A family member stayed in a hotel in Dubai recently and on returning said how incredible the staff were and willing they were to help them, and my response was "no shit"
I went once. It feels like Disney Land but for the wealthy. I'll never go back, and I actually regret going to be honest. It's disgusting and it's right out in the open.
1) This is a legit point although i don't see Valve as a big problem in that area. They invented lootboxes but refused to be as bad as others who followed them. Today with valve these things are restricted purely to cosmetics.
2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo.
Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.
Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.
The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.
The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.
Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam, and we still want you to encourage your users to come to steam and buy things. We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity.
Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).
They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.
> should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value
"Very little value"? It's clear that you've never developed a game before. Don't speak so confidently out of complete and total ignorance - it leads to making utterly insane and totally factually wrong statements like this one.
State where the value is then, without just stating features that cause lock-in.
You can't blindly just call me an idiot and say there's loads of value without stating what it is (I mean you technically can, but it's not a brilliant way of getting your point across).
> without just stating features that cause lock-in
That's a false dichotomy. Features that cause vendor lock-in can still be incredibly valuable.
> You can't blindly just call me an idiot
Sorry, that was a little harsh. I wasn't meaning to call you an idiot - I'm sure you have domains of expertise that you're highly proficient in. But you clearly have little (if any) experience with gamedev, and my point is that you should be far less confident when speaking about it.
For instance, you said something just factually wrong:
> The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.
...which was debunked by another comment:
> Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing.
As for features that are actually useful to devs and users:
Local currencies, regional pricing/payment methods, gift cards, Steam Wallet, game gifting, product keys, wallet/credit system (Steam wallet), bundles, DLC, complex storefront (topics/labels, discovery queue, wishlist, sale notifications), user reviews, game refunds, CDN, a really good download/update system, player metrics, shader pre-caching, shared runtime management, cloud saves, game management across multiple drives, LAN downloads/updates, beta/release/build management, DRM and anticheat, game collections, developer updates, forums, Big Picture/Steam Deck UI, Proton, Steam Input, a complex social system (friends, text chat, voice chat, add codes, profiles), social integration with games, account 2FA, and many, many, many more things. (go and ask a LLM and I'm sure it'll be more than happy to give you a far longer list :)
These are all things that developers and players benefit from. The value added is immense and blindingly obvious even to people who only play games, let alone to developers who have some idea of how difficult it is to actually implement all of the above.
> The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.
Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing. The actual written rule, from the Steamworks documentation, says: "It is important that you don't give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers." It even allows discounts at different times on other stores, as long as Steam gets a comparable offer within a reasonable period. There is no written policy preventing a developer from selling a separate, non-Steam-key version of their game cheaper elsewhere. The claim that Valve informally enforces broader price parity beyond Steam Keys is the unproven allegation at the center of the lawsuit.
And the broader claim, that lower commissions would lead to cheaper games for consumers, has already been tested and disproven. Epic exclusives like Borderlands 3, Control, Metro Exodus, Phoenix Point, and The Division 2 launched with no Steam version at all, complete pricing freedom, and a 12% commission. They were all priced at full retail. The hypothetical £35 game you describe has been possible for almost a decade. Nobody has produced it because developers and publishers set prices, and they choose to maximize their own margin regardless of what the platform takes.
> We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends.
Steamworks matchmaking requires a Steam account and Steam does not force developers to use Steamworks. This is how every platform-specific networking layer works: Xbox Live requires an Xbox account, PlayStation Network requires a PSN account. They offer a free matchmaking service if you want other platforms use other platforms. But i guess it is because of:
> Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront.
Yeah this sounds a lot like:"How dare they deliver a better service in the pursuit of user retention."
> taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026
This lists surface features and ignores the infrastructure: global CDN serving petabytes of downloads, payment processing across dozens of regional payment methods, fraud prevention, Workshop mod hosting, cloud saves, anti-cheat, regional pricing tooling, Proton development, Steam Deck compatibility, discovery algorithms. But the real test is simpler: developers are not forced to use Steam. If the value were as thin as claimed, the lower-priced competitors would be winning. They are not.
