That doesn't make any of it morally excusable. "The other guy is just as bad!" is an argument for toddlers.
The reason why "the other guy is just as bad" is we've removed real consequences from these companies and people.
Someone should probably be in prison for the Grok CSAM thing for instance.
While we're calling people out, this one is extremely rich: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-... . The old man dying, to me, is not that most extreme part. It's the part where Meta has internal documents about guidelines for minors having romantic relationships with chatbots. WTF! Quoting:
“It is acceptable to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” according to Meta’s “GenAI: Content Risk Standards.” The standards are used by Meta staff and contractors who build and train the company’s generative AI products, defining what they should and shouldn’t treat as permissible chatbot behavior. Meta said it struck that provision after Reuters inquired about the document earlier this month.
"The document seen by Reuters, which exceeds 200 pages, provides examples of “acceptable” chatbot dialogue during romantic role play with a minor. They include: “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed” and “our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss.” Those examples of permissible roleplay with children have also been struck, Meta said."
This isn't a very great defense, either. Apple started the trend of seeking federal protectionism to avoid liability for market damages. Now OpenAI, with their own federal connections, are going to seek to exert political pressure for a settlement. This is a turnabout-is-fair-play moment in the ugly, lawless Thunderdome arena of modern businesses.
Grok and Meta are non-sequiturs here. Their reputation isn't being put under a microscope - Apple's is. And just looking at Apple's history suing businesses like NSO Group and Corellium doesn't instill much confidence in their ability to protect their IP or exact damages outside of a legal settlement. Up against OpenAI, they'll be forced to fold for all the same reasons they had to throw away their (entirely justified) case against NSO Group.
I think you're incorrect here, what's being put under the microscope is not Apple, it's OpenAI and as a consequence a large swath of the AI industry. (It's the same people moving between the same companies -- probably similar ethics at all these places)
Sure - again, this is like saying that "NSO Group is under the microscope" - which they were!
But Apple lacks the political intuition to take NSO Group down. Apple is reliant on the US Federal government, which in-turn is deeply reliant on both NSO Group and Apple. It made all the sense in the world to force the companies to settle, even if it was an absolutely gross miscarriage of justice. We're going to see the same thing happen here; OpenAI will cry foul to the feds, who will inevitably determine that they can't let their investments pickpocket one another. Mr. Trump will send a very strongly-worded voicemail to Sam and Tim, asking them to make amends or face limited federal support in their future ambitions. Both of them will likely settle out-of-court and then announce a partnership to bury the hatchet.
It will be gross, unfair and likely cause irreparable market harm. In other words, forcing Apple to abandon their lawsuit is nothing that the fed hasn't done before.
It sounds like a possibility, I will grant. However, I think having their dirty laundry aired at a time when they're losing enterprise customers to anthropic is going to be extremely painful. "IP theft from a competitor" is absolutely a thing a company is going to look at before they trust all their IP to a provider.
It was either "pay for Apple's development services" or "don't publish apps" which isn't a very competitive or fair option when the App Store can arbitrarily reject you.
Apple Developers could have developed the skills and expertise to create their own products. App development tools and coding is within the skill set of a smart 10 year old child. “Apple Developer” is a job title for those at entry level. If any want to grow up, there’s a whole world of opportunities for them that don’t require permission from Apple, including development for government, academia, and crowdsourced machines.
All the same, that attitude towards developers sucks. We're now viscerally living through the consequences of centralized software distribution, because people ignored developer discontent.
Of course they did: they could have just chosen to not publish apps which would have crippled iOS. The only reason it feels existential is because developers made a Faustian bargain from the beginnning.
That's the thing - even when you choose to pay for Apple's developer program, they can kick you out. This is why Fortnite kickstarted an important discussion around App Store centralization.
Today, Apple removes apps like ICEBlock and Navalny's voting guide; they're directly complicit in using the App Store to steer political agendas. This is what developers were unhappy with, and we're seeing this type of censorship specifically because iOS has no App Store alternative. On macOS, for example, there is no way for Apple to be strongarmed into censorship because users can install any valid binary they choose.
