While he’s there under oath, can they get some HL3 info out of him?
“Objection, this has nothing to do with the case.”
“Overruled, the public needs to hear this”
“It has already been released. It has been released for thousands of years. Humanity simply needs to reach a point of true understanding to see it.”
Gabe disappears in a flash of light.
They’ll never release HL3. They are not a developer anymore. They are just a game store/directory. HL3 has been overhyped so much that anything released would be a disappointment. The gaming market has changed too much from when they made a game engine and released half life to showcase that game engine.
I can probably list a million more reasons why they’ll never release, but those are the big points.
Half-life Alyx was HL3, just it was better to name it not HL3, because fans would lose their minds.
On the one hand, yeah. On the other hand, HL:A ended with an obvious sequel hook, and that hook was the ending of HL2:E2. Spoilers, I guess, but the game’s been out for a while.
Of course, that doesn’t mean another game is coming, but it does mean that HL:A doesn’t mean another game isn’t coming, either.
I don’t know whether valve has violated anti-trust law or not, and I certainly don’t think gaben deserves any more protection from covid than the general public but;
this is a stupid ruling. Why on earth can’t he appear remotely, as he requested? They can’t “adequately assess his credibility”? Are they gonna have an FBI body language expert on hand? Check his forehead for sweat droplets? There’s nothing they can ask him in person that they can’t ask him over a camera.
Feels like the plaintiffs are doing some kind of lowkey spite thing here, and I’m surprised the judge played along.
Most courtroom bullshit like this boil down to people who probably shouldn’t be in power powertripping.
don’t think gaben deserves any more protection from covid than the general public
I think gaben deserves the world’s sickest powered respirator with RGB lights and holographic Team Fortress 2 unusual hat visual effects.
Glad to hear the court will require N95s at least.
It’s a fucking stupid lawsuit in the first place. I can think of at least 5 different pc game storefronts anybody can use
Can you provide a real-world example of what constitutes a monopoly in your eyes?
Locked down App Store on iOS (EU is trustbusting this one)
Locked down PlayStation ecosystem
Locked down Xbox ecosystem
Locked down Switch ecosystem
Regional monopolies by ISPs
So they are still not absolute in that the users still get to buy a PC or an Android phone or get satellite connectivity via a global ISP, which boils the issue down to inconvenience/cost/hardship, not the absence of alternatives.
They are all monopolies in their ecosystem.
(Satellite Internet doesn’t reach everywhere.)
You got a list of monopolies, stop trying to move goalposts in order to slam Valve and defend a bunch of anti-consumer publicly traded companies.
Standard Oil was a monopoly, but using your logic there wasn’t because there was an alternative of not using oil-based fuels.
An example of a company that actually fits your definition of a pseudo-monopoly would be Nvidia in the GPU market.
It’s the logic of the comment I responded to. The existence of this upcoming trial alone is proof that the mere presence of alternatives is not enough to claim there’s no monopoly in the relevant market.
The (my) comment that you responded to presented you a list of actual monopolies that have no alternatives on their platform. There was no “logic” presented, it was a statement of observation.
The existence of the lawsuit does not mean there is proof, it means that Wolfire has enough of a case to begin discovery on two of their claims that the court is interested to find out more. That’s it.
One of the claims is also very weird and I can’t actually find any information corroborating the claim besides the claim itself (re: Valve acquiring and shutting down World Opponent Network). The only thing I see is that Sierra was acquired by Havas who made WON into it’s own entity, then merged it with PrizeCentral under the name Flipside.com and the last WON game was released in 2006.
The only thing relating to Valve I can see is that Valve announced Steam in 2002 and then they removed WON from their own games, which they had every right to do so.
WG’s strongest claim is the MFN clause, and they actually have to prove that it’s for anticompetitiveness.
They did meet him in the middle, though. Everyone in court has to wear a mask when he’s there, and he only has to take it off when he’s speaking.
This is not how the masks work though. If I were honestly concerned about my health I’d take this as an insult.
Having everyone in court wear masks absolutely does help protect him. However, what would protect everyone better is proper ventilation systems - but that would cost businesses money, rather than passing the cost and responsibility onto individuals.
You’re going to need a lot more than just I’m afraid of covid to get out of being in person for a trial. People with actual fears of being killed for testimony, still appear in person. At this point with vaccines making any serious complications nearly impossible for covid, it’s a really desperate attempt to avoid attending.
They get him on the stand and the judge says " so Mr Newell, remembering you are under oath, when is Half Life 3 being released?"
*Gabe starts gesturing to his lawyer to do something*
“Just answer the question.”
Gaben will then slowly drop his head and whisper into the microphone with a wry chuckle - “You fool. You have just activated my trap card.”
