Training for Moscow!

“From now on, we’ll handle the poll the same way we handled the Crimea referendum”.

No aide, friend or ally of Putin would be prosecuted or even named in court without his personal permission, so Ukraine is undoubtedly better even in this.

“See, they are Nazis!”

Such a hopeless country. At that age, people tend to still process their education as a given and not question much. Even after the war is over and Putin is dead, Russia will be full of patriotic people thinking war is the answer and that Ukraine was on the wrong side of history.

Does Russia claim that? Hasn’t its narrative always been that the neighboring countries that prefer the Western way are just puppets controlled by the U.S. Department of State?

Russia’s expectation is what it wrote for Trump’s peace deal. It definitely wants it in writing. Though Russia itself doesn’t respect its agreements, if one were signed by Ukraine and supported by the US, Ukraine would likely not attack unless attacked. We saw this with Russia’s de facto annexation of parts of Georgia and with Crimea. The latter became a vacation resort for Russians and many bought property there, doing just fine until 2022.

Kazakhstan and the other neighboring countries may be within China’s sphere of influence, but I don’t see China getting involved in any serious way.

In the short term, it’s probably what Russia says it is: getting the territories that it wrote into the constitution. Stopping at the areas currently in control would also be acceptable, as that’s already more than Russia had before 2022. Then it’s going to be about regrouping for new attacks and invasions, which don’t have to be aimed at Ukraine. Even if attacking Europe were out of the picture, there are former Soviet countries to its south.

Sarcasm?

The road condition says it all about Russia’s priorities as well.

As I said, we don’t know the terms of their publishing contract, if any, so that would be a baseless assumption to make. I could also flip your argument and say they might not even want to sell on Steam, but feel forced to because of its monopoly power. It’s one of the points of the class action lawsuit.

I’m glad we at least have moved on from people outright denying Valve does this to defending Valve doing this.

Why did the dev have to increase the price elsewhere to “match the price”, instead of matching the price to $7 on Steam?

You’d have to ask the dev, but obviously Valve takes 30%, while the dev would get 100% on its own store. If there’s a publisher involved, and publisher contracts often cover specific platforms, the dev would get much less than 70% on Steam.

Comparing Steam to traditional stores is incorrect. Even Valve’s own argument in the same Wolfire case was that monopoly power requires a market share of 75%, which Steam exceeds.

There would be more if more people used GOG, but even so, I’m not sure I agree with your premise, because what do most people do when they want a game that’s on Steam and on GOG and even has achievements on both?

How explicit does Valve need to be for you to agree that they make the point clear? In one quote further in this thread, they say “we’d just choose to stop selling [the game]”, in another, on p. 161, they say “we’ll be ready to release [once you match the price]”, prompting the dev to raise the price from $7 to $14 elsewhere. It’s highly anticompetitive because it prevents other platforms from competing on price. Great discounts are instrumental as well, as noted by OP’s very article.

Their tactics including not only threats to delist but also threats to reduce visibility does not make it any better. If those numerous examples aren’t crystal clear about the former, here’s another quote from Valve (page 18 here):

“We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market—so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours . . . .”

When you say “undercutting the sale”, I don’t know what you mean. They are talking about developers setting lower prices outside Steam, which Valve obviously sees as a disadvantage to Steam. Your DLC example also does not make sense and I don’t see that on the list. For a few of the quotes on the list, the type of parity is marked as content, but the overwhelming majority are related to price parity.

Did you look at the page I pointed to? It’s done irrespective of Steam key use. Look at the “Type of Product” column.

Funny because they absolutely use those tactics even to this day. Among other things, they go around and tell developers not to set lower prices or discounts elsewhere if they want to be on Steam (see page 160 here).

GOG’s market share being around 1% compared to Steam’s 80% only proves the point that no amount of great features or love by gamers is enough to challenge the monopoly.

The view in Tuapse.

It’s not like Ukraine would get any help from Iran and its allies even if Zelenskyy fully sided with them though. On the other hand, pandering to the US may have benefits when dealing with someone as narcissistic as Trump. There’s a reason Zelenskyy congratulated him on the election even before the votes were counted, same as how he keeps talking to Trump even after that White House humiliation and many other Trump gestures and decisions favorable to Russia.