Spedwell @ Spedwell @lemmy.world

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I will continue dunking on Valve as long as they remain the reason good, healthy alternatives can't exist. I will not re-hash the whole arguments here, please see my other replies in this thread.

Oh wow, lots to unpack here. Bear with me.

Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn’t successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.

AFAIK still ongoing, looks like most recent filings were on 06/12.

To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn’t the case.

The actual terms of the Steam Distribution Agreement are behind an NDA so we can't publicly know for sure, but Wolfire alleges that it applies to non-key sales (see points 204, 205, 207 of the Wolfire v. Valve filing)

In terms of what is a “fair deal” we could quibble about the 30% but that’s literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that’s an “industry standard” ...

Bit of a chicken and egg situation. Is Steam charging 30% because that's standard, or is the 30% standard because Steam charges it? Epic's attempt at 12% at the very least indicates the "industry standard" is much higher than it has to be, which is a good indicator of non-competitive behavior.

There is some slop in this argument because obviously the quality of platforms could influence this; but that is a bit moot due to the price policy preventing competitive pricing (see below).

... so by all means lower it if they can, I’m all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.

For example if Valve personally came to me and said “you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features” I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.

That's great for you, but I'm sure we could find plenty of consumers who would make that trade. The choice should be available to them.

Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn’t change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.

You can't point to current publisher behavior on EGS, because their behavior at present is influenced by Valve's price policy (called the "Platform Most Favored Nation" or "PMFN" clause in the court filing) which is the foundation of the anti-competitive case against Valve.

Re: concerns about publishers eating the difference. An ideal greedy publisher would drop the price on Epic by some amount in the middle—cheap enough to convince consumers to buy on Epic instead of Steam (since it yields more revenue to them) without making it too cheap that the difference in profit between a sale on Epic and a sale on Steam goes to 0.

This is how competition between platforms should work. It drives down the cost by some amount, but the publisher isn't going to pass up the chance to profit where they can.

Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don’t see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.

I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front… Why wouldnt you?

I'm confused by your response here since this is addressed in my prior comment. Is there something not quite clear enough?

Steam clearly wins on features, the only metric to beat them on is price. Epic is trying to do so, but publishers are not actually lowering the cost on their platform because of Valve's policies—policies which are only effective because a publisher cannot afford to be delisted from Steam due its large market share.

See my other comment in this thread. Steam does exhibit what you call "cartellic behavior".

See my other comment

They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).

It is very much not clutching at straws to claim that. That policy is a major element of the Wolfire v. Valve case. You can also look at how despite charging a 12% platform fee, Epic Games Store does not sell games 18% cheaper.

It's an abuse of Steam's established market share and consumer habits to coerce publishers into not offering consumers a fair price on other platforms. It very literally stops EGS from competing on price, which is pretty much the only area where Epic can beat out Steam, since Steam otherwise is much more convenient, provides more functionality, and has more community-generated content (i.e. workshop material).

It's hard to say that isn't anti-competitive, especially because such a policy is only effective due to Steam's existing market share.

Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.

This is a fair complaint against Epic, I agree.

EGS can't compete on features for sure (it really is quite a shit platform), but they would be very competitive if their 12% fee (vs. Steams 30% fee) could be passed to buyers as lower prices. As it stands, Valve's policies essentially strongarms the market to prohibit this (publishers selling on Steam may not have a lower price on a different platform, or the game can be de-listed from Steam). The Wolfire v. Valve case is highly relevent here.

My plea is for you not to get mad at Epic for being shit. We should be accepting of crappy platforms if their fees reflect that (Epic charges 40% what Steam does). Focus your frustration at Valve for preventing the market from fairly allowing you select the quality of the platform you'd like to pay for.

I don't understand this mentality. If we oppose monopolistic sales platforms when it's Amazon, Google Play, or the Apple store why should we turn a blind eye when suddenly we like a particular company.

I'm not contesting that Steam offers the best user experience by a mile (it truly beats Epic and Gog by miles), but that doesn't erase the downsides of having a single entity with a grip on the entire market.

