Steam is a ticking time bomb

Nia_The_Cat , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

deleted_by_author

Butterbee , 2 months ago

I do this too. If it’s on Gog I buy it there. I hope gog manages to stay around but even if it doesn’t I can grab the offline installers for the games I have purchased and back them up elsewhere.

luciole , 2 months ago

Does anyone actually use offline installers on a regular basis? I tried a few times and I had problems. Dunno if just bad luck. Never managed to install Pillars on eternity with it because it errored out every time. Another game’s offline installer (can’t remember which) would stall for hours then crash. I suspect a lot of users would be in for a surprise if they actually tried them.

DdCno1 , 2 months ago

This looks like a problem with your system to me. Run a few checks on your RAM and storage devices. I had files corrupt on my NAS and a PC of mine, because both had defective memory. I only noticed it, because installers and 7zip began to produce errors.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago

I use them regularly, and have never had issues

luciole , 2 months ago

Good to hear, I’ll check it out again and make sure I’m not having an issue on my end.

PenguinTD , 2 months ago

I wish that in the future developer can just host their own game with very minimum cost/overhead unless they really need some platform’s backend feature. (multiplayer game mostly.)

For single player game I really don’t see why it is so difficulty to host (even torrent it) would be a hard thing to do. During the shareware/pre-steam days where you may have downloaded the full game with a soft lock, I’ve played a whole game and then try find way to send my money as well. (was not living in NA at that time and there was no guarantee that a game will be imported with official vendor.)

TexMexBazooka , 2 months ago

Hosting it is easy, making sure people pay for it is not

PenguinTD , 2 months ago

Yeah, but at the same time, people are “NOT” going to pay for it won’t pay for it anyway. You might as well establish your player/fan base. Like even if you give me say, Suicide Squad for free I still won’t add it to my library.

HobbitFoot , 2 months ago

That isn’t going to happen. Major have studios have developed their own ways of distributing games and found that the public don’t really like it. For minor game studios, it is probably a lot cheaper to rely on Steam or an equivalent to do what you are describing.

DdCno1 , 2 months ago

Not just cheaper, but the vast majority of Indie games need the platform for exposure, despite it being so crowded. Those first few hours on the front page are when most sales are happening, especially given how abysmal to nonexistent the marketing of most small games is.

Developers seem to be under the impression that a few social media posts shortly before or after release are enough, whereas in reality, they need to create a community that is eagerly waiting for the game beforehand, spend at least as much time on marketing and community management as on the game itself.

Then again, the majority of games - and this is something few people are willing to admit, least of all their developers - have absolutely no commercial value, no chance of ever making any money, no business being on any store front and even, in the majority of cases, no business even being distributed for free other than among close friends and family. Over 12000 games were released on Steam last year. Does anyone believe that more than a few hundred of those are even worth looking at, let alone being purchased and played?

Nobody is waiting for the billionth card game or sidescroller with unattractive amateur art. Nobody is waiting for an ugly looking game with a poorly written store page that costs 15 bucks and is coming from a new, unknown developer while similar, better games are routinely on sale for a fraction as much. I’ve received outraged reactions from both developers and gamers for comparing some first marketed at release titles with other games out there. Almost every time, they were trying to sell their games through sob stories like “I worked seven years on this solo, surviving only on ramen and tears”, as if anyone actually cares. Those stories are bonus trivia that you look up and are impressed by after having played a game and caring enough about it to read its Wikipedia article. I’m not buying your terrible time management skills and unrealistic expectations, I’m spending my limited disposable income on entertainment and escapism - and if your seven year amateur project can’t keep up with a two year project by an experienced team of fifteen people even at the very first glance at the first screenshot of the typo-ridden store page, then you’re out of luck - and I like weird “auteur” Indie games. Those 12,068 titles are not just competing with the other 12,067 released that year, but the entire catalogue on Steam (roughly 73,000 at the beginning of this year), as well as older games, games on other platforms and other types of media.

One has to assume that most people brave enough to dive head-first into Indie games development are either ignorant of these facts or hopelessly optimistic. We kind of need this optimism, without it we would have never gotten gems like Stardew Valley (which did not make any of the mistakes listed above though) or the equally amazing and divisive interactive art that studios like Tale of Tales have produced, but it’s still frustrating to witness it pan out very predictably every time. Every single Indie success I’ve observed from the start was clearly on a winning path and every failure was obviously going to be a failure. I’m shocked how predictable it is, which is what gives me hope. At least success in this sphere is based on clear rules.

zygo_histo_morpheus , 2 months ago

One thing that I think is missing from the equation is good video games journalism that covers indie games. Video game journalism has never been doing amazing but it’s practically dead now.

