this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.
Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.
I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.
In general, I think being decent to customers is a business strategy, because the barrier to entry for a Steam competitor is nearly non-existent, and there's always piracy. Still, capitalism working the way it's "supposed to" is still capitalism.
My brother in christ have you heard of network effects?
It's not network effects (but slightly related), it's opportunity cost.
Getting your app into yet another app store isn't hard, but takes time, so you need to make sure it doesn't cost devs more to add support for you than it earns them. The slightest fuzz and they'll drop you if you're small.
But stores like Gog are able to exist just fine. They're big enough that many devs think it's worth it to support them. If you want more devs to do so, tell them that's what you want and show it will be worth it. And if you want to open another store, copy Gog & co