Valve certainly isn’t perfect, and I used to buy more games on GOG. But then I noticed those games, which initially had Linux support, were no longer getting updated or working properly on distros. Their Linux support just kind of fizzled out.
On the flipside, even in it’s early days, Steam/Proton made Linux gaming such a far nicer experience. If Proton were proprietary, I would stay away from Steam still. But what Valve is doing for Linux and free and open-source software is a net good right now, and that is worth supporting.
There are things that suck about Steam, like the drm. Just the other day I had a game running and also tried to run a second game through GameNative only to find Steam only allows me to run one game at a time, dumb. And there will probably be a day when Valve pulls some kind of enshittified bait and switch like Google is doing with Android right now.
And when that day comes it will be necessary to fork and forget them. But until then I’ll enjoy the ride.
Technically they only block the second game launch if both are online. If you switch steam to offline mode, you can launch as many games as you want.
That’s slightly better, but the salient question is, how would these things function in system that overall is more rights respecting and built on free software principles? It’s still an anti-feature, it’s still drm, and it’s still a component of a part of Steam that is proprietary.
While Steam is doing a lot of good, it can’t be forgotten that the majority of their systems are still not free software, and still fall far short of a more ideal platform.
What’d be really nice to see is maybe something like Bazaar but with a gaming focus. A much more open storefront that can still allow game devs to be compensated for their work.
Gabe doesn’t do a lot of interviews and mostly keeps out of the public eye. Elon Musk also had a lot of fans until he started running his mouth too much and revealing who he really is.
We already know a bit about Valve’s internal culture due to leaks and interviews, and it’s dysfunctional but in a completely different way from almost every other company.
Thanks to having a small headcount plus more money than God, Valve has zero (internal) pressure to release, and has embraced a culture of freedom where developers can work on whatever they want. This has led to tons of Valve projects getting 80% finished before being abandoned once they reach the final stages of development and are no longer fun to work on. Every release they’ve managed since Steam took off has been due to a few major players with the charisma to swing others to join their pet projects and stay for the long haul.
In a rarity for the field, I’m not aware of any toxicity issues in Valve’s workplace or a single complaint about Gabe himself. Those who’ve quit have nearly always said it’s because their passion project got canned due to it being so hard to get anything past the finish line. Other than that, employees seem to love working there (the massive paycheck probably helps too).
Gabe seems to be held in high regard, even though the internal structure he’s cultivated is such a mess. And I still prefer this clusterfuck of inefficiency to literally any other AAA developer.
Tbf, compared to most modern CEOs, Gabe Newell is a saint. I suppose in a different world where we aren’t in the second gilded age, he might be more hated
He isn’t perfect but he represents what could work about capitalism if there were proper safeguards. With him, he’s governed by his own choices or morals, so the current system doesn’t work because most rich people don’t care. Gabe:
Provides a good base product
The product is based on being ran on open hardware that you own.
Uses his own money to advance support for a true open standard (Linux) because Windows is going down the toilet for UX.
Creates his own hardware that works with the product to give a walled garden experience if you want that. Or you can install your own operating system on the hardware, or install his operating system on other hardware, he doesn’t care.
Doesn’t have anticompetitive practices with people that make a similar product, focusing on being the best product.
Incorporates ease of use for other products into his product (PlayStation controllers, adding non steam games that are able to use most of the same features via Steam including Proton).
Treats employees well.
Is generous with the refund policy.
And guess what? Everyone is happy. He’s happy and rich AF, his employees are happy, his customers are happy, his competition is happy because he’s not purposefully throttling them (though they probably aren’t happy he’s eating their lunch because customers don’t want them). The system can work for everyone if it is fair. We just need to demand these safeguards because even Gabe could change his mind at any time.
100% ^^ this right here.
Valve is one of the very few big companies I am totally fine spending money with. The value proposition is entirely focused on the products and how the customer, me, gets the most from them. No artificial scarcity, no protectionist bullshit, no outrageously exploitative EULA or obvious shafting of vendors. They focused on creating something useful and functional, and they profit from it. Bravo.
And they have been doing this for decades. The first PC I installed Steam on was a Celeron with a Voodoo2 GPU in it.