On iOS, developers and users do not have that same choice. There is no natural competition.
Completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand though. Ok, so every massive company (including OpenAI) is built on anti-trust violations. I agree we should go after everyone for this, but whether Apple has done bad stuff is a complete distraction from IP violations at OpenAI
1) Lots of people think they are partly complicit in all the skins trading/gambling that children do, which is basically skirting gambling laws. This has culminated in a current lawsuit in New York which claims they broke gambling laws.
2) They also currently have a large antitrust lawsuit going on, due to them requiring Most Favored Nation pricing while setting a 30% commission fee vs 12% on competitor platforms, which exploits market position and artificially raises game prices to Steam's benefit.
1) This is a legit point although i don't see Valve as a big problem in that area. They invented lootboxes but refused to be as bad as others who followed them. Today with valve these things are restricted purely to cosmetics.
2) is weak. The 30% rate was set in 2003 when Steam had zero market power and was identical to the rate used by Apple, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo.
Valve later added tiered reductions (25% above $10M, 20% above $50M), bringing the effective average to ~24%. The rate moved downward while the platform added massive infrastructure: free multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, global CDN, refunds, and community tools. The 30% buys far more today than it did two decades ago.
Developers can also generate unlimited(or i think now limited to some ratio of steam sales) Steam keys and sell them anywhere else with Valve taking 0% commission. If valve were extracting monopoly rents, this escape route would not exist.
The actual lawsuit targets the PMFN price parity clause not the commission itself. And on PC, which is an open platform where Epic's 12% store gained roughly 3% share in seven years despite hundreds of millions in investment, the monopoly framing falls apart. That 12% is also based on EPIC using lots of anti-competitor and anti-consumers tactics and using Fortnite money to prop up the store.
The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.
Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam, and we still want you to encourage your users to come to steam and buy things. We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity.
Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).
They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.
> should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value
"Very little value"? It's clear that you've never developed a game before. Don't speak so confidently out of complete and total ignorance - it leads to making utterly insane and totally factually wrong statements like this one.
State where the value is then, without just stating features that cause lock-in.
You can't blindly just call me an idiot and say there's loads of value without stating what it is (I mean you technically can, but it's not a brilliant way of getting your point across).
> The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.
Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing. The actual written rule, from the Steamworks documentation, says: "It is important that you don't give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers." It even allows discounts at different times on other stores, as long as Steam gets a comparable offer within a reasonable period. There is no written policy preventing a developer from selling a separate, non-Steam-key version of their game cheaper elsewhere. The claim that Valve informally enforces broader price parity beyond Steam Keys is the unproven allegation at the center of the lawsuit.
And the broader claim, that lower commissions would lead to cheaper games for consumers, has already been tested and disproven. Epic exclusives like Borderlands 3, Control, Metro Exodus, Phoenix Point, and The Division 2 launched with no Steam version at all, complete pricing freedom, and a 12% commission. They were all priced at full retail. The hypothetical £35 game you describe has been possible for almost a decade. Nobody has produced it because developers and publishers set prices, and they choose to maximize their own margin regardless of what the platform takes.
> We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends.
Steamworks matchmaking requires a Steam account and Steam does not force developers to use Steamworks. This is how every platform-specific networking layer works: Xbox Live requires an Xbox account, PlayStation Network requires a PSN account. They offer a free matchmaking service if you want other platforms use other platforms. But i guess it is because of:
> Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront.
Yeah this sounds a lot like:"How dare they deliver a better service in the pursuit of user retention."
> taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026
This lists surface features and ignores the infrastructure: global CDN serving petabytes of downloads, payment processing across dozens of regional payment methods, fraud prevention, Workshop mod hosting, cloud saves, anti-cheat, regional pricing tooling, Proton development, Steam Deck compatibility, discovery algorithms. But the real test is simpler: developers are not forced to use Steam. If the value were as thin as claimed, the lower-priced competitors would be winning. They are not.
