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sproid ,

That post is pure hysteria. First no one knows when Gabe is going to die, and even if he live very long he may step down due to old age still.

  • also worrying so much about something that may happen 14 years later according to op is unnecessary and distorted thinking.
  • why assume there is going to be a power vacuum? can’t he and his leadership make pans of succession?
  • then believing a whole made-up story going down the rabbit hole of the worst case scenario is again unnecessary and distorted thinking. Is okay to think of worst case scenarios but to take them as if they were real is gifting ourselves anxiety for free.
  • in any case, the mental exercise of thinking of some undesirable possibilities allow us to take precautions and prepare to the extend that is appropriate and reachable. Which would be the most efficient behavior that thwarts “actual fear” as OP writes it.
demizerone ,

Valve doesn’t need infinite growth to survive wallstreet. Proton is open source and very popular.

MoonMoon ,

Deep discounts are locked behind a subscription

HaiZhung ,

What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise transcends human existence in 2024.

Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?

The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.

Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).

TCB13 ,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.

Come again? Steam is enshitifed af. from forcing CS:GO players to move to CS:2 to adding DRM left and right, they do it all. They even release remasters of old games that are essentially always broken one or another.

GhostTheToast ,

Steam doesn’t control the quality of remasters. That’s up to publishers. I’m not the most active gamer and might have missed something, but didn’t valve release a major revamp to the way the Library and Store were layed out in the past year or two? They also recently expanded family sharing and remote co-op. The only L I can remember in recent memory is the whole “You can’t leave your games to another person when you die”

GhostTheToast ,

Based take imo. I think many posters fail realize the insane amount of money steam makes Valve. Rough estimates are that Steam sold 400 million games last year. Average cost for a game is ~$15.5. Steam has a platform fee of 30%. That means that, roughly, Steam made Valve ~1.86 billion dollars just through the sell of games. Not considering microtransactions or hardware sells. Reportedly, Valve made 1 billion dollars just off cases from CS2 crate openings. Let’s just give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume they made $5 billion dollars last year.

Impressive, but honestly not that impressive when you consider that Xbox brought in 18 billion and PlayStation brought in 30 billion last year. However, if you factor in that Xbox has a head count of ~$20,100 and Sony has one of ~12,700. While Valve has a head count of about ~400. We see that Xbox and Sony are bringing in about $900K and $2.4M per head respectively. Valve is bring in 12.5M per head. Plus Xbox and PlayStation have multiple studios and campuses. While I believe Valve only has the 1 or 2 campuses and they are their only studio.

My point being that, Valve has a ton of liquid cash for investment and growth opportunities. I’d wager Valve brought in more than 5 Billion last year, but with them being a private company, it’s hard to pin down what exactly they could’ve made.

bitwolf ,

if steam dies we need to support GOGS

blusterydayve26 ,

Or just buy games on GoG.com now to ensure they’ll be there in the future. Why wait?

BoneALisa ,
@BoneALisa@lemm.ee avatar

Because they refuse to suport linux with their launcher. The moment they do that ill start buying more games from them…

ascril ,

Yeah, I had many games on GOG, still have, and after I did full switch to linux using Proton is such great experience. I have Steam Deck too and it’s just more convenient to get stuff on Steam, sadly. I’ve already finished Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows two years ago and I’ve recently wanted to play Phantom Liberty DLC. I’ve tried to install it through Heroic, Bottles and directly through Steam and experience to setup GOG Galaxy to maintain cloud saves and achievements is frustrating at best, but I’ve also noticed some lags and micro-stutters when using GOG client.

cumskin_genocide ,

Gamers truly are the most oppressed minority group

blusterydayve26 ,

Don’t blame gamers because some of all the shitty MBAs want to speed run capitalism.

Bogasse ,
@Bogasse@lemmy.ml avatar

Steam, my Steam library and Proton could disappear. But at least it will have supported a big traction in the ecosystem : Wine, DXVK, Lutris, Heroic Launcher, Bazzite, etc… are all open source projects (so they can’t really disappear) that have never moved as fast as they are today.