The current assumption made by these companies is that AI training is fair use, and is therefore legal regardless of license. There are still many ongoing court cases over this, but one case was already resolved in favor or the fair use position.

Empty threats is an interesting concept, but ultimately the market is behaving as if the threats are sincere so whether or not Valve would follow through is irrelevent to whether the presence of a policy is an exhibition of monopolistic power. The need to see an actual example of a game being delisted for violation of the policy is a weirdly high standard of evidence, when the downstream effects of the policy are otherwise so apparent.

I guess we'll have to hope the courts are reasonable on this (if it ever gets out of legal limbo lol).

They certainly do pocket the difference. But the point is the behavior we see is that what we would see if Steam wasn't enforcing uniform pricing. Publishers would pick some list price on other platforms / their own sites that undercuts Steam and also gives higher margin for themselves.

E.g. a $60 game on Steam with a 30% cut nets you ~$42. If you list the game on for $50 on Epic with a 12% cut, you net $44. The price differential works in favor of the consumer and publisher, and would convince more people to buy on the high-margin platform. A greedy publisher isn't going to keep the $60 price tag, because that just pushes consumers to buy on Steam (which has the most features).

Adding a link to my other comment: see points 204 and 205 in the filing for where it alleges Steam enforces pricing for non-key sales.

The latter point is a claim in the Wolfire case, and is supposedly a term in the Steam Distribution Agreement which all publishers sign. It's behind an NDA, though.

There is indirect evidence of this in the following: if Steam's cut is 30%, and Epic's is 12%, and a publisher's own site has no platform fee... Why don't we see gradiated pricing across these different services?

It seems like there must be some policy or threat of consequences that keeps a game's price consistent.

Ah, yes. The famously singular "westerners" who all 100% agreed with every foreign affairs policy of their government over the past century.

Huh, thanks for the heads up. Section 4 makes it look like they can close-source whenever they want.

I'm just glad FUTO is still letting Immich use the AGPL instead of this, though.

There is an episode of Tech Won't Save Us (2024-01-25) discussing how weird the podcasting play was for Spotify. There is essentially no way to monetize podcasts at scale, primarily because podcasts do not have the same degree of platform look-in as other media types.

Spotify spent the $100 million (or whatever the number was) to get Rogan exclusive, but for essentially every other podcast you can find a free RSS feed with skippable ads. Also their podcast player just outright sucks :/

Errrrm... No. Don't get your philosophy from LessWrong.

Here's the part of the LessWrong page that cites Simulacra and Simulation:

Like “agent”, “simulation” is a generic term referring to a deep and inevitable idea: that what we think of as the real can be run virtually on machines, “produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times.”

This last quote does indeed come from Simulacra (you can find it in the third paragraph here), but it appears to have been quoted solely because when paired with the definition of simulation put forward by the article:

A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.

it appears that Baudrillard supports the idea that a computer can just simulate any goddamn thing we want it to.

If you are familiar with the actual arguments Baudrillard makes, or simply read the context around that quote, it is obvious that this is misappropriating the text.

The reason the article compares to commercial flights is your everyday reader knows planes' emissions are large. It's a reference point so people can weight the ecological tradeoff.

"I can emit this much by either (1) operating the global airline network, or (2) running cloud/LLMs." It's a good way to visualize the cost of cloud systems without just citing tons-of-CO2/yr.

Downplaying that by insisting we look at the transportation industry as a whole doesn't strike you as... a little silly? We know transport is expensive; It is moving tons of mass over hundreds of miles. The fact computer systems even get close is an indication of the sheer scale of energy being poured into them.

Feel the same way. My Camry is a 2013—recent enough to have a simple display and Bluetooth, but old enough to predate the 'modern' infotainment systems.

Believe me, I plan to drive this car until the scrapyards run out of part donors.

concepts embedded in them

internal model

You used both phrases in this thread, but those are two very different things. It's a stretch to say this research supports the latter.

Yes, LLMs are still next-token generators. That is a descriptive statement about how they operate. They just have embedded knowledge that allows them to generate sometimes meaningful text.

330 micrograms per gram

That seems like... a lot. Way more than I expected or am comfortable thinking about.