Tying discovery to the same platform that you consume things on is really bad, because it always gives that distributor way to much power. Similar story with spotify, but journalism about underground music is at least in a slightly better place.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago

Yep, I follow The Verge, Kotaku, and PCGamer for gaming news, and I think PCG and Kotaku both have a weekly “Steam releases you might have missed this week” article, and they’re always the stuff that no one who checks Steam new releases would have missed. The authors aren’t actually diving deep to discover the hidden gems, they’re just checking the top releases that aren’t AAA publishers.

I get there’s not that much money in video game journalism anymore now that they aren’t all getting review copies to drive ad revenue (you can actually thank Steam for that in part, since it’s more trustworthy for most people just to read user reviews there, and the other part you can thank all the paid YouTube game reviewers for, since publishers much prefer them to an outlet they can’t directly write the ad copy for).

sus , 2 months ago

I’d think game journalism has been mostly replaced by youtube reviewers / video essays, no?

zygo_histo_morpheus , 2 months ago

I do love me a good video game video essay, but I think that a more traditional journalistic format has a lot of strengths when it comes to covering small games. It’s probably true that youtube has replaced a lot of traditional journalism but I think that this is overall bad for the video game echo system.

kbal , 2 months ago

So basically Steam is fine, has been for 20 years, and has competitors waiting to step in and take over the market if Gaben and co ever succumb to the temptation to cash in for a quick boost to corporate profits for a few years at the expense of ruining the business forever after, as impatient shareholders might demand if it were a public company, which it isn't.

It's true though, it could fall apart at any moment. So could anything. I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.

avidamoeba , 2 months ago

Luckily it’s not a public company and it seems its shareholders aren’t interested in making a quick buck. If they were they’d have already made it obvious. If they decide to sell or IPO on the other hand (also sell), then quick buck will be the name of the game in no time.

blindsight , 2 months ago

I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.

Exactly my thought. And backing up games and stripping Steam DRM from the games that use it (very easy to do, or so I hear.)

If Valve announces Steam is shutting down (or enshittifies), then everyone who can (and cares) will just backup their games, and everyone else will just download the DRM-stripped versions using their favourite piracy platform.

Right now, it’s easier to buy a game on Steam than fuff about with piracy. Even at minimum wage, it’s usually cheaper in the opportunity cost of time to just buy games (if you’re a patient gamer, at any rate; higher income levels needed for full box price).

ShaunaTheDead , 2 months ago

Looks like an article paid for by Epic.

Here's a repost of what I said the last time the Steam vs Epic Games Store "debate" was brought up:

My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let's be honest. They have many ties to China's Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.

There's also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don't know.

As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.

Plus, any good will that they've purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They've been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They're going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.

They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they're fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it's projected that they won't be profitable until 2027, which means they'll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.

randy , 2 months ago

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.

Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode… Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

I don’t disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author’s key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn’t investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn’t too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve’s attention. So who is being “anti-consumer” in this example, Valve or Apple?

corbin OP , 2 months ago

It’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. Apple very obviously doesn’t want the Mac gaming ecosystem to exist in the same capacity as Windows and Linux, but Valve also has an obligation to its customers using Macs to keep the service running well.

YaBoyMax , 2 months ago

macOS 10.14 has been EOL for more than 2 years now and basically every Mac released since 2012 is compatible with 10.15. Valve also didn’t actively flip a switch and disable functionality; they’re just no longer providing updates. I don’t think Valve shoulders any blame in this specific case - it’s unreasonable to expect any company to indefinitely support platforms that are effectively obsolete.

corbin OP , 2 months ago

I meant more that the Steam client needs to be fully functional on modern macOS. Dropping older operating systems is more justifiable, but does still add to the picture of Valve not treating Mac owners all that well.

metaStatic , 2 months ago

I got my first mac a few years back off the side of the road, a 2009 imac that didn't work. I went to a lot of trouble to find and install the most up to date mac os I could get on it for the challenge and because I'd never used a intel mac before.

Believe me, they absolutely did just flick a switch. everything about steam worked fine until the day it didn't even load up. removing support is one thing, actively bricking your product is a total scum fuck move that is just common practice in gaming now.

DdCno1 , 2 months ago

Isn’t it trivial to install boot camp on this thing?

beepnoise , 2 months ago

On Intel Macs, it is fairly trivial.

On the modern ARM based Macs (the M1/2/3/X processors), it isn't an option. The only real solution is to use desktop virtualisation software like Parallels to install Windows (ARM based) and try to get Steam going. There are cheaper alternatives to Parallels, but they are often a faff.

DJDarren , 2 months ago

I have an M2 Air which can run the Windows version of Steam via Whisky. Its ability can be patchy, but the fact it runs any games at all is little short of a miracle. I’ve been playing The Talos Principle II that way, and while my wife thinks the glitchy graphics are hilarious, I’m not too fussed because the gameplay is still there.