Smoogs ,

No no…it’s going to be much worse than that.

It’ll be a subscription just to play the game you already own.

blusterydayve26 ,

$15.99 monthly library access fee? Who knew!

Or, if you’re only a casual gamer, just $1.99 per launch.

desktop_user ,

assuming I will ever close games

Lets_Eat_Grandma ,

Anyone who thinks their steam libraries will be safe forever is delusional.

Eventually a for-profit motivated individual will gain control and they will use all their MBA learnings to maximize subscriptions, per play revenue, per download revenue and overall provide a cheaper platform.

There isn’t an mba on the planet that doesn’t recognize that advertising is highly lucrative and being the company that sells the most pc games means you have metrics no one else has. They’ll instantly monetize advertising and the popups we get when we log in today will turn into mandatory non-skippable ads on the free tier to start a game, and they’ll add their wrapper on top of games in their store, especially games that do not currently need steam to play today.

It’ll only get way worse. Expect everything to be pay to play… once gaben is gone. They have a monopoly and any leader would think they are too big to fail. No one can just take their games elsewhere… we’re locked in. We’re committed. We can’t escape. They’ve got us by the balls.

derpgon ,

Steam with Gabe at the helm cannot ever fail. Steam without Gabe, that’s a while different story.

Schadrach ,

It’ll only get way worse. Expect everything to be pay to play… once gaben is gone. They have a monopoly and any leader would think they are too big to fail. No one can just take their games elsewhere… we’re locked in. We’re committed. We can’t escape. They’ve got us by the balls.

Sure you can escape, at least for any future purchases. There are other stores and you can take your business there, and the moment Steam does any serious enshittification under new management post-Gaben those other stores are going to be trying to pull customers from them hard. Likely to EGS or GOG (probably EGS unless GOG makes a big move at that point, like bringing back and expanding GOG Connect).

A couple of years down the road from there and Steam is known as that thing you only use to play older games and exclusives.

lightnsfw ,

We can switch to piracy. I don’t only because of the benefits steam offers. If that ever changes in a way that tips the scale I’ll never buy a game from them again and I’d never need to. Even if they start making all new games online only in a way that can’t be circumvented there’s a big enough backlog of games to keep me going the rest of my life.

Koordinator_O ,
@Koordinator_O@lemmy.world avatar

This so much. The thing for me is, pirated I get everything from my library back FOR FREE. So there is no loss money wise for changing things up for me. Without the convenience and fairness there is nothing holding me there. at all.

olafurp ,

Categorically wrong since Gaben lost weight.

trolololol ,

I came here to say this but I see my arch nemesis made it firrrrrst

Flies away

EnderMB ,

The direct transfer of power in tech is often to someone that will carry the torch. It’s quite rare that a successor is picked that has been at the company for years, but wants to change practically everything about it. For that reason, I can see Gabe passing to a like-minded person that already knows that they are a succession candidate.

But ultimately none of us know Gabe, or what he plans to do. He may have a 100 step plan to secede power, or he might get to 65, say “that’ll do” and just sell up and retire to a remote island somewhere. The plans might have been in place for years, or he might not want to consider Valve without him. Hell, he might not even think that Valve should exist without him. It’s impossible to guess, so it’s not worth worrying about…

hglman ,

It seems worth worrying about if only to try and make valve think about the future.

Lets_Eat_Grandma ,

Remember when google didn’t do evil? Remember when they were hip, cool and not the living nightmare of a corporation we see of them today?

EnderMB ,

That was two CEO’s in. Google under Sundar is very different to Google under Page.

elauso ,

So this really doesn’t alleviate any concerns for Steam. They too might be just 2 CEO changes away from sending their users to hell.

Yerbouti , (edited )

Steam is just another profit business. I don’t get why people think they’re about anything else. They take a huge part of the sells and don’t even let you own the games. Owning means you can sell, give or do whatever you want with your games. Oh and “likely to die before 75”, lol, says fucking who, the 4chan doctor?

Ifera ,

There is regular, for-profit business, and then there is EA/Microsoft/Amazon level for-profit.

The complete disregard for their employees, massive firings for “AI powered optimization”, the use and abuse of dark pattern methods(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern), are some of the things that I haven’t yet head of from Steam.

Sure, ultimately Steam is a capitalist business, but it could be much, much worse.

Piemanding ,

Their entire platform is built on goodwill. After he passes, someone is gonna cash that goodwill in for profit. Seems to be happening to Nintendo. Disney has been doing it for many years.

hglman ,

That is the McKinsey formula, abuse consumer trust to have them over pay expecting the previous quality of goods while you slowly slash all your costs and bottom out the quality of your product. The lag time between your actions to destroy the product and the consumer realizing that your doing is all profit.

Yerbouti ,

I mean, there is your regular serial killers, and then there’s ___ Insert most dangerous killers here____ . Sure ultimately I’ve killed a few people, but it could be so much worse. See what I mean? Steam is an ok platform but in the end they only cares about profit. But since 90% of the gamers get wet when you mentioned the company name, there’s no need for them to change anything right now. Why in the world is it considered normal that a business that basically only provide server space gets to take 30% of sale price, while the devs who spent thousand of hours on a project only get 70%. Maybe it made sens 15 years ago, but not in 2024.

Theharpyeagle ,

On the one hand, yeah it’s absolutely important not to idolize any company, because they have no sense of loyalty or generosity. Telling yourself otherwise is a guaranteed path to disappointment.

On the other hand, of all the shit sandwiches we’ve been served, Steam is one of the fresher ones. Though they developed Proton for their own benefit, it’s pretty undeniable that it has made gaming on Linux way more viable than it has ever been, and it’s open source. I mean no shade to FOSS solutions like Lutris, but having paid developers work on a project full-time certainly has its advantages.

I do think that the concerns about Steam’s pricing rules are valid, as are gripes with its DRM for first party games. But, overall, they’ve brought a lot of convenience to PC gaming that is hard to find elsewhere in the gaming world.

Yerbouti ,

I get that steam is a pretty nice platform to browse, and being a linux user, Proton is amazing. But steam is business, they build Proton to sell the steam deck, not for Linux users. And aren’t they in trial right now for overcharging millions of dollars? We now have eveything in place to replace steam with a fair, user controlled alternative. I will gladly pay a 5% or 10% fee, on top of the game’s price, to finance a user controlled infrastructure and dev team for projects such has proton.

Theharpyeagle ,

I think we generally agree, but I worry that a new platform couldn’t do more than GoG+Lutris already do. Perhaps, though, it could be done with a reputable foundation.

And the lawsuit is more or less what I was radio referring to with Steam’s price rules. I would definitely be on board with striking the requirement for publishers to offer the same price on all platforms at the same time.

On that note, though, I wouldn’t take the whole case at face value, as I think parts of it are pretty frivolous (unless they prove that Steam is actually actively stifling competition and, you know, not just a decent platform that entered the space first.) I also think it’s silly to point out Epic’s lower commission rate since they’ve been giving out free games like candy and actually making third party games exclusive to their platform in a very clear attempt to compete with Stream. There’s absolutely no guarantee that they won’t raise their commission once they have a foothold in the market (though I do concede that their licensing terms for Unreal Engine have remained fairly reasonable).

BarbecueCowboy ,

I think they were just going off US averages. Our average lifespan has been declining past few years but it’s pretty close to 75 if you’re poor.

Gabe hasn’t always taken care of his body, but he’s rich, he’d be likely to hit around 88 in the US. The average lifespan in New Zealand is also a bit higher, so if he stays there then it may add a few years.

Yerbouti ,

Unless you’re a doctor, I think you shouldn’t get into medical diagnostic. My grandpa smoked 2 packs a day and lived up to 95., my other grandpa was walking 10 km a day and never smoked, he died at 72.

