The Steam Deck is software-freedom friendly

Not only is Steam not a monopoly, TFA mentions how it’s possible to easily install alternative app stores on the Steam Deck.

It’s not just factually wrong to call them a monopoly, it’s uncharitable given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices despite being in a position (and arguably having the right) to do so.

They have an implicit most favored nation clause which is by definition anti-competitive.

Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive.

Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.

> given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices

Well, not quite. They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."

(Their ToS wouldn't allow gamers to form a class action, but developers were apparently allowed to.)

So, perhaps not all good.

(From https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-case-explained)

> Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price.

Note the use of ‘store’ here. You can sell your game on your own website for a lower price.

One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com than it is on Steam, Gog, or Humble. Steam, Gog, and Humble all sell at the same price, however.

> Note the use of ‘store’ here

No. It’s an implicit rule. You don’t get to language lawyer.

> One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com

Just checked, $35 on both.

Valve would only allow a dev to sell a game on their website for a lower price so long as the game sales numbers were not a threat to Steam. If Factorio sold very less on its website and suddenly 90% of sales were direct Valve would not be pleased and there would be consequences.

I'm genuinely curious. If that's the case, how is it that I have bought dozens of games on the humblebundle store (for Steam) that were far cheaper than the retail price on Steam itself?

Isn't that only true for selling steam keys, not the whole game? Bigger problem with the monopoly is less sales on steam means less visibility in steam's algorithm, so you get punished for having people buy off steam.

Same if you want a video on your site: if you don't YouTube embed and instead host yourself, you get less amplified by youtube even if people want to watch it just as much. YouTube ends up getting to plaster ads interrupting your website trailer as much as they do on YouTube.

If you spread your marketing to a steam competitor with better cut you get the same problem, less amplification on Steam. Steam is today stone soup, Valve used to put in more of the meat and veggies but now that's more and more up to the captive devs. For a time Valve was the most profitable major company per employee in the US from this stone soup arrangement, but they did eventually have to drop their rates on the biggest devs, announced either a few days before or after the Epic Games Store launched.

IIRC their big TOS clause they had you sign in October flipped it around. So I think now gamers can make a class action.

This was in defiance of the fact that some lawyers were arranging a mass arbitration lawsuit over this stuff. So Valve is flipping the table hoping to evade that.

This is entirely what one of the major lawsuits is about. The official word age is that this is a clause for using steam keys. But internal emails shows there's definitely preferences even for non steam keygames to do this

https://galaxy.ai/youtube-summarizer/the-judges-ruling-a-maj...

>Initially, it was believed that this policy applied only to Steam keys, but the emails indicate a broader application, raising serious concerns about Valve's business practices.

Humble bundle uses steam keys, so they are working in tandem regardless.

That said: enforcement on such things is not going to be 100%. Larger companies will either be purposefully ignores or make their own internal deals and contracts to follow. Some smaller games will slip through like everything else in life (Valve can still let Malware slip in once in a blue moon. I'm not surprised you can find some niche Japanese game sold for cheaper on DLsite or wherever).

But the point is that they can push thst in devs because of the monopoly. And that's how you get stuff like the Wolfire lawsuit when a few people do push back.

I bought a Steam Deck OLED last year, and it's honestly astounding to me how well it both provides an amazing out-of-the-box experience for both the "gaming mode" Steam interface and the "desktop mode" with a regular Linux desktop without sacrificing basically any customization. It's a glorified tablet that in my baggiest pair of jeans I can just barely fit into my pocket, and somehow probably the most realistic attempt I've seen at making something suitable for the mythical "year of the Linux desktop", which wasn't even the goal!

It's also so clear to me in retrospect how long they've been building up to something like this. Investing in Wine and developing proton to make running Windows games on Linux as frictionless as possible, dipping their toes in hardware with much less ambitious projects like the Steam link and the controller for it so that they weren't going in without any experience as a company dealing with physical products...I can't imagine that this would have been able to pull for for most companies due to how much they had to be willing to invest in long-term endeavors that couldn't be guaranteed to succeed. I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that they might have single-handedly lifted up Linux gaming to the point where I'll never end up using Windows on a personal machine again, and that's because they put so much time and effort into the tooling for running the games independent of their distribution network. At this point, I probably would have been willing to forgive them for releasing the Steam Deck as a locked-down device, but instead they went ahead the made it pretty much indistinguishable from my laptop and desktop in terms of how much I can change or remove things. There have been so many discussions about whether the App Store should be considered a monopoly or not on iOS, and if there's not consensus on that, I can't even fathom how someone could make the argument that Steam is.

> > One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com

> Just checked, $35 on both.

This might be a regional thing then. When using a UK IP, it’s £30.00 on Steam, GOG and Humble. It’s £27.03 on factorio.com. I checked before posting.