copygirl

Alright, since you’d rather argue than open up a search engine, let me be the one to do that.

Admittedly, there’s a lot of articles that are on the edge on whether or not the “most-favored nation” clause is a thing, since that’s what the lawsuit alleges. Though as I said, it has been confirmed by developers. Steam appears to indeed be clear about the policy around Steam keys usage and pricing on other stores, where it makes absolute sense. The thing is, otherwise, Valve is specifically avoiding putting this extra rule in writing. Here is a reddit thread where I found this document, which, if real (and I’m not sure why we should assume it is not) does confirm that Valve does this.

If we get to a situation – again, this is rare. If we get to a situation where a partner is telling us that the price needs to be lower on other platforms than it is on Steam, then we will typically choose not to run curated marketing during times where that game is being discounted, if that is where the price is lower, or around a launch if it’s a around – if it’s a price at launch time.

And also:

Q. Okay. And part of these conversations is saying, hey, we’re not going to offer you curated promotions if you keep doing that, right?

A. Part of our approach, if we get to a situation where we can’t have pricing that is fair for Steam customers is not to amplify marketing with curated markets.

Q. But these conversations, as you know, also involve the threat not to keep the game on the Steam store at all; is that right?

A. That is not our typical process.

This reads to me as: If Valve finds out your game is priced cheaper on another store, they will approach you to “have a conversation”, after which they might decide to just pull your game from Steam’s marketing system (or maybe off the store) or low-key threaten to do so. After all, they have the final say on what gets offered and promoted on their own store. This is totally within their legal right (MFN clauses are common), but still a dick move, and disadvantages especially smaller developers (who’d like to avoid the “Steam tax”) and consumer, who could benefit from a cheaper price off-Steam.

That’s about as much effort as I’d like to put into this conversation for now. But if you’d like to continue, I ask you to put at least as much effort into this as I have.

Then it’s still the word of multiple developers publishing games on Steam reading the terms they have to sign versus… I guess random people on the internet? I suppose hard evidence will be difficult to come by because:

• The lawsuit has taken ages and who knows when or if it will conclude with information
• Developers probably don’t want to get on Valve’s bad side to prove it
• Even if a game is taken off the store, it won’t be easy to prove it was due to this

I’ve seen conversations that mention threads on the Steam developer forums on this, but I’ve not been diligent enough to save this. Though I will try if I ever come across it again. It’s unfortunately difficult to search for information with my admittedly limited motivation. (If anyone can bring evidence either way, I’d be very happy.)

Already responded elsewhere in the thread but wanted to hop in and also say that no, this being about Steam keys alone is a myth. I compiled the information I found in a thread in regards to this. Some developers have confirmed it there as well.

From my understanding the only time a Dev can’t sell their game for less on another store is when they are using a steam key to redeem the game.

Hey there. Actually, this isn’t true. This is the case regardless of whether a Steam key is involved. Games on Steam need to be the same price (or lower) as other stores. I’ve found this out a little while ago and compiled my findings in this thread (plus some helpful comments, including from developers confirming this).

Essentially, Valve does NOT allow the savings of putting your game up on a store with a lower fees to go towards the customers. They however don’t care if the developer or publisher pockets the difference… Something about “not putting Steam customers at a disadvantage”.

I ask you to please not repeat this misinformation, as I have in the past.

People use this community, among other things, to stay informed about what’s happening with open source software. rsync, possibly among the top 0.1% of software used for system administration in Linux land, starting to use AI in its development is certainly noteworthy. Linking to an issue where people can voice their (anti-AI) opinion, contained within that one issue, is hardly worth getting upset over. Unless… you know… you’d rather people stand by and let it happen.

I think it’s better to try and convince the developers to pivot away from AI. Only if that doesn’t work out, does it make sense to consider a fork. Forks do mean more work overall, still done for free, and the new maintainers will not have the same experience, as you said yourself.

Yeah, but it had a locked bootloader before that. So I was just adding that some phones have a procedure for that. (I had to get a unique unlock code from the Fairphone website, as far as I remember.) Not many, but they exist.

Well, to be fair, I did in the past unlock my Fairphone’s bootloader, and then re-lock it as per the iodéOS instructions. But, presumably, that only works with certain devices and certain OSes?