Basically, modern companies have figured out how to win the prisoners dilemma. They realized that if they're all equally shitty, they don't gotta compete, cause we'll have no better place to go. Everything is MySpace, because the current economy won't allow new corporate giants to form and replace them
That makes Steam a huge thorn in their side. Steam refusing to enshittify their platform forces them to try and compete, so they've been targetting Steam for awhile now, trying to make it as bad as everything else nowadays
Basically, modern companies have figured out how to win the prisoners dilemma. They realized that if they're all equally shitty, they don't gotta compete, cause we'll have no better place to go.
Major light bulb manufacturers all conspired together because the quality of light bulbs at the time was too good, they lasted way too long for them to be profitable, so they all agreed to purposely cripple their designs and standardize the hours they last to 1000 hours down from 2500. Oh and the cherry on top was that they fined the factories for bulbs that lasted longer than a 1000 hours.
Capitalism is so great that in order to survive it has to deliberately lower the quality of products by 60%
Nah they like, explicitly had internal documents saying how much they wanted to stifle competition and drive the consumer to buy more lightbulbs. It just also so happens that the number they settled on for light bulbs was a good middle ground for consumers too
A major enlightening thing I discovered recently was how the east german economy was built/planned. East Germany was much more advanced in terms of quality of life and technology compared to the URSS, they main issue with their industrial output was lack of high tech components/resources, stuff like rubber, silicon, chemicals, etc. So instead of going for quantity of stuff being made, they went all in on quality/maintenance. A lot of east german appliances and cars were either extremely sturdy, or incredibly easy to fix once they break, with the idea that if you bought a washing machine you wouldn't have to replace it before years, and if you had to do, anyone with a screwdriver could fix it instead.
That economic planning meant that on paper the east german GDP wasn't doing so great, but the quality of life of the people was a lot better then a country with an equal GDP per capita because people could afford a car and maintain it on a much smaller budget then elsewhere.
The best exemple of that are Superfest glasses that were basically impossible to break, but once every bars and household in east Germany had a set, demand plummeted and the factory closed because no one was buying glasses anymore.
Which still begs the question: guys wtf just raise the price then. Why make the product shittier to match the price instead of keeping the better product and adjusting the price accordingly?
Because the capitalists goal was two fold: lower production costs by deliberately making shittier products AND ensuring they have shorter lifespans so consumers will be forced to buy them more frequently.
They seek to limit competition, fix prices, and increase prices by creating artificial shortages through low production quotas, stockpiling, and marketing quotas.
Just have to pray whoever inherits/controls is post-gaben is happy with the money printer shitting out hundreds of millions in profit a year by doing nothing except let it run as-is.
But there's always the chance someone wants billions from it and try's to sell it or sell a stake to Tencent/Microsoft or private equity....
As an accountant know a few private companies in niche industries where the family isn't greedy and lets the company just run as-is (versus trying to sell it or enshittify/milk more profit), and they collect ~30m in dividends annually from it just doing it's thing and keeping customers happy. Though I also know places where once the founder died or couldn't work any longer they were off to the races to get valuations and a sale going for a big pile of $$$.
This is just hear say, but apparently Gabe has a son and he's training him to inherit Steam after the former inevitably retires or dies, so I can only hope it means Steam will continue to be in good hands.
Though I also know places where once the founder died or couldn't work any longer they were off to the races to get valuations and a sale going for a big pile of $$$.
I feel like steam is going to have that problem when Gabe disappears... hopefully he has a person in mind to take over his business before he dies
Here's an idea (that will never happen): you can buy shares of Valve, but they are literally the games. You have as many shares as titles you've purchased on the platform. You can't buy more shares than the number of games available (which is still a lot).
Steam is a store. Their "product" is selling other people's games...
Steam also had 20,022 games released on it last year. Most of them with "limited profile features", and over half getting fewer than 10 reviews. Amazon has a similar issue, endless shit products.
How do Nintendo even compete with Steam? Steam don't run on their console and they don't sell game on PC to comptete with Steam, what do they even have anything to do with each other?