Of course, it’s not perfect, and while I can get Fallout 4 to run, it looks like shit even on the lowest settings. However, in the context of the gripes in this thread, it means I can play Portal 2 and its various mod packs on my Mac. And they look great.

beepnoise , 2 months ago

I completely forgot about Whiskey. Managed to get GTA V running at 120FPS on it, which was (and still is, IMHO) absolutely mindblowing.

DJDarren , 2 months ago

Yeah, that’s awesome.

Now, let’s see about Red Dead II…

verdare , 2 months ago

Yeah, Valve has put a lot of effort into bridging the compatibility gap for Linux. Most of that work could also be ported to macOS, but they just don’t care.

It’s a shame, because getting 32-bit to 64-bit compatibility working would help Linux as well. I don’t know how much longer distros want to keep supporting 32-bit libraries, and some distros have already dropped them.

That said, macOS compatibility seems like a non-sequitur for an article calling Steam a “time bomb.” DRM is definitely the bigger issue here.

CalcProgrammer1 , 2 months ago

It’s not just 32 on 64 bit, new Macs use ARM64 processors so x86/x86_64 code is effectively obsolete on Mac. I would love to see Valve pour resources into a cross platform x86 on ARM64 emulation layer though, it would benefit Linux as well.

verdare , 2 months ago

The ARM translation may be less of a problem on macOS because of Rosetta. That said, integrating something like Box64 would absolutely benefit both Mac and Linux.

DdCno1 , 2 months ago

Agreed. This is a superficial history lesson masquerading as an article. While nothing lasts forever and Steam has its issues, the examples being cited are not supporting the not outrageous prediction that Steam might get worse in the future. It’s just not very insightful.

Anyone who, unlike the author, actually had to deal with early versions of Steam can attest to the fact that in most ways, the platform has dramatically improved.

Farias , 2 months ago

To be clear there’s only been a single generation (2006) of x86 based Macs that weren’t 64bit. They’ve been telling everyone since 2007 (well actually earlier even, the final PPC generation was 64bit), that the 32bit was going to go away.

I hate to defend Apple arbitrarily but all us developers had plenty of notice, and had to specifically reconfigure the default settings on their projects to only be 32bit. If developers ignore deprecation notices for over a decade, then is it really the fault of the other side?

IronTwo , 2 months ago

I am not a developer and honestly curious about this. What’s Apple’s reason for ditching 32 bit programs? Isn’t backwards compatibility a net positive for both developers and consumers?

GenderNeutralBro , 2 months ago

I wouldn’t say Apple disregards backwards compatibility, but they certainly don’t prioritize it to the degree Microsoft does, or that the general open-source community does. For Microsoft, backwards compatibility is their bread and butter. Enterprise customers have all sorts of unsupported legacy shit, and it dictates purchasing decisions and upgrade schedules.

Apple gave devs and users a ton of lead time before dropping 32-bit support. The last 32-bit Mac hardware was in 2006 (the first gen of Intel Macs); it wasn’t until Catalina’s release in 2019 that 32-bit apps stopped running, and Apple continued releasing security updates for older OSes that could run 32-bit apps for a couple years after that. So that was basically 15 years of notice for devs to release 64-bit apps.

That was much more time than they gave Classic Mac apps under OS X, or PowerPC apps on Intel. I was much more annoyed when PowerPC support was axed. Only a matter of time until Intel apps stop running on Apple Silicon, too. That’s gonna be the end of the world for Steam games. Ironically, it’s already easier to run legacy Windows and Linux games on Mac than it is to run legacy Mac games.

teawrecks , 2 months ago

Yeah, totally agree that we shouldn’t go all in on trusting valve, but apple is definitely the anti-consumer one here. I don’t think valve would support DX if they could get away with it. Apple deprecating everything but metal without making it an open spec basically said, “we don’t want anyone gaming on our platform”.

RobotToaster , 2 months ago

It’s amazing that a company who’s primary product is a DRM system managed to make so many people think they’re the “good guys”

warm , 2 months ago

There's a lot of DRM-free games on Steam. It's up to developers to use their DRM, it's not a requirement by Valve.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago

The person you’re responding to is one of those people that thinks Steam is the DRM, because 1) it checks games against your account the first time you run them, and 2) they don’t provide offline installers like GOG.

warm , 2 months ago

Yeah, the lack of offline installers sucks, but it still updates the game and you can copy them files away whenever you want.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago

Agreed. I like Steam.

sus , 2 months ago

steam’s drm is a complete joke though? Tons of game developers add their own drm on top because it is so trivial to bypass steam’s own.