Immediately, the Half Life 3 release will drop. Gaben has been holding it back, continuously updating for decades, awaiting exactly this moment. The judge, completely flabbergasted at the proceedings will immediately declare a mistrial. Legal scholars will then study the “Gaben defense” for decades.
“There is no Half-Life 3, there will be no Half-Life 3.”
Half life alyx was hl3
If this happened I think Gabe would just say “it’s not happening, not at least the way you all want” and then we get some half life cyberchip augmented reality game in another 15 years (it is good though)
I appreciate requiring everyone wearing a good mask while he’s in the courtroom, but I don’t understand how having him in the room to testify would be substantially different from an online appearance.
Same energy as CEOs demanding workers return to the office
It’s probably a huge mistake for the plaintiffs. Imagine inviting in gaben so he can steal everyone’s hearts.
Lmao Valve made a service so good at what it does, it’s fucking over all these other business ghouls like Tim Sweemey who are actively trying to dominate the market without actually competing; just look at Epic’s store, it’s d o g s h i t. They give out free games and still no one I know wants to use it. It’s the same across the board, these companies do not want to make good services, they want to legally strongarm the consumer.
I’ll tell you a secret) nowadays ALMOST all corporations regardless of what they make business into wanna strongarm the consumer, for quick example look up denuvo and baldurs gate, if product is good then people will buy and denuvo won’t be needed
GOG has shown that drms are never needed. More often than not, denuvo causes issues to the player, and gets bypassed by a pirate easily. It is simply there because gamedev companies think they get something out of it, when in reality they don’t.
Denuvo isn’t easily bypassed, unfortunately. I think there’s still only like two people cracking Denuvo and one of them is batshit insane.
Empress, right? I’ve seen some things from her (if Empress indeed is a chick) that I thought really couldn’t be meant seriously.
Yeah. I don’t even know that much about the whole thing, just what I learned when going to look for a game a while back, and even from that little it was like, wtf is with this person?
Never had an issue pirating a denuvo game.
Bingo.
I recently got Alan wake 2 on EGS because I’m a huge Remedy head and huge fan of the first game and couldn’t contain my excitement to wait for a steam release and potentially see spoilers, and damn dude that store really is the most bare bones half assed thing ever. Even EAs store on their launcher is nicer.
Alan Wake 2 was a great game at least.
So there is an anti-trust lawsuit against steam, but not apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft… Etc of those giant companies who literally destroy everything in their way? Please tell me they’re next?
Good. Thank you for sharing.
DoJ is currently in a lawsuit against Google for search monopoly. Been going on for a while now.
Good. Other giant ones need to be next.
Just don’t expect him a 3rd time.
Come on, not every guy with a beard is–
“Hi this is Gaben”
OOOOOOHHHH MA GAWD
Thats: [email protected]
Valve is trying to escape Microsoft’s monopolistic practices with Linux while out performing their competition in a fair market. I like competition but I don’t get what advantage steam has that their competition doesn’t. Even with the steam deck they’re using standardized hardware and open source software to make a competitive product leaving room for competition to create their own versions.
Steam has a large userbase, which offers a lot of consumer inertia to prefer games on Steam. They also have a policy where game pricing on other platforms cannot undercut Steam.
The main complaint is that this pricing policy coupled with the consumer inertia makes it difficult for other gaming marketplaces to enter the market. You cannot undercut steam unless a publisher wants to not put their game on Steam at all (which would be suicide for anything but the largest titles), so you have to sell at Steam’s price point. Few platforms could match Steams’ established workshop, multiplayer, streaming, and social services; all of which benefit from costs at scale and the established user content.
Imagine trying to convince a user: “Buy your game here instead. It will cost the same as on Steam. No, you won’t have access to the existing Workshop. No, you won’t have in-platform multiplayer with your Steam friends.” Even if you had feature parity, people would prefer Steam since that’s where their existing games and friends are.
Note that the main argument Wolfire is making is that game marketplaces (buy/download the game) and game platforms (online features, mod distribution, social pages) need to be decoupled. By integrating the two, Steam is vertically integrating, amortizing the cost, and then forcing every other marketplace to bear the cost of a platform in their pricing.
If you bought a game and paid for platform services separately, then competition can better exist for both of those roles. Which is good for consumers.
I’m going to be real, the seperatization might be good technically from a consumer standpoint, but mostly will just prove to make consumers lives harder for no reason. One of the major benefits of Steam is that it handles everything, and isn’t something I, or anyone else, would be happy to give up.
