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That’s shitty. I hope Valve goes down in this law suit but Gabe specifically asked for a remote deposition because he’s old and obese. Two serious factors for COVID or really any illness. Apparently that wasn’t enough to get them to allow remote deposition. What a really shit situation to put a person in.
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On the other hand I don’t see why being there in person has to be required for anyone. He can say exactly the same things remotely.
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A court room with stale air and only him with his mask on. Surely, what could go wrong? I see no risks at all.
Just let him join remotely. What is the big deal here?
It states everyone else will wear a mask too and he will remove his during his deposition. Like it or not, the courts require in-person attendance.
Why do the courts require an in person attendance? How is it okay for our government services to ignore technology? Imagine we still went with God’s will as proof of a crime. This is just the ignorance of the judge making someone take a day to come down and give their side. This whole thing could be done via text message. We just have a government that isn’t utilizing technology.
cause you would then have to dispatch a 3rd party audit to make sure Gabe isn’t reading from a teleprompter that his lawyers prep to answer any questions on the fly. You can prep your script “before” but not during, once you are on the stand you are on your own, subject to the court rules, etc.
Anything they haven’t been prepped on is just answered with I don’t know. So the end result is just who is the better actor? Who memorized their lines the best.
They will have to face the consequence because then the lawyer will bring up stuff that shows:
- you know and you are lying
- you said/did/wrote something and you forget but here is the internal email etc.
- use that to their advantage when possible.
Target is to make the case, through Gabe is just a attacking vector.
It’s not even a valid excuse any more at this point. People can get vaccinated at their leisure against the current variants no problem, and other fat old dudes don’t get to bail on an uncomfortable situation either, this is just special treatment for the rich. Also all the accommodations that are already being made with everyone wearing masks. Also I’m sure they can open a fucking window or so for some fresh air
I might be more inclined to agree if there was some benefit to having him show up in person, but I don’t see why he can’t just attend this remotely. People get sick after being vaccinated too. Maybe is a minimal risk, but it seems like a pointless risk nonetheless.
It’s a court of law. People appear in person to ensure they are who they are, their answers are theirs and they fully own them, they aren’t being coerced or manipulated, and so on. FaceTimeing in from the bathroom at his home isn’t cutting it.
He’s required to wear a mask. He can’t wear one while giving the deposition though. A remote deposition isn’t different than an in person one. So this argument falls flat. Why require a person to travel if we have the technology to not? Why did we even do all of this Internet building if our government services won’t use it? Technology is supposed to make our lives easier. The 80 year old judge is clearly behind the technical times and doesn’t want to learn a skill that should be required at this point.
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Counterpoint: Cardinal George Pell tried to pull the same move in a child sex abuse case. Here’s Tim Minchin’s Come Home (Cardinal Pell) for your viewing pleasure.
Minchin is a goddamn treasure, and I will never not upvote posts highlighting him.
I don’t really understand the antitrust argument here. There are a literal ton of other market places to sell PC games on, such as Humble Bundle which apparently Wolfire started. You could also sell directly to consumers if you wanted without going through a marketplace at all.
Also the main point is valve does not do anything to prevent you from selling the game directly or through other stores.
Just move to a shitty store like EGS.
Their store is to shitty? Pay the 30%.
Either way, never heard of this publisher. I’ll just know not to buy their games anymore.
They kind of had their store. Wolfire games created Humble Bundle, then it became its own company and now belongs to IGN.
If they kept going for the initial spirit of HB instead of letting it become just another way to buy on Steam, maybe they’d be that competition.
If I remember correctly, at the time Valve justified the 30% by pointing out that Apple was charging the same for music and video content. And Valve immediately started building value-added services like forums, updaters, multiplayer support, achievements, etc. to justify the price.
If you compare what Valve was doing to the physical media distribution methods of the period, it was a MASSIVE improvement. Back then, you could sell 10000 units to Ingram Micro or PC Mall, or whatever, and you only got paid if they sold. And any unsold inventory would be destroyed and the reseller would never pay for it. And if you actually wanted anything other than a single-line entry in their catalogs, you paid a promotional fee. Those video games featured with a standup display or a poster in the window at the computer store? None of that was free; the developer was nickeled and dimed for every moment their game was featured in any premium store space.
They are very indie. I had only heard of one of their games, Lugaru, before today.
They seem to be getting better at making games, but they still look to be visually lacking.
Huh. So, I actually own Lugaru, which I purchased through Humble Bundle in May 2010.
It… was not a good game. Basically anthropomorphic rabbits beating the crap out of each other, which SOUNDS good, but was not executed well.
I agree. I think I played it 10min. It felt like more a university project I recall.
Is there a way to read without the invasive trackers? I’m fine with ads, just not the cookies.
There you go, here is an archived version https://archive.is/cyApm
You browse the internet without adblock in 2023? What the fucking wrong with you?
FYI, you’re on a Beehaw community right now. This type of needless aggression may be acceptable elsewhere, but not on Beehaw.
Just from a quick search about the case, it seems to hold very little water.