I have to do business with other companies because they have driven other competitors out of business. I get to do business with Valve.
He’s a billionaire. There are no good ones. Some are worse than others, but none are good. It’s a disgusting amount of hoarded wealth.
I think you’re missing the point. The meme implies that liking Steam is some kind of contradiction to being anticapitalist (or at least anti-status quo of ridiculous unchecked capitalism). It’s not a contradiction because the way Gabe runs his business is good. It is the way all businesses should be ran: pro consumer, pro employee, pro competition/pro free market, and not caught up in the gambling fiasco that is the stock market. If other businesses were not so focused on fucking over as many people as possible, they could be just as successful as Gabe.
Should it be POSSIBLE to be that successful? You don’t think so, and I tend to agree. But pulling for a 90% tax rate after a certain point is in no way in opposition to praising fair business practices. They’re directly related.
If Steam becomes an awful experience, guess what? I won’t sing its praises to people I know and I’ll find something better. Loyalty goes both ways.
But pulling for a 90% tax rate after a certain point is in no way in opposition to praising fair business practices. They’re directly related.
Back in the times that people keep telling me were great, that was the norm. Cutting taxes for the money makers is the entire reason we’re in this mess. Instead of reinvesting money in the company or the country, it’s being boarded and sat on to make number go up.
You are correct.
It’s not a contradiction because the way Gabe runs his business is good.
It… Very much is. He runs a business that doesn’t make people piss in bottles. Great, but that’s a low bar.
He runs a business that looks after customers, that’s great but Amazon does that too so I consider it a cost of doing the billions in trade that he does and a cost of effective monopoly maintenance. If they weren’t pro consumer folks might actually leave.
He pays his employees better than others, great, but he’s sitting on 9 billion in wealth so let’s not pretend he couldn’t pay them more or squeeze small developers less than 30% (and he’s probably squeezing them more than big houses).
You can’t have that much money and be ethical. You can be less shitty than other billionaires but again that’s a low, low bar.
but Amazon [looks after customers] too
This is news to me
Amazon customer service has been “good.” Any time theres an issue they just ship a new one and tell you to keep the old one. I know lots of people who speak extremely highly of them, do you think they got so big treating their paying customers like shit?
Wait you’re telling me the guy that pioneered loot crates and owns like 8 yachts isn’t a good person?
But he made that fun game that one time!
It shows how low the bar is. We can eat him last.
Leave gabe alone. Leave him alooonee.
do NOT let this guy lead the revolution
He doesn’t abuse his power as much as most billionaires, but he certainly does abuse it.
He’s not worthy of idolization, no billionaire is. No person is.
Gabe worshipping is cringe. he’s a dude. have some self respect.
capitalist. he’s not a dude.
It’s amazing how many people drop the whole “nobody becomes a billionaire by being a good person” rhetoric as soon as you mention their pet wholesome chungus billionaire.
You guys are just as bad as the people that defend musk because “he’s real life Tony Stark! He makes rockets and electric cars!!!”
Making a company that revolutionizes how games are sold around the world and markedly for the better is a better reason for having dragons hoards than manipulating the stock market. There are degrees to douchebaggery.
You sound like a real person, so let me say, there’s no time to go into depth about the issue, but Valve is a billion dollar company, and you only become a billion dollar company by acting like a billion dollar company. And those actions have been as toxic and exploitative and amoral as any other.
It just so happens that Valve, exactly like early Amazon, puts the client first. They are really good to you, the 1st-world country buying gamer. They turn their exploitation towards the rest of the economy, and play by the rules.
Playing by the rules is as evil as the rules are, and boy, do we live in bad rules.
If you want, go looking around for their plentiful controversies, like their anti-competitive practices, and attempts to enforce prices in other stores. They just pull out the moment that Shit gets any attention, and walk back.
their anti-competitive practices
Do you have any examples? For reference, Steam does allow developers to list games on Steam and other platforms, and even to have lower prices on the other platforms. I haven’t been able to find any true examples of anti-competitive practices by Steam.
