They’re getting sued often because they’re greedy sloths suffering the ego trip just like epic did when Fortnite was on the top of the world second only to Minecraft of course.
They’re far from perfect, I’d be the first person to tell you.
But they’re still light-years ahead of anyone else, because they’re perfectly happy just making tons of money instead of trying to squeeze every last cent out of the storefront at our expense.
This is silly. Valve is already a profit driven company. You don’t see the walled garden? The DRM? Valve supports proton because it’s in their monetary interest to do so.
You’re thinking in reverse. Walled gardens keep you in, not out. Without logging into your Steam account (pretending you don’t have one), try to download a mod for a game you bought on GOG and see how it goes for you.
There’s “profit-driven” and “seeking exclusively the profits of the next quarter”. While capitalism has a lot of downsides in the long run, the vast majority of bullshit people get outraged about is due to publicly traded companies being organized in such a way that their CEOs and shareholders sacrifice all sustainability and instead try to loot your kitchen.
Whatever Steam policies you think are bullshit right now (and I can name a couple more, too), they’re not too much in comparison to what they’d be under more typical management.
Since it’s not publicly owned it doesn’t have to focus on quarterly profits.
If it gets sold to Microsoft they’re probably going to start stripping it down to please investors and get rid banking on how most people will be too lazy to leave it. We’ve seen the same thing happen with reddit and twitter. I’m pretty sure enshittification is inevitable.
For sure! There is no real market with exclusives! EGS is the bad apple that may spoil the bunch. Now do steam services also create a pseudo exclusive, yes kinda. But developers do not have to use those, they are just making their life easier. And developers can still do their games on other platforms as well.
EGS can’t compete on features for sure (it really is quite a shit platform), but they would be very competitive if their 12% fee (vs. Steams 30% fee) could be passed to buyers as lower prices. As it stands, Valve’s policies essentially strongarms the market to prohibit this (publishers selling on Steam may not have a lower price on a different platform, or the game can be de-listed from Steam). The Wolfire v. Valve case is highly relevent here.
My plea is for you not to get mad at Epic for being shit. We should be accepting of crappy platforms if their fees reflect that (Epic charges 40% what Steam does). Focus your frustration at Valve for preventing the market from fairly allowing you select the quality of the platform you’d like to pay for.
I’d be a lot more willing to root for epic if they had spent any time at all making EGS preferable. I would prefer steam over their mess even if EGS was 20% cheaper all the time. Tho I go for GOG over either of them whenever possible.
Gabe is helping, sure, but he isn’t holding up gaming. People were gaming on Linux before Proton even existed, myself included. Also, even if Valve went away completely, Proton is open-source and there are people like GloriousEggroll who work on Proton entirely as a community member. Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source. All the progress made on Proton won’t suddenly disappear, all the games that were previously playable on Proton will still be playable on Proton.
It’s a somewhat reasonable fear but it’s not a realistic fear. Proton isn’t going anywhere.
Additionally, if Steam would start to morph into what is posted here, it would simply be integrated into Heroic and / or lutris just as Epic is right now. There would be no need to actually launch steam anymore but just use it as a background service to pipe your games into something else.
Even if they want to open-source it, an issue is the amount of work of organizing the repository, making sure it’s properly organized and doesn’t have any files they don’t want to distribute, and then maintaining that with future versions.
75 years of nation-wide life expectancy is also likely to include early deaths due to accidents, cancer and such. People who die of “old age” typically do later than 75.
When people talks about life expectancy 99.99% of the time they mean life expectancy at birth, at every year the life expectancy change. Using this life table someone with 61 years, have a life expectancy of 19.7 years, that means he’s expected to live until he’s 80.
Yep, and that was true even going all the way back through history. People weren’t routinely dying in their 30s or whatever before modern medicine; it’s just that a lot more of them were dying in infancy/early childhood and that brought down the average. (That’s the situation anti-vaxxers are trying to go back to, BTW.)
It is funny that people think Valve would sell out instead of becoming the big evil.
As Valve continues developing an OS agnostic platform, they start building into various tools that require a Steam account to play games in order to defend their app store. Maybe they buy Unity and make it a Steam exclusive, maybe they make their own engine that can be played on Windows or Linux.