Hell, it’s already been dismissed once.
steam is one of the good guys. maybe instead of suing they should just make better games
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Ah yes, because rich == bad
It’s possible to be successful and have a good influence on the industry. Valve is the perfect example of that.
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It’s a private company. They don’t have shareholders to report to, so they’re not remotely as scummy. Fuck the rich, but choose your battles and go after the ones who are really the problem.
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Don’t play games then, they are only being made to get your money. Screw those!
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Uhm, I’m Not against your argument, but have you informed yourself in any manner before making this Statement.
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Why does the title say Valve v. Wolfire when it’s Wolfire that sued Valve? Or does the order of versus not actually matter for titles?
Is it an appeal? That would explain it
I don’t get wolfire’s point here. Yes steam takes a hefty 30% cut but game developers are free to sell directly if they want to. Unlike apple who have completely locked down the iOS app ecosystem or Google who allow sideloading but scares and warns people against downloading apps from non Play Store sources, steam does nothing to hinder games not sold through it. If there was a competitor who was as good as steam but took a smaller cut, then that competitor would have been the market leader in place of steam.
Exactly, I mean you can even add Non-Steam games to Steam. Yes, you don’t get achievements that way and there’s no support for workshop or big picture or the community plug-in, but you can launch the game from the steam library.
On another note, can Steam, even for a small payment of 2 dollars, add those functions for games not bought in the Steam store, but that could have been bought through Steam? I really want to have TW3 with achievements, but don’t want to buy it again.
What’s that about price parity? I’ve often bought games from 3rd party sellers like Fanatical, to name one, specifically because their prices were lower than Steam’s. What am I missing?
They used to have a price parity clause in their steam distribution agreement. They loosely enforced it, depending on what game and what service. I think they quietly removed it because I read through the agreement recently and didn’t see it but I remember it influencing choices I made for pricing my games on itch.io.
I see, thanks for the clarification. That does sound a bit shitty on their part, especially because when most people are asked “gaming on PC?” they answer “Steam”. Lower prices elsewhere might have given a better chance to other storefronts, although I don’t think that would have made a huge difference, since Steam is THE storefront
Steam wants to keep it that way. Any references to other storefronts in your demo or game aren’t allowed either. So if you’re demo has a list of every place to buy the game, it’s rejected, can only contain steam. Steam is deathly afraid of losing the advantage.
What role do you think the Steam workshop plays in this?
Obviously the people playing the AAA franchises don’t care, but when you see the sheer quantity of workshop content for some games (Cities:Skylines and Space Engineers come to mind for me, no doubt there’s other examples in genres I’m less familiar with), you see how much the modding community has contributed to the commercial success of these games. I’m wondering how this factors in to steam as a whole.
One of steams major profit points is the market place from what I can tell. The workshop less so. Modding might be a factor but a minor one compared to things that make money actively instead of passively.
If they’re acting this way it means that either they’ve already seen a decline somewhere (or at least not as big of a growth) thanks to other storefronts (and maybe other companies’ launchers like Rockstar and similar), or anticipate things will get worse in the future. I get it, as a company they want to make more money YoY, but this is definitely an ugly move. Guess I’ll add another reason not to buy from them!
If that is the biggest problem, I wouldn’t keep myself from buying from them. I think Valve is generally a “good behaving” company, probably mostly because they are not on the stock market, and I would expect mostly any other company to do much more shitty and monopolistic things when (or before) it has grown to the size of Valve.
It seems pretty fair to want equal pricing. You’ve been speaking as if Valve is actively killing small storefronts like itch.io and these little guys would be the one to gain from something like this. They might, but not nearly as much as Epic Games would which is the lead in a very similar lawsuit. Epic wants to be able to sell games available on Steam at a lower price to influence people to use their storefront instead. They’re literally giving games away so I think they’d love a chance to try and recoup some of that while still getting to look like the pioneers of cheap.
I honestly don’t think that’s a viable strategy. Retail businesses mostly have the same practices, so one could say that Valve just doesn’t want to start doing game price-matching like Best Buy. The closest I’ve ever seen is a store not having stock of something and a worker there suggesting a different store that might have it. But I’ve never been on Gamestop’s website and seen that Funkopop for sale cheaper at Walmart or Target? An individual working there might tell me because they’re not a corporation.
Given they also have pretty steep sales, I would imagine cheaper pricing could influence sale availability as well - if the game is always $20 cheaper somewhere else maybe the dev doesn’t want to put the game on sale as often/at all. None of that is antitrust though, so why use that as their argument? I guess the case will tell us for sure.
I also think that, probably to a lesser extent, it’s been to help Valve prevent the grey-market key selling. I’m of the opinion that Valve likely doesn’t care too much about you or I selling our Humble Bundle key of a game for $3.74, however they do want to avoid stolen credit card key sales and revoked licenses. I personally don’t think that Itch or Fanatical relates to this, but I do think there’s a general misunderstanding that people conflate Fanatical/Green Man Gaming and grey market sites like G2A and Kinguin. It can’t look good for Valve when a user buys 3rd party and their key is revoked and the user gets mad about it, and boy are there a lot of angry vocal people out there complaining about this very thing.