I don’t have a strong hate for Valve, but I’m fairly certain that they often DO have contracts that demand their store gets the lowest price available from at least some game developers. So if you offer a game for lower on Epic, you also have to drop your price to match it on Steam. There may be “sales” caveats in there, but I do think that’s generally the rule in at least many cases.
In fact, I think they’ve been sued over that before. (Maybe they changed the policy after the lawsuit? I’m honestly not certain; sorry.) The argument went that if a developer could offer the game for $40 to everyone, then the storefronts could argue over their own markup, and maybe other storefronts would be willing to take less than Valve does. But as it is, Valve artificially keeps prices high on other storefronts with this approach to contracts.
If your experience is different I respect that, but I don’t think that’s universal.
I’m fairly certain
Do you have something to show for it or not?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o
The lawsuit - filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London - alleges Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms.
Also
It claims that as Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam, if they’ve bought the initial game through the platform it is essentially “locking in” users to continue making purchases there.
It was filed in 2024, and given approval to go to trial at the beginning of this year. It hasn’t happened yet.
/Edit: The other person responding to this suggests that the “you can’t charge lower elsewhere” clause exists when you use certain Steam features. (Selling Steam keys, using Steam’s multiplayer backend.) And if that’s the case that seems pretty reasonable to me. (I hear they’re VERY kind about keys actually.) But I hope you’ll understand that when articles I see why the case don’t mention them, I don’t know that’s the case.
At the same time, I would almost understand outlets that don’t cover digital goods like this may not understand this, or may not see the importance of them. So maybe they’ve dropped the ball here.
I’m fairly certain that they often DO have contracts that demand their store gets the lowest price available from at least some game developers.
There is a paragraph in their store contract that specifically demands price matching with other stores, but only if you sell steam keys on other stores or use the valve infrastructure for multiplayer. How its enforced is another question, but the rule itself is fair.
Maybe big studios have different contracts, but I at least haven’t heard anything contrary.
And you may well be completely on point. I don’t recall hearing those specifics in articles I’ve read, but at the same time, some large outlets may not be familiar enough with the industry to recognize the importance of Steam keys to the argument.
Because I posted it elsewhere, in going to repost an example of the coverage of those lawsuits:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o
The lawsuit - filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London - alleges Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms.
Also
It claims that as Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam, if they’ve bought the initial game through the platform it is essentially “locking in” users to continue making purchases there.
It was filed in 2024, and given approval to go to trial at the beginning of this year. It hasn’t happened yet.
Would you be embarrassed to learn that you’re responding to an AI? Why or why not?
markedly for the better
Yeah I’m so glad I don’t actually own any of the games in my steam library.
Yes. When I first opened my account in 2016, the second game I bought had advertised Linux support, but did not run on the first 2 distros I tested. On the third distro, it ran but I couldn’t play with Windows users, so it was useless to me. I got a full refund.
Yes. They RMAd my left index controller a year out of warranty, in addition to always replying within hours. Literally never had a better support experience.
Meta on the other hand is a slew of incompetent fucks that have zero power, until you finally get pushed through to their “specialist team” who takes a fucking full day for EACH REPLY, and even then I had to basically demand a refund for something that was never shipped to me, and (once I bought one later) discovered it literally could not have even fit in the box they sent the other shit in.
Yeah …? It was very easy and automated. Same as it is now.
Thanks for your opinion, random ass Valve salesperson.
He got there because every bad person that tried to stop him was unbelievably incompetent. He is the exception that proves the rule.
I hope his boots are tasty
Sorry, Gabe isn’t great either. He just knows not to constantly fuck over your consumers everyday to make loads of money. He’s on the list, lower on it, but still.
he simply cant - he dont have those nintendo/microsoft/sony resources. he knows if he starts fucking around - he will find out and quickly.
but also - his yacht - thats for oceanography, I hold a believe that he might be doing more like commander Cousteu type of thing and not rich guy (hookers/cocaine) type of thing . and I can get behind that
He could easily fleece his users in so many ways if he wanted to. Many of us are in so deep with Steam that it would take something truly heinous to pry us away from our game libraries, and the next-best service to Steam is absolute dog shit.