Their main product is a marketplace/content delivery system

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago

The only “DRM” that they have is checking the game against your steam account the first time you run it. Is that great? No. Would it be nice if they offered offline installers? Of course.

beepnoise , 2 months ago

Truth be told, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

PC Gaming has had tons of DRM examples - from SecuROM (anyone remember those times?) to modern day Denuvo DRM.

So there are a few unpopular DRMs out there:

• Disc checking based DRM (if the disc was cooked, that's your paid game down the drain)
• CD Key based DRM (if you lost the CD Key, that's your paid game down the drain)
• Online activation (you registered the same game on two different PCs? Try that again one more time and you're done for. For added bonus, sometimes the activation software would register the same PC as different hardware because someone had the audacity to upgrade their hardware!)
• Always online - need I say more?
• Cloud gaming - now with the added joy of not owning the ones and zeros you paid for!!

Steam has managed to use account based DRM while avoiding the trappings of pretty much all of the above (for some games you can enter a CD key, and that game is permanently attached to your account, which is great if you lose the disc, but sucks if you want to sell the physical game on afterwards), while the competition used any of the above (some used multiple layers of DRM, which is eurgh).

Then on top of that, hats off to Valve - they do tend to listen to their customers and give them what they want, even if the whole point is to keep them tied to using Steam and strangle out the competition:

• Cloud saving
• Steam Workshops
• Game streaming via local network
• Sharing the game library with family
• Controller support with button remapping for legacy games with poor support
• In store game reviews
• Store algoritm suggestions based on the game categories you buy and what you friends buy
• Discussion forums (even if they can be thoroughly toxic at times)
• Guides (the formatting is awful)
• Fairly deep and independent social integration
• Built in audio streaming via Steam
• Those card things that you can sell for a bit of money or craft

Compare that to Origin, Epic Store, GOG etc. They just cannot compete with what Valve offers in terms of features on top of features.

What bothers me about Valve is that

• They have such a chokehold on PC gaming that everything else feels inferior, and no other company can really compete in terms of features
• They have fought refunds in the past (as mentioned in the article)
• The whole paid modding fiasco because Valve really wanted to financially exploit a community known to give stuff away for free
• How they often abandon their own products due to lack of customer attention and their limited size due to wanting to remain a limited company
  • I'm looking at Valve Index, and apart from Half Life: Alyx, I don't see much in the way of new games. Even worse is that I watched someone on YouTube basically explain that there are still glitches and weird stuff that occurs in the Valve Index - aa product that costs £919 here in the UK.
  • I'm also looking at the Steam Controller, which has been very, very neglected with no talk of a sequel (given how successful the Steam Deck has been, I'm shocked at the lack of a "companion controller")
  • I'm also looking at the infamous Steam PCs that completely flopped
• How TF2 started the trend (at least on Steam) of microtransactions in games, and how CS:GO has carried that flag (and started a gambling community which has probably done untold damage to young children as they grow into adults and are confronted with the world of gambling)
• How Valve, as a company that started off making games, has absolutely no desire whatsoever to make games anymore because of how wildly successful they are.

And this is the stuff I can think of at the top of my head. I was going to say it also concerns me they don't have a bug bounty program, but it turns out now they do.

averyminya , 2 months ago

You mean the trivially easy DRM that is a single patch found on GitHub?

RobotToaster , 2 months ago

Shitty DRM is still DRM.

MudMan , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I disagree with the author, the enshittification of Steam started ages ago. Day one, in fact. It's come and gone in waves.

Yesterday there was an article on the exploitative practices of Roblox doing the rounds around here. Some of the bad praxis around monetized UGC called out there was pioneered by Steam. Online DRM for single player games? Steam was there at ground level. NFT stock markets? Steam tried really hard, they were just bad at it. Gig economy automation replacing human moderation and greenlight processes? They banged their head against that wall until they uberified PC game development successfully. Loot boxes? They are remarkably resilient. Where others have moved on, Valve insists on keeping them around for CounterStrike 2.

Also, CounterStrike 2.

There are also ways in which Steam is ahead of the competition, or they wouldn't have the near-monopolistic position they have. Their Linux support may be motivated entirely out of spite and an ironic fear of Microsoft's monopoly, but it's welcomed. Their client is easily the best in the market and there are crucial features from it that should have been universalized by MS or Nvidia and still haven't been, somehow. It's good stuff.

But it's been enshittified since day one of Steam, when it launched torjan horsed with CS and Half Life 2, and it remains problematic in many areas, including its role as a single point of failure for game preservation on PC.

Aatube , 2 months ago

NFT stock markets?

Wait, Roblox and Steam's "stock markets" are run on NFTs?

averyminya , 2 months ago

I think they’re implying that the digital items such as TF2 hats and weapons skins are NFTs

Aatube , 2 months ago

Yeah, I know. These and trading cards. I don't think they're run on NFTs.

MudMan , 2 months ago

They are, though, by any reasonable definition. Despite what the cryptobros would have you believe, there is no need for a blockchain to have a tradable, persistent token associated to an asset. Besides the fact that the tokens are stored on Valve's servers instead of a distributed blockchain, there is no difference in how those work.

The cryptobros tried to convince everybody that a blockchain made the tokens "non-fungible" as in automatically interoperable and endlessly persistent, which was a lie that only survived until the first time the assets, which were all stored on servers and not in a blockchain, got deleted.

That's a different discussion in any case. The point is it's a stock market of tokenized, tradable items where the transactions are monetized by the company by taxing the trades. It's the same on Roblox and Steam (and in all the NFTs people dumped all that money on).

jarfil , 2 months ago

The public doesn’t understand NFTs, and scammers abused that.

[Distributed blockchain] NFTs were never stored on servers, the GIFs were never NFTs, and NFTs usually point to an IPFS URL (a P2P type “server”), which needs to be seeded by someone, doesn’t matter who.

In a sane world, the owner of an NFT would seed the corresponding assets on IPFS, because it’s in their own interest. Instead, people got swindled into “investing” in NFTs without having a clue of what they were doing… until the inevitable reality check struck them.

It’s true that Steam popularized NFTs, hats, digital trading cards, and so on. Those things also existed before Steam, way before the “crypto” NFTs… and if we go further back, check Luther’s rant in the XV century about how the Vatican was mass printing “NFT” indulgences.

mox , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I have my criticisms of Steam, but I see no sign of it marching toward some kind of big anti-customer explosion as suggested in this article. Unlike most others, it’s run by a privately owned company, so it doesn’t have investors pressuring toward enshittification. We can see the result by looking back at the past decade or so: Steam has been operating more or less the same.

Meanwhile, the author offers for contrast Epic Games, a major source of platform exclusives and surveillance software (file-snooping store app, client-side anti-cheat, Epic Online Services “telemetry”), all of which are very much anti-customer.

AFAIK, only one of the other stores listed is actually better for customers in any significant way: GOG. (For the record, I mostly like GOG.) But it was mentioned so briefly that it feels like the author only did so in hopes of influencing GOG fans.

Overall, this post looks a lot like astroturfing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be sponsored by Epic or Microsoft.

---

Edit: I forgot something that has changed in the past decade:

Valve has spent the past five years investing in open platforms: At first by funding key parts (often the most difficult ones) of the open-source software stack that now makes gaming great on linux, and more recently by developing remarkably good and fairly open PC hardware for mobile gaming. No vendor lock-in. No subscription fees. No artificially crippled features. This has already freed many gamers from Microsoft’s stranglehold, and more of us are reaping the benefits every day.

This is the polar opposite of what the author would have us fear.

Corgana , 2 months ago

Well said, private companies are incentivized to make their customers happy. Corporations are incentivized to make their shareholders happy. Sometimes those goals align, but they are not the same.

TwilightVulpine , 2 months ago

I get the risks of putting all eggs in one basket, but whenever people argue for competition using Epic as an example, a company that is demonstrably more anti-competitive and anti-consumer, it shows that they just think of the matter of theoretical ideals of evenness as opposed to benefits to the customers. I don't see any good coming from Epic having as much or more marketshare than Steam.

Unlike GOG which only offers DRM-free games, a substantial advantage compared to any other store.

stardust , 2 months ago

Makes me think of a Walmart opening up in a town and people arguing that the residents should buy from there because it’s competition. Company just existing doesn’t make it good.

philpo , 2 months ago

Steam is a major problem for a lot of reasons,but basically none of the reasons the author gave are the main problem - It sounds more like a whining of a Mac/Apple user. Once again…

There are hundreds of more important problems with Steam.

YMS , 2 months ago

Would you mind to name five of those hundreds of problems?

blindsight , 2 months ago

Not parent poster, but I’m going to see if I can come up with some.

0: If you get banned from Steam, you lose hundreds or thousands of games.

0.1: You can’t use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.

0.5: If you’re blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you’re locked out of all your games that use VAC.

1: Steam requiring other storefronts to sell at the same gross price instead of the same price net fees. This means nobody can compete with their 30% cut… On the other hand, they take 0% for activating games sold elsewhere, which kinda balances it. Still, this is probably the biggest barrier that’s maintaining their 30% cut.

2: Discoverability since they stopped curating the games list. (Maybe? Not sure if this is a problem, tbh.)

3: Normalizing the concept of games requiring a launcher to run/DRM.

4: Offline play functionality is inconsistent, so sometimes it breaks when people are traveling with no Internet access.