BarbecueCowboy ,

Yeah, anecdotes are a thing, one of my grandpas smoked a pack a day too and he beat yours and made it over 100. Our personal experiences don’t trump collected data though, we’re not the average experience and we can expect most to trend towards that.

Lets_Eat_Grandma ,

Extreme Obesity is defined as being 100 pounds or more over your ideal weight. It is known to decrease life expectancy up to 14 years.

It’s just one factor but it’s a big one. Living past your 80s is really tough… and working into your 70s is really hard as it is. The reins will go from his hands likely before we die.

Yerbouti ,

I think people should go easy on medical diagnostic. Do we have access to this guy’s personal medical records? Are we all doctors now cause we have access to wikipedia?

Lets_Eat_Grandma ,

Nobody thinks they know for sure the guy’s medical situation. Everybody dies eventually and when he’s gone his control goes with him though.

Smoogs ,

Fuckload better than ‘you need to pay a subscription just to play the game you already paid for’ cuz oh you launched it from their app.

Killer ,

What digital game platform lets you resell your games? That’s just a bad point to try and make.

Yerbouti , (edited )

It’s not because none of the current platform let you do it that it’s a bad point. People have traded games for decades before digital platforms, it wouldn’t even be innovation lol. You can suck on Steam all you want, it’s just your usual capitalist business, they dont care about you and will fuck you up the very second they evaluate they can make more money by doing so. But in the current state of things, they basically make tons of money by doing almost nothing (providing server space, wow) and “gamers” will rip their shirts off at the slightest criticism of that company.

JasonDJ ,

Dr Chan is a pretty cool doctor. Eh diagnosed one of my friends as a b-tard and doesn’t afraid of nothing.

Shameless ,

I mean, its possible.

But then again, people have now known the beauty of steam. If this does happen as you say it could, it does open up the possibility for someone to make a Steam_v2.

I have faith that there are enough people who are passionate about Linux that it’s possible for Windows to lose some of its dominance in the future. Maybe the enshittification of steam is needed to make that a possibility.

Sniatch ,

I mean yea, but all your games are still locked in Steam_v1.

Templa ,

The fact that people non ironically visit 4chan in 2024 kind of worries me

koavf ,

I have heard for years and years that “the other parts of 4chan” than /b are good, but I’ve never seen it myself.

RabbitMix ,

I used to go on 4chan, on a variety of boards, every day for 10 years (06-16) some boards are better than others, and /b/ is definitely the worst by a lot, but they’re all terrible.

mlg ,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

Aside from valve probably having a hit by bus plan, I’m pretty sure ownership of valve is actually split pretty evenly so it will likely fall to another senior dev who understands what to do.

FreddyDunningKruger ,

I’ve heard they’ve hidden three immeasurably invaluable CS:Go Knife skins throughout the platform, and the first person to find all three will unlock Half-Life 3 and annoint the winner as Gaben 2, God Emperor of Valve and owner of Steam. Also, they get a chocolate factory.

Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In ,

Oompa loompa, doompadee doo, We’ve got a perfect riddle for you, Oompa loompa, doompadee dee, If you are wise, you’ll listen to me.

Three precious knives, in Counter-Strike they hide, Find them all to claim your prize worldwide, The first to collect, in triumph shall stand, To unlock Half-Life 3, the game so grand.

Oompa loompa, doompadee doo, Follow the clues and you’ll be through, Oompa loompa, doompadee dee, Just one more knife, and then you’ll see.

A crown awaits, a throne so high, Steam’s vast empire, you’ll rule the sky, With Half-Life 3, your reign begins, All hail the gamer who truly wins.

Oompa loompa, doompadee doo, The ultimate prize belongs to you, Oompa loompa, doompadee dee, Gaben 2, you shall always be.

aalvare2 ,

I hope it pleases you to know I sang this entire song to myself

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