I typically try to buy games from gog if available and on epic if not and steam if it’s on sale. The only harm I see is how janky the other storefronts are and how frequently they break or refuse to load and that’s not steams fault. I don’t play a lot of online games but epic and gog are my primary platforms to play on.
I’m not defending steam but I also don’t see how the advantage a platform like steam has is a direct result of any anti consumer practices. Honestly I prefer a storefront over rootkits and heavy handed drm any day not to mention downloading gamepatches directly from the publishers website.
One can appreciate Valve’s contributions to Linux gaming without idealizing them. The likely reason they went for Linux is that they would have to pay Microsoft to use Windows.
This is true that it is a likely reason. It is also possible that Gabe Newell runs his company in a very deliberate way because he thinks it’s a net benefit to both his company and gaming in general. From what I have heard, which of course may be a flawed understanding of the man, it seems like he has certain principles. I guess the question is whether or not a person believes intent matters or only the end result.
I don’t idealize them, I use the other storefronts (gog epic) potentially more because they often don’t sell games with any form of drm. I just don’t get it because as far as my experience goes they’re all about the same minus more jank on the other two.
I’ve actually spent the most time with Rockstar games launcher thanks to GTA V and RDR2 and that one is a real piece of work tbh.
Their VR is all open as well for the good of the universe. Perhaps have a little deeper look.
Years of experience. It’s like wow. When your audienfe is so entrenched other MMOs can’t compete
I’m out of the loop, can someone reply what’s going on? I’ll leave this comment for those like me who curious what happened
David Rosen of Wolfire Games (Receiver, Overgrowth, Lugaru) is alleging that steam reps have threatened to de-list his game if he lists it as less expensive on other platforms. Specifically not just steam keys but other distribution platforms.
Which is hard to believe, considering how many times I’ve bought steam games on other (legitimate) platforms that were cheaper than on steam, that are still on steam today and werent removed for being cheaper on another platform.
Sure, but Valve essentially reserve the right to no longer sell your game if it’s offered cheaper elsewhere. See the quotes on pages 54 through 56 of the complaint.
Which is a dick move on valves part.
Remember folks, Valve isnt the peoples company.
All the good things it does, it does only because of regulation pressure or lost lawsuits.
Remember folks, Valve isnt the peoples company.
No corporation is “the peoples corporation”, but some corporations treat their customers with a lot more respect and fairness in pricing/policies than others.
Yes, but people have to be reminded of that with “sweetheart” companies like AMD and Valve, because they get too deep in the koolaid and forget it.
It isn’t the peoples’ company, but nor is it a publicly traded company that is obligated to pursue profits above all else. It’s Gabe’s company, and he gets to run it as he sees fit.
Ultimately Wolfire’s argument falls apart not because Valve is setting the terms, but because their claims about Valve’s position in the industry and supposed abuse of power don’t hold much water.
Fyi I like valve but im in no way sworn to them.
I think the justification would probably be that if they continued listing the item:
- It maybe mislead consumers into paying more for the same thing
- The reason why people pay more in that scenario is for convenience (IE all games in the same place) but that would be exersizing valves monopoly, so it may be safer to just remove to reduce complaints to steam about the higher pricing because there will be operational cost to processing those support requests and complaints
I don’t feel like valve does everything because of lawsuits. Open sourcing proton wasn’t due to a lawsuit. Releasing Cs2 as a free upgrade to csgo wasn’t due to a lawsuit.
On the other hand and in response to your comment, I think the regulatory fix is that platforms must display their platform fee clearly and separately to the publishers price.
Open sourcing proton wasn’t due to a lawsuit.
Wine and dxvk was already opensource. They couldn’t have closed it even if they wanted to.
Minor note about only a single point here
CS2 as an “upgrade” to CSGO has been less than well received from what I can tell. If they wanted it to be free it should have been a new game and left CS:GO in place. Removing a game many of us paid for in favor of a newer, different game isn’t something that should be praised, and should be called out as the anti-consumer move it was.
TIL: valve is run by robots.
I believe it is in the Steam marketplace agreement, and applies to all games. Are you referring to sales on other platforms, or to the full listed price?
That hasn’t been my experience, could be a regional pricing thing.
HumbleBundle…
deleted by creator
Not only that, but games you’ve actually heard of, too
Oh shit. I love David Rosen. I also live GabeN…
I should be the judge.
Yeah, it sucks when mommy and daddy fight.
Oh lawd he comin
Half Life 3 has been delayed by another three months.
Really? Steam? With all those EGS, GOG and Origins? Is it Apple’s trolling?
Is this why they were giving away all free steam keys on 4chan yesterday? I thought it was just Black Friday deals, shoulda known those anons don’t do anything for the sake of being nice.
GabeN?
They might as well sue Microsoft