30% was set when they were handpicking every title, a home internet line today was a $10,000+ a month DC connection, and they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%.
The fact they whittled away the value they provided time and time again until they became a market of slop and had the audacity to keep a 30% cut is insane.
It's funny that gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is. It turns out trying to deliver value in a market has tough as gaming is not easy, and you will make tons of mistakes... at least compared to extracting nearly every dollar you can and leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship.
> 30% was set when they were handpicking every title ... they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%
The "handpicking" era was a walled garden developers spent years protesting. Greenlight was a direct response to developer demands for openness. The "slop" you complain about is what developers asked for. Valve then built discovery tools (reviews, curators, personalized queues, Next Fest) to handle the volume.
> they whittled away the value they provided time and time again
Since 2003 Steam added multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, Remote Play, game recording, Steam Families, regional pricing, refunds, the Steam Deck/SteamOS ecosystem, and ongoing VR investment. The effective commission dropped to ~24% for successful titles through tiered reductions. The rate went down while the platform expanded massively. That is the opposite of whittling away value.
> leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship
Valve grew from 78 employees in 2003 to ~550 today. Revenue per employee is high because the business is efficient. A company "extracting every dollar" does not fund Proton to make Windows games run on Linux at its own expense, develop VR hardware, or sell the Steam Deck near cost.
> gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is
Sweeney himself explained the difference in 2019:
"It's nearly perfect for consumers already... There is no hope of displacing a dominant storefront solely by adding marginally more store features or a marginally better install experience. These battles will be won on the basis of game supply, consumer prices, and developer revenue sharing."
He admitted Steam was already an excellent product. His conclusion was not to build something better. It was to buy exclusivity and remove games from Steam, forcing consumers onto a store that lacked basic features for years. Epic spent $444M on exclusivity deals in 2020 alone. It wasn't an affinity for some gabe cult that consumers rejected Epic but because Epic offered them fewer choices and a worse experience.
> make $1,100 PS4s as a side hustle
Valve sells hardware to establish new platform categories, not as high-margin "side hustles." Valve's hardware strategy has always been about expanding the Steam ecosystem, not milking unit margins and current hardware shortages fucked them.
>As I said in a different thread[0], the fact that some subscriptions are predatory doesn't mean subscriptions are necessarily predatory.
"Some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Subscriptions are structurally designed to extract payment for non-use. the whole point of the model is to be predatory.
You pre-pay for some allotment of resources but get nothing back for unused resources. And the main profit comes from the gap between what you paid for and the actual usage. And that's just in the best case scenario there the company is not running at a loss just to squeeze you later even harder. The entire model only works if people throw their money into the void.
If a provider genuinely wanted to cover the costs my usage imposes on them, they would bill me for usage. That's the honest version: you used X, here's the bill for X.
Instead, subscriptions deliberately decouple what I pay from what I consume, and they always decouple it in the vendor's favor, never mine. I never (well i think Kagi[0] actually is different, one outlier) get a refund for the month I didn't watch anything or the API calls I didn't make.
>You pre-pay for some allotment of resources but get nothing back for unused resources.
I dunno. This just doesn't quite compute to me as some universal principle.
I paid $30 for a year of Strong (an iOS fitness app), for example. What do you see as the "allotment of resources" there? They're delivering maintenance upgrades and feature releases periodically that I'll use any time I log a workout; the app runs on a phone that I own; the data is presumably sitting on a server of theirs, so it needs to be ready for whenever I want to use it.
I've logged ~40 workouts so far, so let's hope I stay consistent and end up with 80 for the year. That's ~38 cents per workout.
I just don't feel ripped off here, especially since I moved off of a fitness app that I liked less and cost $50/year, the price has stayed the same over four years while improving steadily, and I'm not aware of anything that does what I want for a better price. I'm not sure I'd even want some kind of metering system; psychologically I don't like the idea that I'd have to spend a second thinking about if I want to pay more to log more workouts.
Why does a fitness tracker need continuous development? How on earth is something whose main competition is a $5 notebook and a $1 pen worth $50/yr?
