Can you trust Valve? Honest criticism of Steam.

TommySoda , 6 hours ago

It’s not that I trust Valve. It’s that I distrust them the least when compared to the other giant companies out there. And I already have 90% of my games on Steam.

TheTechnician27 , 6 hours ago

I trust GOG the most, but Steam is solidly second-most. Guaranteed that if Epic had their way, the PC gaming landscape would be just as trash as the console one, if not moreso.

Valve could definitely go off the deep end after Gabe is gone, and that’s why good third-party competition is still healthy. But for right now, they’re one of the few large companies I’ve seen that aren’t on the enshittification warpath.

neidu2 , 6 hours ago

I too prefer GOG, but the fact that they still haven’t made a native linux port of GOG Galaxy causes me to mostly use Steam. I usually use GOG for indie stuff and thingsI want without it being tied to a launcher or DRM.

Oh, and I recently bought Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 there, as I felt it was about time I gave Chris Sawyer some money for all the fun the pirated version I downloaded 25 years ago have provided.

mesamunefire , 5 hours ago

Yeah they ever get Linux support they will become my favorite.

ms_lane , 5 hours ago

Also quite a few games have worse or non-updated versions on GoG (this isn’t GoG/CDPRojeckt’s fault, but it’s still a pain factor)

Similarly, sometimes the Linux or MacOS ports for a game don’t make it to GoG while the Windows version does.

Peffse , 5 hours ago

I hate how I get charged overseas transaction fees for every purchase.

jqubed , 4 hours ago

Yeah, I feel like I trust Steam as long as Gabe is calling the shots at Valve. I’m sure it helps that they’re a private company. Hopefully whoever takes over after him will have learned the lesson that you can make a nearly unimaginable amount of money in this industry without putting the screws to the consumer. If they were public or let the business “experts” in I’m sure there would be all sorts of moves to extract more money from customers that would end my trust, but I feel like overall I have a couple of decades of experience at this point that Valve isn’t actively trying to hurt me.

HeyJoe , 4 hours ago

Oh crap… you bring up a good point. How long do we think Gave has left? There is absolutely no way Steam won’t get worse after that happens. Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess.

stardust , 6 hours ago

It’s also that they put out a product I actually find value from like Linux support, Steam Input, forums, workshop, etc. I enjoy using Steam because I find it to be a good experience.

It’s like reasons people prefer Android or Apple even if they share the same apps. Really can’t discount the experience simple things like navigation and social features do to add value. Those who dismiss it as unimportant probably share the same views as some MBA who only looks at the numbers and think they can just enter and corner a market through brute force spending.

IronKrill , 5 hours ago

Better alternatives? That is highly subjective. Itch’s store-front experience sucks balls and they lack 98% of the features Steam has. I appreciate their existence and have bought games from them, but language like that will only serve to alienate people that know how much Itch lacks compared to Steam.

Maven , 35 minutes ago

Dear god I just wish itch had the ability to sort games in literally any way at all… Please let me sort all the games I got from bundles holy shit it would make me use the store way more…

Honestly even sorting by platform would be enough just fucking anything please

ampersandrew , 5 hours ago

Valve has a reputation for being the good guy

Because they earned it.

“Big tech monopoly is bad”, but somehow “Valve monopoly is good for the customer”.

I had this discussion with some friends of mine lately. Valve is definitely not perfect, but the steps they’ve taken to be better than their competition, often in the consumer’s favor, is so far and away better than the likes of the other entrenched market leaders: Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. I’m not a fan of them tying Steam Input and Steam VR, among other things, to…Steam, naturally…when they should be independent libraries, but would Sony and Microsoft have started to abandon their walled garden ecosystem strategy of exclusives without Valve leading the way? Not a chance.

Predatory pricing? Not a problem. It’s the industry standard.

But like…it is the industry standard, and it’s definitely not the definition of the word, “predatory”. If they offer the best deal in town, it’s still a good deal. Epic is offering better than that, but if it was so easy to match, you’d see the other platforms doing so as well, including those also trying to compete with Steam, meaning maybe the dollars don’t really make sense in Epic’s world.

Steam is dismantling the entire concept of digital ownership

The hell they are. For one, not every Steam game has DRM. For another, when I buy a game on Steam, any game, I certainly “own” more than when I buy a “digital copy” of a movie or a TV show, of which there is no avenue to actually legally obtain the file that contains the movie. It’s only streaming.

[Before Steam] it was possible to buy a game and just play it without internet access

Perhaps the video author is too young to remember, but online authentication on PC games definitely came before a single third party sold their games on Steam. MMORPGs predate Steam for that matter.

Honestly, this whole video seems to come from someone who’s too young to have lived through this and only read about it. We became happy Steam customers because it was better than what came before. Valve is not responsible for standardizing any of this nonsense and did in fact get to where they are by being better than everyone claiming to be their competition.

For many games sold on Steam, Valve takes a flat 30% cut. Why 30%? I don’t know.

Exactly my point. They picked 30% because they were confident it would scale to cover their costs and because it was a better rate than what the developer could stand to make in brick-and-mortar.

The cost of running an online store is essentially zero.

No, it’s very much not.

Now all of the other tech companies are getting sued for…[these monopolistic practices]…

Because they’re exhibiting monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior. It’s a much harder case to say that Steam has engaged in monopolistic practices compared to Apple requiring that all software on their devices comes from their store. Which is why the Wolfire case is not a slam dunk.

A lot of the other bad faith arguments here are derived from the incorrect idea that running a digital store costs nothing.

I do shop on GOG for lots of the reasons that the video raises, but it’s often still a worse experience than buying on Steam. For instance, I’m on Linux, so while GOG’s refund policy is exceptional, I have to do a lot of legwork to get a game like The Thaumaturge to run in Wine, a game that’s Steam Deck verified and just works on Steam. And the only way I was able to deduce the steps to get it working was by taking a peak at SteamDB to see what the game’s dependencies are.

chronicledmonocle , 4 hours ago

I don’t trust any corporation. However, Valve has treated customers with respect and doesn’t try to bend us over. For that, I’ll keep buying from them.

However, I fear for the day Gabe Newell is no longer running the show.

scratchee , 1 hour ago

I trust Valve to be lazy and swim in their sea of profits rather than go searching for more.

They have thus far avoided serious levels of enshittification because they don’t seem motivated in maximising immediate profits and killing their golden goose.

The day they get replaced by a competitive non-monopoly is the day it becomes a race for the bottom, who can invent the most predatory way to drain profits from users? Nobody else will be able to compete, so they’ll all be copying each other on their way down.

Streaming services all over again.

Not all monopolies are bad.