Do we get a free copy of the new Gaben AI wiafu?

In the immortal words of Cave Johnson:

Brain mapping, artificial inteligence - we should've been working on it thirty years ago

Pretty sure he's back living in the US, so he can actually work at the valve offices

Nah it's still their concern too. They're mostly just on the beneficial side of it.

Nothing else comes close to steam in terms of market share.

GOG is missing a good portion of major games. Outside of that most of the options are much worse

EGS is really the only thing remotely close to what Steam does, though.

GOG will always be an afterthought as long as they have their DRM-free policy in place. They're super cool, but they're a niche and will never grow beyond that without losing what makes them cool.

Origin (or whatever EA's calling their store now) gave up pursuing third-party sales years ago. They still do it, but they clearly have no interest in actually making a go of becoming an actual competitor to Steam.

The Windows Store is terrible for a number of different reasons, even if it's better than Microsoft's previous attempts at getting into this space (coughGWFLcough). EGS is more likely to overtake Steam than Windows Store is to even rival EGS.

Uplay (or, again, whatever Ubisoft is calling their store these days) is like Origin - I don't even know for sure if Ubi is doing third-party sales, but if so, it's very much an afterthought for them.

And then everyone else just sells Steam keys. They're not in the same market as the others, so don't really fit into this conversation. If you're 100% reliant on the store you're "competing" with, you're not competing with them.

What else lets me easily play games on Linux, on my couch, without touching a keyboard or mouse?

Amazon kinda exists?

Yeah but just the amount of games I own on Steam already (not to mention the Steam Deck), if all that ended up getting enshittified by Microsoft it'd be like having to start over from scratch pretty much.

Plus, at least from my perspective, Activision-Blizzard was already bad enough that if MS made it worse, it wouldn't affect me because they were already bad enough that I'd swore off their games. MS owning them was an improvement or at worst more of the same.

That's absolutely not the case for Valve. They are one of the few large companies that I respect plus they are playing a big role in breaking the windows stranglehold over OSes when you like to play games.

The level of popular opposition to MS acquiring Valve would be on a whole other level than the opposition to the blizzard acquisition. It might even rival the opposition to Nvidia acquiring ARM.

CoD is dominant fps. It's why they made the concession about it

Yes, that is just how the American system works. The actual body here is the doj. The ftc tried to sue and was slapped back immediately. This was the ftc trying to show claws and the actual ruling body saying no, you have no power and Microsoft can do what they want.

It was a huge loss for the ftc that has been trying, and failing to fight big tech