Saying he can’t make more evil, exploitative choices because it would be bad business ignores the fact that nearly every modern company makes evil, exploitative choices no matter how little business sense it makes. Honestly, I’m exhausted by just how rarely companies act in their own self interest and just let us continue giving them money instead of shooting themselves in the foot.
Maybe he could build a train. Idk, seems like I’m a vacuum that’s probably the sensible thing to do. Maybe he could donate it directly from his income (that’s actually real income of course, we can’t tax those loans you took out to pay for said boat) directly in charge of fixing things up for people.
Tldr, fuck his “science boat”. Build some goddamn houses for people. Gates is a bastard but Gaben gets a “charity” pass?
srry on my scale of bad rich people, - Gaben hes just not on it.
its a gaming platform, not forced on you.bezos on the other hand - hes very high.
I’ve made this comparison against Taylor Swift and it works for Gaben too. There is no ethical way for an individual person to acquire more than a billion dollars, full stop. That said, there are billionaires who have come across their fortunes a little more honestly than others. Taylor Swift and Gaben are good examples of that. So if/when the guillotine comes out I hope Taylor S. and Gaben won’t be on the chopping block and will relinquish a lot of their wealth. Unlike Peter Theil who is just evil.
Hard agree! Although my personal version is less about acquiring than having.
Even if someone acquired a billion through the most ethical means possible, the simple fact that they are holding onto that disgustingly imbalanced amount of wealth is unethical.
If he wasn’t fucking over his consumers, he wouldn’t be able to spend 1000 million on fancy boats.
I feel most sorry for small developers having to hand over 30% of their entire work’s value to “uncle Gabe” who’s already sitting on over 9 billion. Fuck that noise.
Most of those small developers wouldn’t have been able to make a dime trying to get their games into physical stores.
That’s not to say it should be this way, but it could be a lot worse.
Yeah I agree that steam offers them a decent marketplace and we’re definitely seeing lots of great games from smaller studios or individuals as a result.
I’d prefer if sales were “taxed” lower than 30% up to a given threshold instead of fluffing Gabe’s already massive bank balance though.
Like 10% on your first 50K, sliding scale upwards after that for example. I’m spitballing but you get the idea I hope. He just doesn’t need that level of payout from smaller folks.
Yep, I remember the paid mods fiasco
Guillotine ALL billionaires
Is this just blind zeal for dogma, or do you have any scrap of justification to mob justice this guy? To be blunt, I can point to evils that Gabe is responsible for, and if you can cite one, I’ll support ya - but if you’re oversimplifying “rich = evil” because it’s a convenient and fun, than you’re as evil as those you’d behead.
In the wake of the French revolution many good people died for the crime of being distantly related to a noble. After we murder a few billionaires, can we take their money and make a gift of it - we could then gift billions of dollars to anyone we don’t like and murder them for being a billionaire! It’s a perfect system! </s>
Yes. Gabe is rich - but honestly their behavior is by and large the practical example by which other billionaires are condemned. If all billionaires were as responsible as Gabe, society would be much less inclined to grab their pitchforks in the first place - we’d still have a broken system that needs fixing, but without gaudily selfish billionaires I’d be optimistic that it could be fixed without bloodshed.
All rich people are evil, it’s obvious. If you end up with a lot of money and you’re somehow not evil, you’ll give it away instead of becoming rich.
I don’t believe you. I believe you’re earnest, I just also believe you’re wrong. If you grew up in a modern industrialized nation with luxuries like plumbing, sub millimeter precision engineering, electricity, internet - are you suggesting we tear those things down because others don’t have access to them? 'Cause if no, I have news for ya, buddy - by the standards of history, you’re exceedingly rich. You wouldn’t understand though because all rich people are evil, obviously. 🙄
There’s a difference to having plumbing and having useless shit like holiday houses, private swimming pools, luxury cars, gold tat etc. And a multi-millionaire like Gabe Newell can even buy all of that and still have a lot of spare money to pay off anyone for any reason. Why would any single person be entitled to that?
They shouldn’t, but Mr. Newell didn’t invent capitalism. I blame coffee and the enlightenment for that. And for all the flaws it brings, it’s still a step up from feudalism.
Valve found a niche in the gaming industry. Gabe created a good product and stewarded it well. He has an industry gold standard stance on piracy and for as much he has made Valve’s product indispensably useful, their product fosters indie developers and small creators in ways the competition struggles to play catch-up on. By biggest frustration with the guy is largely about worrying about what happens when he steps down and is replaced by someone else.
For all this, the system has showered him with money. A frankly stupid amount of money. And for that, you assert he should die. Do you think if we Thanos snap away all the billionaires that the system which creates them will automatically go with them? If it does are you naïve enough to think that it would easily be replaced by something better in the power vacuum that follows?
The bottom line is: there’s no shortage of billionaires who deserve a good pruning. Plenty of uncontroversial targets whose absence would send a clear message. Choosing Gabe Newell as a target of convenience does far more damage than help. I’m not saying don’t murder monsters, I’m saying don’t let bloodlust lead you to shooting yourself in the foot.
Im not sure its smart to reply to this st all ley alone right as i wake up but ill bite.
First off. It is fundamentally immoral to have such wealth. Last i looked the conservative estimate to end homelessness in the us was like $10b. Gabe newell alone could do that and then he and his lineage could still live in excessive insane luxury with no issues for generations.
Secondly, you can NOT obtain such wealth without abusing others. At best, youre just not paying a fair share. No single person can do so much work or is so uniquely gifted or whatever else capitalism would have you believe. Not even remotely close.
Third. Fuck his predatory gambling that feeds off the addicts and kids
Thank you for your reply. I like it more than @wylinka@szmer.info’s. Sorry for the delay - turns out living in a MAGA hellscape sometimes hurts your friends and family, who coulda guessed? 🤔😅 Got busy helping friends and decided that’s more important than arguing with strangers.
It is fundamentally immoral to have such wealth.
I’m unconvinced by this argument. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but this is more of an armchair philosophy discussion than a justification to kill someone. Capitalism, by its nature, concentrates wealth. It “picks winners” as a function of its structure. Murdering rich people, while cathartic, is treating the symptom and not the cause.
I believe, in today’s environment, once we start murdering people, it’ll be hard to stop. All the evil people in ICE will quietly switch hats because murdering rich people is more viscerally satisfying than murdering immigrants (but they’ll take what they can get, amiright? 🙄). From there - the concept of “billionaires” becomes fuzzy - a billion is an arbitrary number. Especially fuzzy if the dollar continues to weaken as the international fiat currency.
Secondly, you can NOT obtain such wealth without abusing others.
I can get behind this as a principal, but it’s still incredibly weak. Can you prove that it’s not possible to fairly gain that much wealth without abuse? That sounds like a statement of faith to me, and it relies on luck having some mystical upper bound that in practice has never been shown to exist.
On a more practical level - is GabeN really the poster child you want for this principle? How he made his money is pretty simple: he makes a 30% cut of every Steam sale and he made a bunch selling hats in TF2. Sure, we can quibble on if 30% is too high or not - but it’s not really backroom wheeling and dealing. There’s nothing particularly shady here. Or rather, if this is the hill you want to murder on, you’ll have to bring more evidence.
Similarly, how he uses his money matters - Tim Apple and Microslop are marching us into a tech powered surveillance state. Mr Newell has used his influence to encourage people to use Linux and every product he releases is the most open available. Pop quiz: Name some Nintendo exclusive titles. Playstation? Xbox? Cool. Name some Steam exclusives. Much shorter list. But it is a markedly better track record than many others. As a businessman, he seems to embody the philosophy of ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. Does this make him a saint? I don’t know. But it also doesn’t make me eager to throw the guy to the wolves.
Third. Fuck his predatory gambling that feeds off the addicts and kids
Ya know what? Fuck this guy. I believe I said, “and if you can cite one, I’ll support ya”. This is absolutely one of his largest evils. I would not mind organizing around removing gambling’s influence in the economy and Gabe’s hands are absolutely bloody in this. Not for his TF2 hats (I mean, they don’t help his case) - but for all the other lootbox crap Steam definitely makes it’s cut on. If such a mob shows up at his door and Gabe can’t appease them, I wouldn’t lose much sleep over it. I might privately suspect that if such a murderous coalition were to start to coalesce, GabeN would likely be a smart cookie and would course correct their business - but if such remedy failed to materialize in time to save his life, I wouldn’t lose much sleep.
I am more concerned about what types of murderous mobs I unleash on the world. “Kill all Billionaires” makes a protest potest poster, but as a policy is ripe for abuse. The first things that will happen is many clever rich people will cleverly hide their riches better (not all, but enough of them will do well enough to effectively escape justice in this life), moreso, many clever billionaires will use their influence to set up other billionaires, which turns the whole apparatus back into a tool for the rich.
Anyways, thanks for listening. Would love to know your thoughts.
I’ve literally never seen any of these so-called “simps”
Like, the internet is a big place and I’m sure some of them exist, but you could make that argument about any view at all. I see way more hatred for these alleged simps than the simps themselves.
Steam, and Valve, operate in a capitalist system. They’ve been successful. They are similar to a handful of other companies, like Costco, that seem to understand that in order for capitalism to be sustainable, corporations need tk govern themselves and show restraint. They need to focus not on merely achieving profit for ownership this quarter, but on establishing long-term and stable business relationships with all of their stakeholders. Customers, emplpyees, suppliers, governments, lenders, the planet itself.
The biggest failure of capitalism is that the system does not incentivize for any of this. Which is why such corporations are so rare.
For capitalism to be “good” basically everyone would have to be a saint. That’s why something better than capitalism is needed, because that is far from the case, and actually impossible
Steam extracts money from their customers and suppliers at an insane profit ratio and has barely any employees. You are one of the simps bro.
Game stores are money printing machines. Gaben isn’t your friend looking out for you, he probably laughs about peasants like you. You are a money bag waiting to be sucked dry.
Steam also provides value by acting as an intermediary.
There were 21,503 games released on Steam last year. How the hell is a consumer supposed tk make informed purchasing decisions with all that? Steam is a discovery platform which connects a game with the individuals most likely to buy that game.
It is also a central launcher to organize and manage libraries, including non-steam games. It’s easy to move games between drives, and to use the various library tools to pick out what I want to play.
Then there’s Proton, a completely free comlatability layer for Linux that has allowed me to mostly stop using Windows.
There’s the Steam Workshop, which is far and away my preferred method to mod games. It’s so much easier to click a button to add a mod tk Cities Skylines or Civ 6 than it is to fuck around with Nexus Mods and a mod manager for Skyrim.
Steam is a centralized location for support from developers. It also is convenient tk keep track of updates.
Steam Remote Play is probably the single most umpactful thing to my gaming in the past decade. I just need my 1 gaming desktop and I find myself playing on my Shield in my living room, my phone in bed, my tablet on my exercise bike, my Steam Deck on the porch, or even over at my friend’s house on an old laptop. All for free, when I’ve never even be able to get Moonlight or Sunshine to work at all in my desktop.
Steam has social features like friends lists, chat, and even voice, which is relevant with how shitty Discord has been as a company lately. Support for family sharing and multiplayer is phenomenal.
It is not like Steam is just pocketing a bunch of money and not doing anything. They beat out not just their legitimate competitors, but even piracy, because they provide better value for the consumer. They do a lot of tasks that publishers otherwise would have to handle themselves, saving them costs.
And I’m sure there are more features that I’m forgetting kr that I don’t bother with, but other people find valuable.
I do think they should be heavily regulated, but there hasn’t really been much to regulate with them. They had a minor lawsuit in Australia early on relating to the verbiage displayed about refund policy. I don’t like loot boxes, but my solution is… I don’t buy them, and usually I don’t even buy games with them.
There were 21,503 products released on Amazon last year. How the hell is a consumer supposed tk make informed purchasing decisions with all that? Amazon is a discovery platform which connects a product with the individuals most likely to buy that product.
I’ll be a lot more open to comparing Valve with Amazon when I hear reports of Valve employees pissing in bottles
I see the point you’re trying to make but that is a false equivalence for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest being that Amazon is well known to treat their workforce like crap and profit at their expense. Valve does not do that. On top of that Amazon dominated the market by illegally keeping prices lower than everyone else using backroom deals, using the Amazon basics label to undercut competition (a lot of times by making deals with the factories making those products,) and buying up competition.