30% was set when they were handpicking every title, a home internet line today was a $10,000+ a month DC connection, and they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%.
The fact they whittled away the value they provided time and time again until they became a market of slop and had the audacity to keep a 30% cut is insane.
It's funny that gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is. It turns out trying to deliver value in a market has tough as gaming is not easy, and you will make tons of mistakes... at least compared to extracting nearly every dollar you can and leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship.
> 30% was set when they were handpicking every title ... they could legitimately replace a publisher taking 60%
The "handpicking" era was a walled garden developers spent years protesting. Greenlight was a direct response to developer demands for openness. The "slop" you complain about is what developers asked for. Valve then built discovery tools (reviews, curators, personalized queues, Next Fest) to handle the volume.
> they whittled away the value they provided time and time again
Since 2003 Steam added multiplayer matchmaking, cloud saves, Workshop, Proton, anti-cheat, Remote Play, game recording, Steam Families, regional pricing, refunds, the Steam Deck/SteamOS ecosystem, and ongoing VR investment. The effective commission dropped to ~24% for successful titles through tiered reductions. The rate went down while the platform expanded massively. That is the opposite of whittling away value.
> leaving a skeleton crew to run the ship
Valve grew from 78 employees in 2003 to ~550 today. Revenue per employee is high because the business is efficient. A company "extracting every dollar" does not fund Proton to make Windows games run on Linux at its own expense, develop VR hardware, or sell the Steam Deck near cost.
> gamers villainize Sweeny for being the person that they think Newell is
Sweeney himself explained the difference in 2019:
"It's nearly perfect for consumers already... There is no hope of displacing a dominant storefront solely by adding marginally more store features or a marginally better install experience. These battles will be won on the basis of game supply, consumer prices, and developer revenue sharing."
He admitted Steam was already an excellent product. His conclusion was not to build something better. It was to buy exclusivity and remove games from Steam, forcing consumers onto a store that lacked basic features for years. Epic spent $444M on exclusivity deals in 2020 alone. It wasn't an affinity for some gabe cult that consumers rejected Epic but because Epic offered them fewer choices and a worse experience.
> make $1,100 PS4s as a side hustle
Valve sells hardware to establish new platform categories, not as high-margin "side hustles." Valve's hardware strategy has always been about expanding the Steam ecosystem, not milking unit margins and current hardware shortages fucked them.
Even Valve has its sins with questionable monetization, alleged anti-competitive practices, and of course DRM, it's just, for their size it's challenging to find companies that aren't much worse for these bullet points.
Still, a rare exception of a company that seems worth the openness of one's mind. It's pretty shameful that this alone is worthy of praise, even forgetting the things Valve does that are just generally positive.
Questionable monetization meaning essentially turning a blind eye to and profiting from the gambling industry that skirts regulations and targets kids that is enabled by the market for rare skins in their games (as well as the inherently gambling-like means that those skins are sold in the first place).
I'm not even exaggerating when I say that feels utterly benign these days. Merely just choosing to not police it is certainly a choice, but it's still a far cry from the more active participation in basically exploiting people that is pretty much normalized these days with stuff like sports betting and prediction markets.
I don't say this feeling that it is good, just that it is where it feels like we are at right now.
I do always think it's interesting that the "bad" guys like EA had, for a long time, much friendlier store terms (refunds) than Valve did.
I also never thought that it was very nice of Valve to historically have security practices that are so bad that a group of security experts wrote them a letter begging for better security practices.
The reason why "the other guy is just as bad" is we've removed real consequences from these companies and people.
Someone should probably be in prison for the Grok CSAM thing for instance.
While we're calling people out, this one is extremely rich: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-... . The old man dying, to me, is not that most extreme part. It's the part where Meta has internal documents about guidelines for minors having romantic relationships with chatbots. WTF! Quoting: