I don't know whether valve has violated anti-trust law or not, and I certainly don't think gaben deserves any more protection from covid than the general public but;

this is a stupid ruling. Why on earth can't he appear remotely, as he requested? They can't "adequately assess his credibility"? Are they gonna have an FBI body language expert on hand? Check his forehead for sweat droplets? There's nothing they can ask him in person that they can't ask him over a camera.

Feels like the plaintiffs are doing some kind of lowkey spite thing here, and I'm surprised the judge played along.

I appreciate requiring everyone wearing a good mask while he's in the courtroom, but I don't understand how having him in the room to testify would be substantially different from an online appearance.

They get him on the stand and the judge says " so Mr Newell, remembering you are under oath, when is Half Life 3 being released?"

So is the allegation just that Steam is too successful?

Lmao Valve made a service so good at what it does, it's fucking over all these other business ghouls like Tim Sweemey who are actively trying to dominate the market without actually competing; just look at Epic's store, it's d o g s h i t. They give out free games and still no one I know wants to use it. It's the same across the board, these companies do not want to make good services, they want to legally strongarm the consumer.

So there is an anti-trust lawsuit against steam, but not apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft.... Etc of those giant companies who literally destroy everything in their way? Please tell me they're next?

EDIT: If it's true that Valve is also refusing to sell games that are sold for a lower price in other stores where steam keys are not being sold then I think there's definitely a case here. I didn't understand that was their policy but if so it sucks and I take back anything good I said about them being permissive. Thanks to this comment for finding the exact language in the lawsuit that alleges this.

I'd be interested to see what Wolfire's case is, if there's more to it that I don't know about I'd love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately...

claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract "an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store."

...then I don't think this will work out because Valve hasn't engaged in monopolistic behaviour.

This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That's it.

Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren't suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven't enshittified for so long is probably because they don't have public shareholders.

To be clear I'm against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were "private and not public". Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he's gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I'd love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don't see this case achieving much.

Just don't expect him a 3rd time.

Come on, not every guy with a beard is--

"Hi this is Gaben"

OOOOOOHHHH MA GAWD

I'm out of the loop, can someone reply what's going on? I'll leave this comment for those like me who curious what happened

Valve is trying to escape Microsoft's monopolistic practices with Linux while out performing their competition in a fair market. I like competition but I don't get what advantage steam has that their competition doesn't. Even with the steam deck they're using standardized hardware and open source software to make a competitive product leaving room for competition to create their own versions.

Really? Steam? With all those EGS, GOG and Origins? Is it Apple's trolling?

Oh lawd he comin