Frankly, you buy on Steam because you get the Steam Overlay to completely change your controller scheme and use community templates, access to per-game notes, and the Steam Workshop, in addition to whatever other peripheral things like cloud saving. It’s all very user positive so of all things I don’t really understand why this is the move that influences your decision when the other options, save literal indie stores, are decidedly worse.
Itch.io is great, it’s unfortunate that devs who want to sell on Steam can’t advertise to their alternate store listing but it also seems sensible? No business actively advertises the ability to buy somewhere else to give the devs 20% more of the sale. Does anywhere actively promote anything like this? Not as far as I’ve seen, so it seems odd to single out Valve when literally every single business in existence works the same way? And I’m not saying that I personally think it should/shouldn’t, I’m more trying to see if there’s any precedent in existence that would implicate Valve to have to do this in order to not be… “shitty?”
For posterity I just opened up Epic and checked out a few games and there’s no place where the storefront shows the existence of its availability on other stores. The Witcher 3 has no references to GOG Galaxy, Red Dead 2 has no references indicating to buy it on the Rockstar Launcher anywhere. For that matter, nor does Itch.io or Fanatical, ironically neither of these have links to go buy it on Steam instead either.
I’ll happily change my opinion if the arguments in court make sense but as of right now I’m skeptical. Personally when I google a game I discover it from a series of sources and Steam is where I end up choosing to buy it. I choose Steam because it offers the best service. I’ve regretted buying Control during its hostage situation on Epic because it’s caused me nothing but problems (lost saves, validation issues, needing to redownload the game every time instead of pointing to the existing location). Ubisoft and EA only have games that were bought on Humble Bundle and because of it I didn’t have access to Need for Speed: Heat for about 2-3 months while the Origin/EA App transition was happening. “You need to play this game on the EA App!” says Origin. “Sorry, we’re working on getting this game to the new EA App! Check back soon!” says the EA App. A waking nightmare.
I feel like the chances are high that these are the winners if the outcome of a suit is against Valve, not itch.io. Itch will just get drowned out by Humble Bundle and Epic and only indie indie developers will get sales through itch. I also doubt that the point of this suit is to allow devs to put everywhere else the game is available.
From Valve’s perspective I think it’s important to note that their ToS seems to indicate that other developers are allowed to sell on store fronts, but Valve does not get any of the commission despite providing Steam keys. However, since Steam keys are being provided, Valve is still providing quite a large service with cloud saves, forums, everything I mentioned earlier. I actually didn’t know this, so I can also understand Valve not explicitly wanting to give that service away for free and not get anything from it. I mean, that would basically mean that by advertising on the store that the developer can get 20% more if you buy on Itch while still getting a Steam key and access to all of its features…
All told, I am personally of the camp that I think equal sales on storefronts is fair. If Steam has a sale, other store fronts don’t have to have one. Other store fronts are allowed to have sales as long as an equitable sale is had on Steam in “a reasonable amount of time” per the ToS. And it legitimately seems insane to expect one store to advertise an unrelated store just because it’s available at both.
Anyway, these are all just thoughts. I don’t know anything and no one will until the evidence is shown and it’s settled. However, having liked Humble Bundle and the Wolfire team I personally am disappointed to see this suit coming from them. If I’m not mistaken this is literally being funded by Epic Games, they actually are the same case. If you’ve scrolled by the Epic. vs. Valve lawsuit ad on Instagram or Facebook, I’ve seen it quite a bit. That’s this one.
Fucking Tim Sweeny man.
Denying references to other places that directly compete with you seems pretty reasonable to me. You don’t see toaster boxes at Walmart saying it’s also available at Target or whatever
That’s true, I was looking at it from a wrong point of view
It’s been this way since 2004. Their outlook for the future has always been pessimistic.
Remember, if Valve actually lost this suit, which they almost certainly won’t, it won’t improve the videogame ecosystem. It will possibly make it worse.
I see a lot of covid misinformation going on around this story which is extremely worrying. Just because the human race not currently at risk of imminent extinction from it doesn’t mean it’s not still a serious illness. Some people get long term complications from it. Some people are extra vulnerable to it. Some people are still dying from it.
“Just get the vaccine” is the worst kind of uninformed handwaving response to the concerns and worries of other humans, it’s upsetting it is becoming the norm.
These are some heavy accusations for Gabe
Wait that lawsuit is still going on???
Judge: I further order you to complete Half Life 3
Just vaccine and all be good.
That’s not how the Covid vaccines work. It’s all a game of probabilities and you can still get sick. They may also help you get more easily through the sickness, but it’s not a guarantee. Previously having additional health issues and age are also factors to take into account.
So maybe his concerns aren’t completely without base.
And even if vaccines reduce the risk of long COVID, the risk is still there. 1 in 10 COVID cases leads to long COVID. It’s about layers of protection against COVID, one of which is vaccines. The others are masks/respirators, good indoor air quality, testing, UVC lights, staying home if one is sick and so on.
Well,
especially if he has additional health issues he should go for his vaccine. Of course it’s not a guarantee, but it lowers the risk for a serious illness significantly.And it’s still not an excuse to stay away from a courtroom.
