If the disruption is temporary, it’s bad.

High prices will massively incentivize expanding fossil fuel production, which is exactly what is happening worldwide.

But the oil wells in the Middle East haven’t gone away. That oil will still make it to the atmosphere, sooner or later, and we will end up with an expanded production capacity.

Additionally, war is a terrible emitter.

Your scenarios aren’t wrong, but thing is they are all just temporary symptoms. The oil crises would need to be sustained, indefinitely, to stop those reduced consumption patterns from rebounding.

It determines the price. If you “self-publish” on a web shop or something with DRM free downloads, you have to price it the same as on Steam, otherwise Steam may delist you. So devs can’t get around the 30% fee by offering a discount on their store.

And… practically, if the storefronts are the same price, most will just buy on Steam.

There can be other complications related to scammers, but that’s not Valve’s fault. Supporting both also takes more dev effort.

Rimworld took this route, at least for some time. It started only self published via the Ludeon Store yet ended up mostly on Steam because that’s where all the attention and mods went. I have the game bought both places, oddly enough.

…This is exactly what I am talking about.

Why do people pivot to whataboutisms?

Valve is an effective monopoly. There is no talking around that.

They have made many straight-up anticompetitive moves, to cement that. The biggest example in my mind is the “other storefront pricing policy,” but there have been several over the years.

What other companies are doing is irrelevant to that point, unfortunately, as they don’t have enough market share to compete. It does not excuse Valve or make the situation any less worrying to me.

Eh, I am afraid everything will just go to YouTube and Google platforms.

I bet Google will buy Discord too. Hell, maybe Reddit once it tanks?

…I am not smiling at any of this. The destruction of the internet will not be a relief, as Google ultimately owns it already.

…Or, what most “normal” people apparently do now, ask ChatGPT and carry on with a complete hallucination.

Yeah, I swear, I love our lemmy content posters, but why must links always be from content farms or tabloids?

Does no one ever click through to see where they copied the news from? Does it never occur to posters “huh, this site is spam, maybe I should find another, if not the original source?”

Do people here, on Lemmy of all places, still not worry about Valve being a monopoly?

It worries me, deeply. Especially with how the community already makes up excuses for them doing anticompetitive things.

There is only one way that ends.

I can’t think of a single example of a “happy sustainable monopoly” in history, but at best they must be vanishingly rare.

leveling up your profile, participating in events, earning digital collectibles you can showcase

YMMV.

This makes me feel icky just reading it. All that feels like spam to me.

And it’s great to be able to go into airplane mode, and still have access to your library.

Except not really, as it’s still locked by Steam DRM, and all sorts of factors can break it (like family sharing in my case).

GoG is what true offline gaming looks like, with all features enabled.

there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?

Uhh. It’s that Steam is an effective monopoly?

They hold all the attention, all the recommendations, so if you aren’t on Steam you are practically invisible.

There are a few major games that only self publish. Starsector is one, of the top of my head. Hence it is practically invisible to most.

When anyone asks about “effective altruism,” this ^ is precisely what I’d point to. It’s better than words.

Most of Lemmy is not interested in nuance.

This has been my observation outside “AI,” on any other topic. TBH I think you are wasting your breath.

The answer to that question is Tech Bros.

Altman, Modi, Musk; those are the people that benefit from the binary view, because they are quite intentionally turning it into a “it’s us or nothing” wedge issue.

I disagree strongly.

Slop means “high volume, low effort garbage,” and it was a term even before LLM/diffusion proliferated.

“Anything AI generated is slop” was not the original definition, and it cannot be applied consistently. You’re probably on a computer filled with “slop” right now, if that’s your definition. You’re using it in nearly every website you visit regularly, you were touching it in media well before Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT were even out.

Well, I’m not advocating for LLM assisted game development to be banned, or those with a but if diffusion. That’s what the tag is supposed to be for.

I’m strictly talking spam and clones. Clearly dysfunctional games, misleadingly advertised.

Valve makes $billions in revenue every year. If they make 30% off every developer’s sales, I think they can afford to apply some basic vetting to each one.

Right now, Valve is the “best” video game distributor - apart from maybe GoG. I hope GoG dethrones them as the only reasons Valve is “better” are Linux support and market dominance (ergo convenience), and perhaps the AI craze will be the wedge issue that GoG takes a firm stance against, at which point they’d be in a good spot to take over.

Again, I emphasize: you are talking about this as if picking a team.

These are storefronts, run by corporations. I don’t care if Valve is percieved as “good” or not, I care about the current and future transactional services they will offer me, and how they will affect the market as a whole.

And this is bad. Its toxic for game devs, bad for me as a shopper, and unhealthy for the future of gaming.

Vavle do not deserve excuses and hand-waving just because one thinks they are a ‘lesser evil’ in some other context; every service should get criticized a-la-carte. They are not people, they do not get passes.

The mindset of loyalty and “thrones” and “who is nicer” is exactly the sort of anthropomorphic mindset they want you in. Its the goal of advertising. They want you loyal to their storefront, so at some point, it becomes an irrational factor that influences your shopping choices… Hence this comment section.

All that to say: I agree they should be doing more, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Indeed.

But I’m not going to apologize for Valve in the same breath eather, and I am appaled so many commenters here are. They would be skewering them if this was some other strorefront doing the exact same thing.

Assets can be packed or otherwise obfuscated in all sorts of ways.

I’m less certain about the “3 month forced waiting period” thing… it sounds like a good idea on the surface, but I just wonder how it might affect small devs. Also, some spammers would still immediately schedule a listing for a clone and then vibecode it over the three months.

With all due respect, this is exactly what I am talking about.

I feel like Valve is trustworthy enough that most devs should be able to open-source their code to Valve.

Enforcing posting code source isn’t viable for many reasons. But one is that spammers are going to hide the vibecoding anyway; this would only catch relatively innocent coding assistants from earnest devs.

It wouldn’t catch anything malicious.

Then put a little thingie showing how many years a dev has existed (so people can put their AI-detector thinking caps on when they see a dev that’s existed for 3 months putting out a fully polished game).

And again, the point of spamming is to get eyeballs in front of customers. It doesn’t matter if 99% reject it as obvious garbage; if just a few people buy it on chance, it’s worth the minimal effort for the spammer, and it encourages other spammers to come.

…And that would be catastrophic to new devs, anyway. How is anyone new supposed to enter the space and publish their labor of love if everyone assumes new devs are malicious?

Sorry if this comes off as thorny, I feel like commenters here are contorting themselves to excuse a giant corporation.

This is Valve’s storefront. They make mountains of cash from it.

It is their job to filter spam, they need to spend money to do it, and they don’t want to. There is no way around it.

FYI the ‘Le Chonk’ fat cat meme has been a thing in the localllama community, which I suppose Mistral is referencing. Its a nickname for giant models that only the insane would try to run locally.

And this is supposedly a big deal because Mistral was… not great, for a long time. They basically pioneered the MoE models that got so popular, then faded into irrelevance for a while.

They have some. This is the most prominant one I know:

https://huggingface.co/ai-sage

But it’s Russian state backed, so (allegedly) the govt limited what they could train on, hence it performs very poorly in English and in subjective tests in localllama.

There are many interesting efforts from around the world, but there are fewer people to test them than you’d think.

I can’t believe the sentiment in the comments here.

…Y’all think spammers are going to label themselves as “AI generated” if that’s detrimental? They will not, and it’s not something that can be objectively detected.

Getting customers to moderate this is self defeating, as the whole point of spam is to get in front of buyers’ eyeballs.

Valve needs to hire staff to cull this junk, they can afford to, but they don’t want to. That’s the crux of the issue.