
The 1 was a typo and in a perfect world where wealth is distributed equally, 500k would be a whole lot.
Heck, even today in rich countries, 500k in savings is an anomaly. 78% of US citizens live paycheck to paycheck, having 10k in saving is something they can't fathom, 500k is a whole fucking lot.