5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.

6: Region-locked censorship, like gore in Germany.

7: Some people would say region-adjusted pricing, but I disagree. Still, might be a valid reason for some.

(Numbering is wonky because I thought of actual real problems later.)

I think I did pretty well! It’s hard to find things to fault. It’s a pretty great platform.

lud , 2 months ago

0.1: You can’t use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.

This or similar actions are very common. Getting chargebacks can be very bad for a businesse even if they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s also a common type of fraud and the easiest way of reducing that is presumably to never dispute chargebacks and just ban the account and/or credit card.

0.5: If you’re blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you’re locked out of all your games that use VAC.

That’s kinda the point of VAC and you are only locked out of online play. The good and bad thing about VAC is that it’s conservative in handing out bans, so false positives are relatively rare. It does of course reduce it effectiveness against cheating.

5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.

Adult content is a setting which I believe is disabled by default.

Unrelated but I really like their new version of “steam family”.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago

Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism

I’m glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn’t choose that, and they’re certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.

It really feels like this author is just saying, “they’re resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo ‘timebomb’!”.

“Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”

BarbecueCowboy , 2 months ago

“Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”

Never thought about it that way, welp, might as well get it over with.

corbin OP , 2 months ago

The issue is Steam and Valve being held up as the ‘one good company’, when there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Valve does many of the same practices as Epic, EA, etc., but there’s a double standard with Valve because it’s the default experience. The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago

The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.

What specifically are you envisioning? If this is just a general kind of, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall” supposition, I don’t think that really holds any water; it’s just a platitude. If anything, Steam being so ubiquitous could more easily make it’s eventual decline a catalyst for legislation to give software license ownership stronger consumer protections. The idea that we should either condemn it now or stop using it, before its decline, makes no sense to me. Is GOG better? Sure. Can it fully replace Steam? No. Is Steam better than Epic, Origin, UPlay? Absolutely. I’m just not sure what the real point of all this condemnation is when they’re by far trying, by and large, to treat consumers well. It’s just blaming Valve for not being totally and eternally immune to the effects of Capitalism.

the ‘one good company’

No one claims this. The only thing remotely close to that which people claim is that Valve is uniquely positioned to be one of the best digital games distribution platforms due to its private ownership insulating it against shareholder demands (which is by far the largest driver of enshittification), which is also true for GOG, but obviously Valve is still beating them out in capacity and capability currently.

there are plenty of examples to the contrary

Of course, it’s a company. But it’s still a billion times better than most of its competitors.

pixeltree , 2 months ago

A sane and reasonable take? On the internet?

it’s more likely than you think

Mohaim , 2 months ago

It’ll be fine until they go public (though maybe a few billion is enough for gaben and they won’t, but I’m not banking on it), then it’ll be an inevitable decline like all the others.

jarfil , 2 months ago

Whatever Gaben thinks, he won’t live forever. The moment leadership changes, we’ll see how money thirsty the new bosses are.

JohnEdwa , 2 months ago

The difference between Valve and almost every other company that suffers from “capitalism” is that Valve is a private company, they don’t have shareholders, investors and an outsider asshole CEO demanding enshittification in the name of exponential growth.

ShepherdPie , 2 months ago

“Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”

I get your point, but this metaphor would be more applicable if historically every human on earth murdered someone during their lifetime. I think Steam/Valve will remain the same as long as their current leadership is in place. 999 times out of 1000, once the original founders are gone, any company begins the enshittification process, whether it’s a major business like Valve or a local chain of grocery stores.

t3rmit3 , 2 months ago

Sure, and when that happens we should (and many will) abandon the platform. But since, as you seem to be implying, all businesses under Capitalism will eventually enshittify, there’s no point abandoning it beforehand, because any alternative you move to will also eventually do so.

ShepherdPie , 2 months ago

I didn’t say anything about abandoning it, just that it’s bound to happen eventually like with any other business unlike people and murder.

jarfil , 2 months ago

The difference between a person and a corporation… is that once a corporation goes public, it’s like having a person whose only goal in life is to get as much money as possible, no matter how. Those people usually end up in jail; corporations, not so much.

On the other hand, something like 2/3 of businesses “fail”, or close, during the first 10 years, never going public. The ones surviving… are the ones that probably should be in “jail” 🤷

dandi8 , 2 months ago

Steam is a ticking time bomb but mostly for the reason that you don't own the games you purchase there and you can't back them up (mostly) so when Steam decides to ban your account or just closes down, you lose all of your games forever.