A fitness tracker is exactly the sort of software I would expect to pay once for. It doesn't need some compute-heavy backend. It shouldn't need any backend at all. The entire application is window dressing for a SQLite database.
A pen and notebook do not provide a database of exercises with video instructions; they don't organize/aggregate my data to show records, chart progress over time, and do the 1RM math for me. They don't track my heart rate (via my watch, which live syncs to my phone when desired) and report health data to a service where I like to see it all aggregated. They don't run timers and they don't operate on a platform that can play music, which means they must be an extra thing I carry around and keep track of.
If you think a pen and notebook are the best solution for how you want to track workouts...great! And if you think you could match those features for a lesser cost, post it up and hopefully I'll find it! What I have is certainly not an essential good; one can definitely lift without it. But it provides services that I find worth the cost.
Why is your data stored on their server where they have access to it at any time for any purpose they choose? For that, they should be paying you, no the other way around.
By that definition, every write() call that doesn't check for EAGAIN is a concurrency bug you're racing the disk controller. The term stops meaning anything.
Isn't that like saying there can never be a language with safe concurrency since the code could interact with C code that segfaults?
I dunno this kinda reminds me of the 10/10 Rust CVE that turned out to be cmd.exe on Windows not sanitizing inputs and languages like Java just labeled it "won't fix".
You mean the one where Windows doesn't have argv the way Unix does, and instead just has a single string that is interpreted slightly differently by each executable? That is a language making false assertions about how the underlying platform works, causing an impedance mismatch that is impossible to fix.
Me and some friends have each been hosting vaultwarden casually for years now. What problem do you see? I mean if the Server goes down and gets completely corrupted, worst case, all my devices still have the version of the vault they recently used. Technically every device has it's own backup of the vault.
If I stay offline for more than 30 days, can I still access my local passwords? Honest question, because if that's the case it's nice, but I think you'd need to somehow authenticate before accessing your local vault.
Thanks for making me check. Did not know this:
"Offline Vault sessions will expire after 30 days.
Except for mobile client applications, which will expire after 90 days."
But for me that is enough time to feel safe, still will do backups regularly.
You need a VPS, correct? Are there any concerns about hardening your VPS from attackers? I worry about my ability to harden a public - facing service that is handling something so critical for myself.
Aren't you agreeing with him?
He pushed the boulder up the hill, thus he is responsible and liable for what happens. He is the author of the work of pushing the boulder up the hill.
In your analogy: He was driving the car, he is liable for the death. He is the author of the work of driving the car.
You are kinda unnecessarily introducing the creation of an object used for the work. Whoever did create the car/boulder is not liable for what happened.
So whoever made the LLM is not the author but the one who used it to create the code.
>>>> If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it?
And all his arguments after that are to support that claim. His claim is wrong.
Ownership and liability are independent of each and all his supporting arguments are dismissing this fact.
> Whoever did create the car/boulder is not liable for what happened.
Incorrect; whoever owns the car/boulder is not liable. The creator doesn't even enter this argument.
> So whoever made the LLM is not the author but the one who used it to create the code.
No; whoever created the LLM is irrelevant. The author who creates the code is similarly irrelevant. What matters in his argument is who owns the code, and this is also irrelevant to his argument, because ownership does not mean liability.
You are attempting to invoke strawman. So is your point that there is not a significant overlap between posters who think that AI companies should not be allowed to pirated use copyrighted material in their training corpus and posters who themselves pirated copyrighted material such as movies, music, games, etc.?
Yes, that is their point. Do you have evidence against it?
I'm sure you can find some overlap, but I bet the vast majority is caused by people making a distinction between commercial and noncommercial piracy. I don't think there's a big cohort of piracy hypocrites.
Due to the nature of the argument, of course I do not have evidence for or against it. However, I am willing to leave it at that, because I think that any rational observer will be able to look at the general mood toward copyright/privacy online (including using Limewire back in the day, pirating movies, downloading Photoshop etc.) and come to their own conclusion whether or not it's plausible that there isn't a significant overlap between the two.