Integrate Chromecast technology to make a console like multimedia device to compete against XBox and PlayStation. Then, start selling video and integrating streaming access.
Push the Steam Store to become bigger. Sure, you aren’t forced to use the Steam Store on most Valve developed hardware, but it is default.
Then, like Google did with Android, pull the tech stack from the open source tools to become wholely integrated with Steam Services.
Most of this already exists and they haven’t taken that tack, though. SteamOS is just Arch and KDE, with access to anything Arch has access to. If you don’t like that, Valve made it trivial to put another OS on the Deck, like Bazzite.
Steam Play is already a streaming technology, which works great and is free to use and has been for like at least a decade.
Steam Store is already gigantic, despite having some well funded competition who has to resort to exclusives and free game giveaways to entice users. It’s already the de facto default game store for PC, and provides lots of extra features beyond just game delivery.
Most of the technology Steam uses (like Proton or GameScope or Arch) are open-source. We can (and do) fork their work for our own purposes regularly.
I don’t think Valve is perfect, but I do think they value their open approach to technology. I think as long as the company is never publicly traded, I would imagine anyone who currently works at Valve would share that attitude with GabeN, otherwise I imagine they wouldn’t work there long.
If they go public and have to report to shareholders, then I completely agree that the enshittification will be swift and merciless. I hope Gabe makes Valve an employee-owned co-op or something when he decides to retire. I can only imagine he has strong plans for the transition of power.
I’m commenting more on how Valve could become evil while maintaining and expanding its markets. Part of that is using open source as a way to reduce development costs while still controlling and monetizing key parts of the tech stack.
You know, as long as their management structure stays relatively similar to what it is, I think I’d be more fine with them being the big evil, compared to basically anyone else.
Edit: and also as long as they stay a private company, that would also be a big concern, but I guess that’s maybe the same as saying their management structure stays the same
Yeah hate to say it but by the time this golden age ends with valve I’ll prob either not be gaming as much anyway or to your point have enough that I won’t really care about the newer games.
I mean, I’m not even bummed! Life has gotten very busy, but I have about 10 old standbys in multiple genres. When time allows, I can get tons of enjoyment out of them.
I look forward to playing them years into the future and don’t feel limited. It’s rare that a new game piques my interest and rarer that it hits my “list”
Well, they’re a game developer. And they own GOG. GOG as a subsidiary is a digital distributor of prepackaged digital content. Developing a system that allows people to find a digital item, pay for it, and then download it, is hilariously, vastly different than developing a compatibility layer for games developed for one operating system to run on another. Like…the former is straight up just basic web development. The latter is hardcore systems programming. They are worlds apart.
The ship has sailed about 4 times now, gog galaxy on Linux has constantly been at the top of requests but we made a stinky about the Witcher 2 so gog and epic will forever hold the community as not worth it. Now the community has done the leg work they have no reason to mess about with translating all those .net calls
I used to support them but when they opened the floodgates to trash games I didn’t get much reason to stick around. I miss and crave curation over volume. If both stores have heaps of garbage and steam has far better Linux support with valve actively contributing to and improving the Linux ecosystem… I’m going steam most of the time now.
Sad as in theory I would support gog more but it seems like they’ve discarded what made them special.
Im wondering how does the excess amount of games offered by a store affect your experience. How would you even notice that?
And - that they were a more closed store was what made them special?
Then I think of GOG I think about licencing, how I actually own a game purchased, how I have a key for it, how I’ll still own that game even of GOG stops existing. Thats not true for any of the other stores (outside of physical copies if some sell them, idk).
I notice it because the signal drowns out the noise. It’s so hard to browse or find interesting new games made by passionate devs because so much low-effort barely-games and hentai visual novels flood it all out.
I’m all for adult sex games but jfc it’s just sad how awful and unending their presence is.
Well thankfully Gabe has lost a ton of weight in recent years. Man is looking absolutely svelte these days. Here’s hoping he has many more years of good health.
I’m also guessing he’ll hand pick a successor that will carry on his views, instead of dying in office and having some kind of CEO election free-for-all.
I think Gabe has been getting healthy lately. Last picture I saw of him he was looking like he lost a lot of weight. Maybe repost this in 10 years and then we can panic.
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