Mask on, mask off.

Oh, headlines aren’t allowed to name things anymore. It’s part of the Darmok accord.

Worth stating, Australia’s censorship didn’t phase him… but Valve’s would have.

Australia is a significant but minor market. Steam is ‘be on this service or fail.’

Careful, you’ll summon Smartman Apps (with emojis) to insist mathematics has exactly one perfect unambiguous syntax, where 2*(1+3) is somehow different from 2(1+3), and also reverse Polish notation does-too have parentheses.

It’s object-oriented; you can assign this to a named variable.

()=>{}

Javascript straddling the middle as usual.

Are you responding to someone who said, ‘all use is forced?’ Because I didn’t.

If you want this in your browser, great, there’s these things called extensions. The fact a goddamn LLM is standard, but DownThemAll is barely tolerated, speaks to completely fucked priorities at Mozilla.

‘We pushed shit on everyone and a bunch of them are using it’ never ever ever vindicates pushing shit on people. People use shit that’s pushed on them! Do you know how low that bar is?!

I am a vocal defender of the underlying technology, and this is still some bullshit.

Which is awful marketing, because of how real people respond to that.

There’s a ‘but the bad things’ buried in the middle, desperately wanting a line break.

I did the same thing initially and tried re-reading it as sass. Especially if “TF2 neglect” was considered positive.

Maybe there isn’t one.

This is what I’m talking about: people think monopoly = bad, so if I say Valve has a monopoly, I must want them burned to the ground. Nah. They’re mostly fine. Having only one good option is precarious, but it is still a good option. For now.

But they’re still a monopoly. We should say so, because it’s true, and important. It shapes the entire PC gaming market.

None of that is what defines a monopoly.

There’s only one store that matters. They have unthreatened supermajority marketshare. Customers go there by default - sometimes exclusively. Developers can sell there, or they’re basically fucked.

What you’re concerned about are anti-competitive practices. But some businesses don’t need those, to lack any relevant competition. It can just happen. They didn’t do anything wrong. They’re still monopolies.

Alan Wake 2 didn’t make its money back for a year despite being a huge game on the second-biggest service.

Steam doesn’t care about other stores because other stores do not matter. They can let other stores sell Steam keys, and it still doesn’t threaten their untouchable market share.

And if his yacht sinks, we’re boned.

While many accuse Valve of monopolising the PC gaming market, others argue that Steam’s dominance is simply the result of doing things right.

These assertions do not contradict. I cannot overstress that.

This whole article is ‘Valve’s monopoly is fine because they did things right.’

Having one good store is not, in itself, a problem. But it does mean we’re one fuckup away from having no good stores.

Saying it’s a monopoly doesn’t mean it needs solving. Anti-competitive behavior is a problem - but being a monopoly doesn’t require that abuse, and you don’t need a monopoly to exercise that abuse.

Yet people get deeply fricking weird about saying it’s a monopoly.

It’s naked taboo. It’s people feeling icky about a word, and actively refusing to engage in rational argument about meaning. When someone has dogmatically internalized that monopoly=bad and Steam=good, the text doesn’t matter. Even pointing out things they just said gets dismissed as some kind of attack against The Good Store.™

We have to start from plain acknowledgement that Steam’s competitors do not matter. They are plentiful and irrelevant. Explaining why they are doesn’t change that they are.

So we’re acknowledging it’s a monopoly? Cool. Defense is still an acknowledgement. I’ve had the weirdest goddamn arguments with people insisting they’d never shop anywhere else, and if games aren’t on there it’s their own fault they’re doomed… but how dare anyone use the m-word! Obviously that can only mean one seller with absolute control, like how Standard Oil owned all 85% of the market.

Octopodes only live a couple years, and thank god. They would be the menace seen in sailors’ imaginations if they just kept growing and learning.

Octopussen.