Valve on the other hand just made the best service and keeps releasing features that actually help consumers and developers. I’m not saying they’re like some angelic company that has done no wrong, but they certainly are nowhere near the levels of Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, etc.
“false equivalence” Gives no logical reason why
I literally gave multiple reasons right after that. Did you just stop reading after those 2 words?
And none of those reasons were valid to the person’s point, yet morons upvoted you without a single thought rattling in their brain.
The Amazon store is pretty bad at any kind of product discovery or helping me make informed decisions. There’s way too much junk there, reviews are mostly useless, and there’s no guarantee of actually receiving the product as advertised.
The key difference is that Gabe doesn’t make it a habit to dick over people. Aside from the MasterVisa problems and the gambling, Steam is pretty awesome.
Yeah it’s not like he popularised the model of only owning a licence to a game, not the game it self, popularised lootboxes and keys and made tons of money of pushing gambling on kids, had to sued into having a refund policy, popularised early access as a business model, takes a huge 30% of profits of other people’s labour, and was the first to fold to puritanicals that wouldnted him to ban certain games from the platform or anything like that.
Yeah lord Gaben is my wholesome good guy billionaire.
Please list all the other software you still buy from a box on a shelf at a store. The only one I can think of would be a copy of windows (on a USB stick!) or physical movies, and that’s a shadow of its former self even though the physical media usually comes with a key for a streamable copy.
I get the sentiment, but physical media was a dead end the second broadband became viable. I’m glad vinyl made a kind of a comeback, but come on, even consoles are digital-first nowadays.
You’re not wrong that physical media was essentially doomed, and arguably it should have been as digital distribution is faster, easier, and objectively better for the planet (look into the environmental cost of manufacturing vinyl records, for example)
But who popularized the current dominant model of “you’re only buying access, not the game itself”? And before you go on about how it would be impossible to make a digital equivalent to distribution equivalent to purchasing physical media, remember gog exists and has been around and successful for almost 2 decades now
The secret sauce there is linux support. It may sound like a marginal thing, but Valve has been working on making Linux gaming viable for over a decade now and it’s paying off in spades. GOG exists, sure, but they’re a fraction of Valves influence for a reason. Besides, there was a DRM free distribution chain before GoG that everyone used, it was called piracy.
valves Linux support is objectively good but it doesn’t magically undo establishing the anti consumer guidelines that now dominate the industry
Piracy also existed before (and after) steam, what’s your point?
I don’t buy any software FOSS all the way baby.
Yeah physical media died, and guess who was leading the charge on licence based media a decade before streaming was a thing?
My steam key to download steam came with my physical copy of half life 2. I was there when the old magic was written, and that HL2 box was the last physical game I ever bought for my PC. For the decade before that, almost all my games were also digital copies, just not legit ones ;) And that’s the part you’re missing. Steam and Netflix were both easier and higher quality than pirating and cheap enough to justify. Netflix decided to milk that for all its worth, but Valve stuck to its plan and has consistently offered a very good alternative to piracy, which won over a generation of digital media hoarders.
So you think having to buy a unique licence for every game is a better alternative than being able to buy an actual copy of a game that you own, second hand for a fraction of the price?
Because thats the argument here, not comparing them to netflix, comparing steam to a model where you actually own the media you buy and can do what you want with it.
Middlemen are assholes.
Gaben is the only capitalists I simp for. He’s what capitalism is supposed to be, not what it actually is.
Gabe is living proof that the issue is not the money or drive to make it on its own that is a problem. Its the building ones entire life and reason for being around making as much money as possible no matter what you have to do that is the issue.
In my opinion if someones only qualification for being in charge of a business is having an MBA and having been in management at other places then that are grossly unqualified to be in charge of anything outside of their own finances.
Yeah steam hasn’t enshitified. The shit bits (forums) were always shit and the rest has stayed the same.
They made a service that works and makes money and that’s enough. Sure it’s a shit load of money, but if it was any of the usual public companies it would have been destroyed by annual KPIs by now
he just happens to run a business that is beloved by its customers and that fact is not lost on him