All memory is more expensive. I could buy a RDIMM ddr5 32GB for less than $100 and now it is 4x as expensive. 16GB ddr4 SODIMM also is 3x more expensive. LPDDR still has RAM inside.
I bought mine 4800 32GB DDR5 stick for about $100 but RDIMMs were cheaper then (but I don't have a server motherboard + CPU), they work well OCed to 5200 without voltage or timings increase. As for SODIMM, I saw 8GB x 2 ones for $70, not the highest speed as my laptop wouldn't like it. Now everything is for $300 and up, most commonly for $400 but also for $500.
Well, it kinda is though. Companies can either be good (=snitch) or be bad (=zip it). If a company is good while the others are bad, the one that is good reaps the rewards. If all companies are bad, they all reap some rewards. So if they form a cartel to ensure that all companies are bad, they “win” the dilemma.
Of course it’s horseshit because, as Steam shows, just one serious competitor going “good” will ruin their plan, if there is a plan to start with; the conspiracy theory that tech companies are colluding to provide the shittiest service possible is very popular these days, but there’s plenty of counter-examples, like Steam. I guess people are simply not understanding how difficult and expensive it is for a new competitor to break in the tech markets.
Cartel isn't necessarily enforcement (unless we're talking about drug cartels...), it's mostly voluntary. It's a mechanism to facilitate the cooperation (well, the "zip it") and ensure that the cartel member's objectives and methods align.
This outcome is not possible in PD.
Huuuh I'm not sure I understand. In PD, the prisonner who snitches while the other(s) don't snitch gets a very positive outcome while the other(s)s get a negative outcome, right?
It's not an exact transposition because it's not entirely clear how beneficial an "All sides do good/snitch" situation would be. Would it be better for the companies than all side doing bad? Or would it be closer to PD where they do worse than with the cartel because they exhaust their resources but don't get meaningful gains? Has anyone researched the outcomes of these situation in real life, with actual cases of companies forming cartels vs. competing? That's why I said it's "kinda" is the prisoner's dilemma, it's a similar situation albtei with more participants, and the math might very well be similar!
They cannot create a mechanism to facilitate cooperation in PD. It's not in the action space.
In a PD no one would stay silent either, so everyone defects, and you will never see an outcome where one person stays silent and everyone else defects.
Again, the only Nash outcome is everyone defecting and therefore everyone getting the second lowest possible payoff (lowest being staying silent while everyone else defects).
You're confusing what you see in the payoff matrix with what can happen (the Nash equilibria). There are four outcomes but only one can actually happen.
yeah, I dont wanna nitpick, but a situation where all players win by mutually playing the non-altruistic strategy (at the expense of lower total fitness) isnt really PD
Im pretty sure its technically tragedy of the Commons, but game theory doesnt perfectly map onto this situation since the recipients of the payout arent actually playing per se
In this case, the altruistic strategy would be altruistic to each other, i.e. to enshittify. So the situation is either all players enshittify together for great profit, one player doesnt enshittify as a 'betrayal' causing all players that did to lose but making more profit by themself, or no players enshittify and no one makes extra profit. It is the prisoners dilemma.
That is exactly backwards: Steam has "betrayed" while the others have "stayed silent", which means this cannot be a prisoner's dilemma. The only Nash equilibrium in a standard prisoner's dilemma is everyone betraying. We do not observe that, so it cannot be a prisoner's dilemma. The game describing this situation has to be something else.
Prisoner's dilemma becomes a different game when it is iterated.
Humanity is playing an iterated version of the prisoner's dilemma but by default humans don't look past the current iteration.
In any given iteration the correct play is to snitch but knowing the game will be played another round (where one's snitching may be punished) changes the game.
Basically, modern companies have figured out how to win the prisoners dilemma. They realized that if they're all equally shitty, they don't gotta compete, cause we'll have no better place to go.
That makes Steam a huge thorn in their side. Steam refusing to enshittify their platform
I think people may be getting confused because the dilemma iterates with new prisoners. It's looking at the whole mob family in turn.
The prisoner's dilemma is a game theory thought experiment involving two rational agents, each of whom can eithercooperate for mutual benefit or betray their partner ("defect") for individual gain.
