Technology

As for the Bloomberg article. I have problems with it. The first of which is that it's paywalled which adds a barrier to entry and is one of the reasons it's not listed with everything else in my original comment.

The second problem is it specifically asserts that Gabe Newell spent an unknown morning in November of 2023 in a meeting talking to lawyers. Who's lawyers? Is this where he asserted that Valve and Steam don't have a policy or dictating prices for other platforms? Or was that a statement made in the court room during deposition as it states later in the same paragraph? Are these two things which appear in the same first paragraph related? If so how? It doesn't really go into anything else he said to these lawyers or anything else said by these lawyers. What is the specific framing of the questions put to him? It claims that he was then presented with written communication of Valve employees that they do in fact have such a policy. But it fails to quote those emails or link to them. Then it switches tac entirely going on about Valve's consumer fan base and how that fanbase view him. That's directly geared to make people think a specific way about the situation instead of simply providing facts. It goes on in that same paragraph to talk about allegations from WB and Ubisoft and their emails but doesn't directly link to or quote those either.

It goes on about the number of developers who believe Steam is a monopoly but can't be bothered to list the reasons they gave for such a stance.

I cannot tell you how much I do not care how many hours of DOTA 2 Gaben has. I do not care what their employee handbook has to say about taking advantage of company perks. I do not care about his yacht(s).

Critics argue that its freewheeling culture masks abusive business practices that make the gaming market worse for developers and consumers. The US lawsuit Newell was deposed in, which has been certified as a class action, alleges that it “is not economically feasible” for game makers to leave Steam in favor of a rival store and that they are effectively “forced to comply” with Valve’s rules and high fees.

What is the culture and how does it mask the abusive practices? There's so much more in this article but you have to slog through it to find nuggets of substance.

Additionally it has a lot of random paragraphs of arguably superfluous information comparing it to other companies,
and makes claims but can't be bothered to reportedly documented which ones are privileged court information or link to the court filings or to anything of substance including pointing people to Valve's own website where they explain the Steam Key program. If people want more context or information about what is going on they can't rely on that article either. It doesn't even actually quote the court filing at all that I can see. I take significant issue with that. But in any case I'm not here to argue the validity of any of the claims made in the filing, in the Bloomberg article or in the IGN/eurogamer article copypasta. Mostly I'm here to provide links to the most credible information I can. Some of the links are just biased in their own right but they do provide links to their sources which I believe is extremely helpful. @mabeledo@lemmy.world