Yes, though fwiw steam provides (in my opinion) more benefits to gamers and games than the apple appstore does to generic apps trying to do all manner of things.
And additionally steam isn’t a walled garden, there is actual choice, and steam goes out of its way to be usable on multiple platforms. Very different situation to the locked down apple ios ecosystem.
With their market share they are by definition of monopoly. Monopoly doesn't mean "only store front", it just means majourity market share to the point they control the market.
People forget there's nothing inherently wrong with monopolies. It's only when they abuse their monopoly position that there's issues.
Steam's customers aren't really the end users, though
Steam's customers are game publishers. Steam provides a service to connect publishers to their audience. Their business model is not "takes money from customers in exchange for goods". It is "takes a cut of each sale that a publisher makes on their platform"
Given that there is no real friction for end users to install Epic Launcher or GoG launcher, is Steam really a monopoly to their customers, the publishers?
If Steam tries to muscle a publisher, they can refuse to publish on Steam and still have options. When popular games aren't on Steam, it does seem like people have absolutely no problem installing another launcher/storefront to access it
Look at the massive success of Fortnite, which is only on the Epic Launcher
I’m worried that this outcome will be applied too broadly and affect Steam. Sure Steam is not perfect, but its dominance is in large part to them offering a superior product. Admittedly I’m not a game developer so the 30% cut doesn’t affect me directly, but I think it’s fair to say that Valve’s success has been a net positive to PC game devs.
Valve remains as one of the rare early tech company successes that has not suffered from enshitification the way so many others have. A key to that is that they have found a way to make a ton of money, and their leadership is happy to be very rich without continuing to expand and grow at all costs. If that business model is threatened, I’m not convinced that gamers and game devs would necessarily be better off.
Inflation, and the even hire steady increases in cost of living with wages lagging far behind; people have to spend a much larger percentage of their income just to sleep somewhere at night than people did in the 2000s, 1990s and 1980s.
This trend has been evident in the US since like the 1960s. If you would like to verify, try comparing median income levels and median cost of living levels for some of those year ranges.
“Experts say the insurance landscape in California is particularly tricky because, in addition to the wildfire risk, the state has a law that adds extra approval measures, including board approval and review by the insurance commissioner, if an insurance company wants to raise the rate of insurance by more than 7%. That’s been in effect since the 1980s.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/05/what-homeowners-need-to-know...
If it's not permitted to raise the price of premiums to point where it covers the actual risk, then it's de facto illegal. Nobody will sell insurance policies at a loss.
Illegal seems fine as shorthand though. Same with housing -- "illegal" to build in many instances. Not technically illegal of course, but enough hurdles makes it effectively so.
"Not enormously so". In particular, it doesn't counter the argument I was making. For the Shuttle, for example, the value of the astronaut lives, even including $15 M in training costs, was an order of magnitude less than the cost of the orbiter itself.
As someone who is interested in getting some kind of back up battery at some point, ty for making a recommendation. But could you clarify what you mean by the kWH unit you used on 7 and 21? Seems like those should just be kW, a unit of power rather than kWh, a unit of energy.
From the article: "Hurricane Beryl took just 42 hours to go from a tropical depression to a Category 3 storm," according to meteorologist Sam Lillo. "This has been done 6 other times in Atlantic hurricane history. And the EARLIEST date this was achieved before was ... September 1,"
I don’t understand this take, because the elected officials could have always made any law regulating this stuff regardless of this ruling. The fact they haven’t tells us something.
And this ruling will result in a lot of the common good (limited resources like fish, air quality, etc) being trampled upon and becoming the profit of a couple companies, taking these goods away (sometimes irrevocably such as in the case of over fishing) for the generations of the future.
We need our regulatory bodies to be able to move faster because by the time congress might respond it will be too late.
What I observed in my neighborhood is that the school playgrounds which used to be unfenced were essentially secondary parks. But they have since been “locked down”, removing more places kids once could just go to hang out in our paved over subrbia. I also had the benefit of an undeveloped forest behind my house to go explore and play in, but I don’t think most kids these days have access to that without an adult driving them to such a location. Walkability to nature is a big plus.
These are multi billion and trillion dollar companies, they should be held to a high standard.