Alright, I guess that's fairly relatable then.

Well, hold on, while that industry is indeed scummy, Valve doesn't ever see a cut of it, do they? Valve allows developers to print their own Steam keys, and takes a 0% cut of them. Game devs use that opportunity to sell the keys to legitimate key sites, which take less of a cut than Steam does, but offer no refund guarantees or other support. Then, credit card thieves buy those keys using stolen cards, and resell them on illegitimate key sites. So in summary, as long as Valve doesn't take a cut on that key generation, they don't directly profit. They just keep allowing key generation to allow game devs a bit more freedom in sale.

This argument would seem to make sense, but from what I gather Bezos and Zuckerberg have lots of control of their respective companies, and can push around the board - yet they do what they do.

So I'm nowhere near a billionaire and it's perhaps worthless to compare - but once many orgs know you are a "source of charitable donations" they spend a LOT of spam your way - and chances are good that at least half of the charities are scams that barely help anyone. So there's likely also an unwelcome degree of effort and anxiety in ensuring charity money is used well. Hence why Bill Gates started his own.

True, but Gabe is just about the best one I can think of.

I think you are missing the point of my question. Why would valve get in legal trouble if they charged less? Both EGS and steam is stored, no? They should be bound by the same laws. Afaik there are no special laws just because you are the market leader.

So that means they operate under a different law which was the point of my question? Doubt.

I think you maybe need to take a second look at this post- you seem to be substituting random words at places and it makes it difficult to tell what you're trying to say.

Epic is in no position or standing to compete against valve. To be a monopoly, you have to actually own an overwhelming portion of the market you're in.

Oh, I mean within the realm / market sector of video games. Both Meta and Amazon have been uh, extremely expensive failures when it comes to anything other than MTX, game-as-a-job style video games. Amazon Game Studios proved throwing near infinite money at making games doesn't work if you have no idea what you are doing. Luna also failed. Facebook literally rebranded to Meta as they were trying to convince everyone they had essentially invented the VR Internet... and to prove this, they gave us essentially an alpha version of some Mii-verse style VR experiences. Google tried to do Stadia, promised us you would not need a local machine powerful enough to render a high fidelity game, because they had invented negative latency. Apple fairly recently released $3000k VR goggles that uh... kind of let you do some extremely basic office work. Etc etc. All of these very major tech companies that decided they were gonna be video game companies too? Pretty much all their endeavors were total internal failures, net losses for them, but, it doesn't matter in the long run because they all make so much money from their core business model, which for all but Apple, is spying on consumers and selling them hypertargetted ads. --- A lot of people give Valve a lot of shit for MTX in terms of things like tradeable CS2 weapon skins, and a lot of that is deserved. But they're forgetting that Facebook actually invented that entire thing, with Farmville. It was with Farmville that Facebook realized you can gamify anything, and then you can monetize that gamification. Farmville is what kicked off the transition into the gamified, data monger, attention economy.

> You can cross the ocean safely and in comfort on 30k yachts, 10ish metres. And even less than that! Anything can be a dildo if you're brave enough.

Yup, there are a lot of bad charities, and the good ones often can't handle billions in donations. And doing that takes time away from things you enjoy. There's a reason he didn't step away from his position until his 90s, he likes what he does.