Forced price matching could be considered a abuse of their position. If a dev cannot sell on another store for less (even if that platform takes a smaller cut) then that makes reduces the need for others to use a different platform to get a cheaper deal. Devs cannot use pricing to save you some money while drawing you to a platform that gives them a larger margin. All of which means that there is less incentive for valve to reduce their cut of the sale to be more competitive. This is what some lawsuits against valve are arguing ATM I believe.

Most people I know don’t look outside of steam for games. Might be a regional thing. But there are a lot of people that just don’t care about the other stores. At least not while steam offer a good experience.

You can choose to buy new things on other platforms. But you lose access to everything you bought on steam if you choose not to use them anymore. That is a form of locking to their platform. You cannot just move you library to another platform.

Sorry badly worded on my part. They can use other platforms alongside steam. I really meant they cannot use them instead of steam without losing a massive audience. And likely making their game unprofitable. At least if they are not a very large game studio already.

And then if steam is pushing restrictions on what they can do on other stores then that is edging into the relms of abusing their monopoly.

Yeah, Steam may be effectively a monopoly, but it’s because nobody else really wants to compete with them at their level.

Steam has two types of customers. Us the gamers where we can decide which platform to use. They have an effective monopoly on us because they provide a good service. But with a large game library we are locked into steam as well and cannot just switch to a different platform. If valve ever did decide to be evil then we are screwed.

But developers are also customers of valve. And this is arguably where valve makes their money. They take a cut from the developers sales. Devs cannot just use a different platform without cutting out a huge userbase. This gives valve a real monopolistic control over developers.

Its hard to argue that 2 config files both multiple lines long is simpler then a single line in an existing file. Adding a service to cron is just simpler. But adding all the extra bit you are going to want on top increases the things you need to learn to do and configure correctly.

IMO systemd timers are simpler to get right at a little bit more of an upfront cost to learning how they work. But cron is still simpler to just get something working without caring that much. I still find that ends up biting you in the longer term though though all the missing features you need to add manually on top of that one basic line you added.

Cron jobs are nice and simple to create. Until they go wrong then they are a pain in the ass. You need to manage logging yourself. If you forget you root mail will fill up your disk and crash the system. If you forget the mailto setting. If you remember it you justlose all logs and have no clue why something is not working. You need to redirect the output to a logfile yourself. And then risk filling up the disk with logs unless you remember to also set up logrotate. And you then still don’t know when something last ran or if it ran successfully.

So many traps and that is just the logging side of things.

That does not stop things from stealing your data.