I’m willing to give the news some benefit of the doubt here because there actually are rational and non-evil reasons to do this.

Socially, we have at least two related, but distinct forms of sexual atrocity.

One is sex with children. There’s extensive evidence that sex before puberty leads to all kinds of long term negative effects for the victim.

The other is non-consent. No matter what the age of the people involved, non-consent has serious negative consequences for the victim.

The Epstein victims all seem to be extremely young post-adolescents. We generally wouldn’t care at all if they were getting it on with their high-school sweethearts.

The problem with the Epstein victims was primarily one of consent. There was a vast human trafficking network and many of our leaders were active participants. The whole thing was so horrible that normal people are sickened by it happening to anyone, not just children.

The reason we may want to be sticklers on this point is that this form of abuse is extremely common and really needs a spotlight on it. We don’t want people to come out the other end of this thing and think, “Sure pedophilia is bad but this guy is just pressuring his 18 year old secretary into sex and then making money passing her around to his buddies.”

There’s simple and there’s oversimplified. The element your missing is “trust”. The reason gamers go to Steam is because we trust their reviews and return policies.

The other storefronts haven’t built that trust. Most gamers have the experience of trying other storefronts, hating them, and going back to Steam.

People don’t trust Gabe because he’s a billionaire, they trust him because he consistently makes decisions that gamers benefit from. No other game store CEO can claim that with a straight face.

That would be how monopolies work. You realize that Steam doesn’t require exclusivity, right? You can get BG3 all over the place. When customers have choice between vendors it’s not a monopoly, even if they tend to make the same choice.

Do you think Larian’s management is also stupid?

Any halfway decent GTM executive would have checked their distribution channel options and chosen the mix that makes them the most money, net of fees.

Why would they pay for a service that harms them?

Are you actually confused about the information asymmetry in video game purchases? Given your weird movie references I assumed you were just trying to change the topic.

I’ll try to use small words. Before you play a game, you don’t know if it’s goo;, just as used car buyers don’t know if the used car is a lemon. Without a buyer protections that drags the price of good games down just as lemons drag down the price of used cars. Akerlof goes into the proof for the car part of this in his paper.

“Lemon laws” mostly solve that problem for cars. Steam mostly solves that problem for video games. That requires trust. You may not trust Steam but millions of people do. They’ve repeatedly made decisions that benefit gamers so gamers flock to them. Thats why they buy so many games from Steam even when they’re available elsewhere. If they broke that trust they’d probably never get it back but, until then, their net effect is to increase revenue for studios by providing a market where people are comfortable enough to spend more money.

So you don’t care that Larian isn’t harmed, you don’t care that the dev’s aren’t harmed, you don’t care that the consumer isn’t harmed.

You just feel bad for Epic?

You’re the one claiming to be the economics expert. I’m simply correcting the record.

I haven’t studied “capitalism” but my Masters degree is in Financial Engineering. Since you seem to care about formal economics, how do you propose solving Akelof’s Market for Lemons?

Valve solves the information asymmetry. That’s a net gain for both buyers and sellers. But you’ve studied economics, so you probably know that already.

So let’s skip to the meat of the question. How do you propose determining the intrinsic value of resolved information asymmetry.

You seem to be operating under some notion that particular work deserves a particular amount of pay. That’s backwards. People pay for what they get, not for what the seller’s cost of goods.

We know that Larian is doing very well financially. Their devs are happy and well paid.

That’s a completely irrelevant number.

I have no idea how many devs worked on BG3 and that number has 0 impact on my enjoyment of the game. Given the number of hours I spent playing BG3, the price made it one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available.

And, as a developer, I really don’t care how much companies pay to marketing vendors. Developer pay is generally negotiated when you’re hired. I haven’t worked in B2C but, as I understand it, they usually pay bonuses on sales volume rather than profits.

“overcharge” is entirely in the eye of the purchaser not the devs. Given the difference in user experience between Steam and any other launcher (sadly even/especially GOG), Steam charges less than I’d be willing to pay.

Valve doesn’t overcharge me.

They provide an excellent user experience. They have one of the few stores where you can actually get reliable user reviews. Their return policies are generous. I’ve never had any problems with fraud or scams. Their search and recommendation functions are pretty good.

To me, that’s a great deal and they’ve earned every penny of their markup.

I just headed over to .ml and did a local search for “mamdani”

I see a bunch of the more conservatives Democrats and their supporters complaining about him and conservatives of all stripes are really hoping he’ll fail.

I’ve been called a tankie several times and I rather like Mamdani. I see him, AOC, and Sanders as the best hope for the future of the US.

Where are these tankies that hate Mamdani so much? What do they hate him for?