• 0 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
Cake day: June 10th, 2025
  • Resplendent606@piefed.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•POV: You are the money on my bank accountEnglish
    2·
    19 days ago

    It is awesome that you looked into the phone number carry over history! That is exactly the kind of forced change that everyone thought would be impossible or “iffy” until it became law. Now, we can’t imagine a world without it.

    To your point about the difficulty: the reason it feels “iffy” is that we’ve let these stores build walled gardens. The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is already solving this for other tech sectors. It mandates that gatekeepers provide APIs for Real-Time Data Portability.

    If Valve was designated a gatekeeper, they wouldn’t have to hand out keys manually, they would just have to allow a secure, standardized way for you to prove to GOG or Epic that you own the game.

    You are right that GOG is doing great work, but the reason their Library Integration is often buggy is that they are scraping data that Steam doesn’t want to share. My point is that we should not have to rely on GOG’s clever workarounds. We should have the legal right to our own data.

    If we move from a world of stores to a world of protocols (like email or phone numbers), the best product wins because it is actually better, not because it is holding a $2,000 library hostage.

  • Resplendent606@piefed.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•POV: You are the money on my bank accountEnglish
    2·
    19 days ago

    I appreciate the civil discussion, but I think you’re confusing “convenience” with “freedom.”

    You mentioned adding non-Steam games, but that’s just a shortcut. You lose the “Join Game” buttons, the cloud saves, and the lobby invites. That is the definition of a social moat. You can leave, but you’re socially penalized for doing so.

    As for competition, the fact that GOG and Itch.io have to hide in tiny niches just to survive proves my point. When the #1 player has 75%+ of the market, they don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be too big to leave.

    My solution of mandated interoperability is exactly how we fixed the phone industry. You can switch carriers and keep your number. We should be able to switch launchers and keep our friends and games. If Steam is truly as perfect as you say, they should have nothing to fear from a system where users are actually free to leave. A benevolent gatekeeper who refuses to unlock the gate is still a gatekeeper.

  • Resplendent606@piefed.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•POV: You are the money on my bank accountEnglish
    8·
    20 days ago

    The idea that they don’t use tricks is not true. Valve’s “Price Parity” rules stop other stores from competing on price. For instance, if a dev tries to pass their 12% Epic savings onto the customer, Valve can kick them off Steam, where 75% of their revenue lives. That is a massive underhanded leverage.

    Also, it is not just about making a better product. It is switching costs. Because our libraries and social circles are locked into a proprietary ecosystem, we aren’t choosing Steam every day. We are just stuck there.

    The solution is not for a competitor to build a “more perfect Steam,” that is impossible because Valve has a 20 year head start on our data. The solution is mandated interoperability.

    We need a system where:

    • Digital ownership is portable. If I buy a game, I should be able to launch it on any client, not just the one I bought it from. My library shouldn’t be hostage to one company.
    • Social graphs are open. I should be able to chat with my Steam friends from a different launcher, just like I can email a Gmail user from an Proton account.
    • Price competition is legal. We need to ban the Price Parity rules that stop other stores from offering lower prices.

    We did this with cell phone numbers (you can keep your number when you switch carriers) and the EU has been doing this with messaging apps. There’s no reason we should not do it for our multi-thousand-dollar game libraries.

    We did this with cell phone numbers so you could switch carriers without losing your identity. They are doing it with messaging apps in Europe so you can text a WhatsApp user from a different app. There is no reason we should accept anything less for a digital library worth thousands of dollars. The goal isn’t to kill Steam, it is to make Steam actually compete for our loyalty every day instead of just relying on the fact that we’re too locked-in to leave.

    Edit: fixed final paragraph.

  • Resplendent606@piefed.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•It's really not that hard!English
    4·
    30 days ago

    Here is how I install Steam on Debian:

    sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386  
sudo apt update  
sudo apt install curl  
curl -s http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/archive/stable/steam.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg > /dev/null  
echo 'deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/steam.list  
sudo apt update  
sudo apt install steam -y

    Edit: Added a fancy block.