More people should push for DRM-free games with offline installers, like GOG and Itch offer.

averyminya , 2 months ago

Idk, there’s a backup system that I’ve put on a hard drive with a very easy to find GitHub steam drm remover. Haven’t had any issues playing my games without a steam account – sans online services for some, but most of the time I’m on trips or without Internet anyway. That said, if the idea is that in some 5-10-20 years this will happen, I feel like a lot of the online services won’t be around… For as much as I love Helldivers 2, I don’t really expect it to be around in 7 years. Online games from 2013 aren’t all around either, and those that are aren’t super populated.

On the other hand, a lot of these online services do rely on Steam, so if it went down a lot of them would need the same unofficial online servers.

I’d be more concerned if Steam were to have extreme DRM, but it’s so laughable that it’s literally worth paying for the game just to have the streaming/per game notes/cloud saves and for current games to not have to deal with updates and online services. But a Steam Library of mostly single player games? Anyone who is concerned can get a $50HDD and install/backup their games with Steam to and then apply the patch. Of the issues Steam has, I think this particular one is low on the list. And per the articles issue, I would actually blame the OS more than the storefront. I used to game on Mac’s from 2007-2013 and let me tell you, Steam was a freaking triumph. All the Mac game stores were truly short lived, had poor support while they were alive and had things like license activations per machine, so good luck past 5 computers (talk about 15 years). Back then Aspyer ports were really great too, always something to look forward to.

Back then Steams issue was that it didn’t have refunds, Tuesday Maintenance, and sometimes it would just be buggy for a bit when trying to open (on OSX – never really had an issue on Windows). Since then they’ve only made it more service oriented, doing things they absolutely should, but didn’t have to, like refunds applying to everyone after the AUS lawsuit instead of just that region. Looking at Apple for this one.

I would implore the author of this article to go back in time, get their games on the macgames store and other similar storefronts for OSX and I would wonder how they fare today.

I have my accounts. I have no access to those games because licenses were activated too many times or because they no longer support the current OS. So I’m effectively limited to a previous version of OSX which cannot download the app because I need a new version of the OSX store. I don’t have the right terms but it was hours of hassle to find out that my OSX copy of Borderlands, Assassins Creed II and Brotherhood, and a couple others are just gone. To add insult to injury, I had to log into the account every year to keep my “platinum points” that you got for buying on that storefront, to use for discounts etc. I didn’t log in so byebye incentive!

My point? I had about 250 SteamPlay games that I bought and used on OSX as a Mac gamer, which seamlessly downloaded on PC when I switched to Windows for my desktop computer. None of this is to say that Steam doesn’t or can’t have shortcomings, but rather that it is a substantially better service than than pretty much every alternative right now, save for GOG probably.

Grimpen , 2 months ago

On the topic of games with an online component, wouldn’t it be great if they could run indefinitely?

www.stopkillinggames.com

fartington , 2 months ago (edited 18 days ago)

deleted_by_author

Nath , 2 months ago

The author has a MacBook and has discovered that the new Apple Silicon is terrible for games. Particularly 32-bit games. It turns out Valve hasn’t re-made these 10-20 year old games to compensate for Apple’s hardware compatibility changes.

Somehow, that’s Valve’s fault and a sign that they’re going down the drain.

Kostyeah , 2 months ago

What a garbage article lol. The only two arguments I can pick out are 1. Old steam games haven’t been updated to work on macOS and 2. Some games require 3rd party launchers. I think the author was just angry that his mac dropped support for a 20 year old game.

Zworf , 2 months ago

Well the third-party launchers is extremely annoying, I have to say. Buying a game on Steam and then it forcing you to install yet another launcher (I have like 8 on my gaming PC now) really pisses me off.

I tend to buy on GOG now if I have the choice because they don’t stand for that kind of shit nor DRM either.

I also really love the overview of GOG of the games you have in different launchers. Before that it happened to me multiple times that I bought a game on sale without realising I had already bought it on another platform years ago on another sale. Oops.

Ethics, features that are actually great for me instead of stuff that’s just great for them. Love it. Reminds me a lot of a company that used to be like that. It was called Valve I think.

PotatoesFall , 2 months ago

Agreed, shitty read. The 30% cut is crazy high though, and IMO the best point the article has. Steam DOES have a monopoly and that’s inherently bad

Kid_Thunder , 2 months ago

A 30% cut for steam games sold on steam and a 0% cut for steam keys sold by the publisher wherever they want with the caveat that they must give steam users the same sales at around the same time. They get their games hosted on Steam's industry best CDN, a page with support for images and videos, an API with features users like, workshop API for mod hosting and delivery, and other SteamWorks API stuff for stuff like multiplayer, patch management without charging a fee for it, forum hosting to hit the highlights. Pretty much all of that drives engagement and is mostly turn-key though you do have to programmatically interact with their API when it makes sense.

