It feels like all the other corpos are mad and want to sue Valve to force them into enshittification.
I’m all for holding companies accountable - when legal pressure forced Valve into creating a return policy, I was happy for that. But this is a $900 Million nothing burger imo. Publishers are mad they can’t get the exposure and sales numbers on a cheaper platform. Cheaper platforms are mad that they still can’t get people to switch to them by significantly under-cutting Steam. That’s (publishers) customers mad they have to pay a ‘premium’ (basically the ‘market rate’ for the service before epic decided to start under-cutting btw) for a better service and the competition mad that a LOT of (publishers) customers are willing to pay that ‘premium’.
Their store UI could be better, searching the database by conditions and clearly seeing why something isn’t available in your region\country\demographic would be good.
But at the same time it’s good enough for me to even be thinking about such conveniences.
Also I’ve remembered recently my dad saying some 6 years ago that nobody makes convenient UIs because it’s bad for commerce. A UI filled with suffering allows you to charge for directed solutions. And if a UI isn’t filled with suffering, there must be something else. Like Telegram and VK which are convenient to use (compared to WhatsApp and Facebook and …), but are Russian special services’ honeypots.
Convenience is a weapon. And a very expensive one, if Steam store’s UI were more convenient, the load on servers would probably be 10x what it is, for a similar structure of purchases, except probably harder to direct.
Steam is the last company that has held out against enshittification.
It feels like all the other corpos are mad and want to sue Valve to force them into enshittification.
I’m all for holding companies accountable - when legal pressure forced Valve into creating a return policy, I was happy for that. But this is a $900 Million nothing burger imo. Publishers are mad they can’t get the exposure and sales numbers on a cheaper platform. Cheaper platforms are mad that they still can’t get people to switch to them by significantly under-cutting Steam. That’s (publishers) customers mad they have to pay a ‘premium’ (basically the ‘market rate’ for the service before epic decided to start under-cutting btw) for a better service and the competition mad that a LOT of (publishers) customers are willing to pay that ‘premium’.
Their store UI could be better, searching the database by conditions and clearly seeing why something isn’t available in your region\country\demographic would be good.
But at the same time it’s good enough for me to even be thinking about such conveniences.
Also I’ve remembered recently my dad saying some 6 years ago that nobody makes convenient UIs because it’s bad for commerce. A UI filled with suffering allows you to charge for directed solutions. And if a UI isn’t filled with suffering, there must be something else. Like Telegram and VK which are convenient to use (compared to WhatsApp and Facebook and …), but are Russian special services’ honeypots.
Convenience is a weapon. And a very expensive one, if Steam store’s UI were more convenient, the load on servers would probably be 10x what it is, for a similar structure of purchases, except probably harder to direct.