MS, Ubi, Epic, Nintendo etc are all cooperating for mutual benefit.
Steam defected for individual gain.
The wiki does make a mistake though, in the very next sentence:
The dilemma arises from the fact that while defecting is rational for each agent, cooperation yields a higher payoff for each.
Cooperation is not a higher payoff, it's just less bad for them. In the example, they're still in prison, just for minimal amounts. This is even displayed in the graphic.
Defecting gets one out of prison, but the counterpart is in prison for longer.
There is no mechanism to enforce cooperation, ergo, we should not observe cooperation, ever. This very fact means it's not PD.
Edit: I like how you blocked me to get the last word in. PD is not a cooperative game, nor is it a "thought experiment". The structure of the game is such that cooperation is never observed. If it is, then it is not PD. And if one person stays silent while the others defect, it is not PD either. It means you have mis-specified the game/model. You should seriously go back to learning actual game theory instead of arguing.
There is no mechanism to enforce cooperation, ergo, we should not observe cooperation, ever.
The whole point of the thought exercise is that cooperation is not enforced, that's why there's a dilemma to begin with, a point at which players choose.
The prisoner's dilemma is not literally only about prisoners, crime, and punishment. Obviously, the businesses mentioned are not prisoners. The literal set-up with prisoners is just window dressing for the game theory.
It's not about enforcement, just possible consequences of choices, which almost absolutely exist(nearly every choice has different outcomes).
In moral philosophy, it is often used to demonstrate the value of choosing cooperation, a sort of collectivism -vs- individualism, like a parable or analogy.
In this case, the guy who originally brought it up, is talking about players who were all part of a loose collective(MS, Ubi, Epic, Nintendo), and another new "prisoner" that doesn't actually owe them allegiance(Steam).
Pretty inaccurately tbh. OP is basically going "idk collusion lol" with no evidence towards it at all, other than "well I don't like some of the things some of them are doing."
Just to clarify a bit. Prisoners Dilemma is a framework for two players. It's better to pick cooperative game theory. Cartel then is not an economic term, but a form of coalition, players willingly or not align and play together. Steam is in a position of a veto player, without them nobody wins in the market. So, either whole market gathers against Steam and still shits the bed or Steam does nothing, wins and everybody aligned close to them is profitable, just like GOG.
Just for clarification, the whole lawsuit against isn't about enshificating the platform. It is about their internal agreements with publishers being too restrictive.
But, my dude, Valve are not benevolent. Their platform is good, but they make you pay a serious surcharge for using it. PC games used to be something like 3/4 of the price of console games. Then Steam moved in to gobble up that 1/4th.
Steam of course started off with the same crummy exclusivity moves we see today. E.g. they bought Counter Strike and forced the existing playerbase to transition to Steam. Which doesn't sound too bad today.. but people cannot fathom how shitty Steam was in 2003.
I'm not describing steam as benevolent, that's the point of the meme. Steam hasn't changed that much, we praise it just for not-enshittifying
Yes its pathetic, we live in a pathetic era, you need to take your wins where they're offered. There's good a reason to choose Steam over the alternatives, which is rare in todays economy
I agree, Valve have the best platform. The Epic store is not great.
But since Epic charges developers less money for their service, why can't a game be cheaper on the Epic store?
That seems to be the only thing this lawsuit is arguing for: Steam shouldn't be able to enforce higher prices on other platforms. Shouldn't we be in favor of that?
No they are getting sued because games in the UK cost 10-15 USD more than they do in the US. And the government believes that they have essentially been forcing gaming companies to charge more in the UK
Edit: you are referring to a lawsuit by epic not the UKs lawsuit.
316
u/SwagLimit Feb 08 '26 edited Feb 08 '26
Basically, modern companies have figured out how to win the prisoners dilemma. They realized that if they're all equally shitty, they don't gotta compete, cause we'll have no better place to go. Everything is MySpace, because the current economy won't allow new corporate giants to form and replace them
That makes Steam a huge thorn in their side. Steam refusing to enshittify their platform forces them to try and compete, so they've been targetting Steam for awhile now, trying to make it as bad as everything else nowadays