Steam provides a lot of benefit for a 30% cut of what is sold on their store front and a lot more benefit for getting all of the above for a 0% cut if they sell steam keys outside of steam.

dubyakay , 2 months ago

Don’t forget steam hosting ranking ladders as well!

stardust , 2 months ago

And even then the same sales around the same time seems very lax with games often going on sale for pre-orders for a steam key that Steam games never get at launch. Most my Steam games are purchased from other storefronts than steam with more frequent sales and faster price drops.

PotatoesFall , 2 months ago

I’m not saying Steam is the worst thing out there right now. I’m saying monopoly is inherently bad, and 30% is a crazy high cut even including the features you mentioned.

Nath , 2 months ago

It isn’t a monopoly though. Even ignoring the Blizzards, Epics and GOGs of the web, any developer can host their game on their own Web site and market it completely independently of Steam and keep 100% of their takings.

The monopoly on storefront argument holds water in mobile land where side-loading a game is not possible/easy. In the world of computers though, I don’t think the same standard applies.

PotatoesFall , 2 months ago

That’s still a monopoly. The article says it too, if you don’t put your game on steam, your sales suffer. It’s similar to how spotify has a monopoly on the music streaming market.

AndrasKrigare , 2 months ago

A monopoly with checks notes 30% market share. It has a plurality, but not a majority.

theverge.com/…/music-streaming-services-market-sh…

ShepherdPie , 2 months ago

How are either of those a monopoly? A monopoly generally means you only have one option and that option is taking advantage of their outrageous market share by jacking up prices.

Where I live the only broadband internet is Comcast which is why I pay 2-3x more for my service than comparable services in areas where they don’t have a monopoly (or areas with sane regulations).

Saying that you’ll not earn as much money if you don’t put your game on steam doesn’t mean steam has a monopoly, it just means you’re not getting as much reach as you could. Being popular doesn’t equate to being a monopoly.

pythonoob , 2 months ago

Citing this article is probably a bad idea.

stardust , 2 months ago

Citing this article that is upset about lack of Apple support but is silent on lack of Linux support from other launchers while probably using an iPhone that locks out everything compared to Android is funny.

Appoxo , 2 months ago

If you market your game better it can “survive” outside of steam as well. I didn’t hear about Ready or Not having funding issues. They didn’t even announce a Steam release when they started their funding campaign.
It may result in less sales because users have to download and update the game manually. Can’t deny that assumption but it’s not a mandatory thing to publish on steam…

stardust , 2 months ago

Monopoly on a platform that they don’t own? That being Microsoft? Then seeing how epic isn’t even profitable on the launcher side and is a loss leader while their launcher is barebones it raises the question of what cut is actually realistic that allows a company to have a feature rich launcher and branch out into stuff like Linux, VR, and Steam Deck.

Current state feels more like Walmart expanding into new territory and trying to lure people with low prices, but isn’t sustainable with the main goal just being expansion.

Cethin , 2 months ago

You don’t need to own the OS to have a monopoly. What a weird thing to say. You don’t need to own the United States to have a monopoly in it. That’s an equivalent statement.

Your point about Epic not being able to compete means they have a monopoly. Steam is great, but part of that is because they essentially have infinite money to spend improving things to make sure no one else catches up.

stardust , 2 months ago

Epic hasn’t given me a reason to buy from them. Fanatical, humble bundle, gmg, etc I find better if the only selling point is price with them having more consistent sales, bundles, and choice of platform.

Epic has done more to make me not consider them an option with their foray into the market being removing Metro Exodus near launch and taking monopolistic approaches to taking the approach of denying games from being sold on other platforms. Not just steam but GOG too with exceptions only being given to owners of the platform.

Appoxo , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Agreed.
Them withholding a game makes me not consider them in the future. I’d rather pirate it if they were to keep withholding it.

But I “allow” them to withhold 1st party games (or studios they aquire like Psyonix) from 3rd party stores. Same goes for Valve, EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard and Microsoft.
They did the work and sure are entitled to keep it. It may not be in the interested of the consumer to have the need to install yet another launcher but it’s fine.
Them buying up 3rd party releases are what I have issues with

diannetea , 2 months ago

Epic isn’t able to compete because their launcher is missing major simple features like reviews.

I don’t want multiple extra steps when I’m interested in a game. Steam has a big market share because they are giving people what they want in a launcher. That’s it.

Epic can put in the effort if they want but it’s already been like 2 years and as far as i can tell hasn’t really been updated with anything new, I use it for the free games sometimes but otherwise not really. That would only change if they make the launcher more attractive.

Cethin , 2 months ago

I know they’re missing features. Steam didn’t always have all the features they have now either. We take that for granted now, but that wasn’t always the case. Steam has their market position because they were one of the first to market, and they invested their profits into making their product better. A newcomer is now met by consumers with the expectation that they’ll be equally as good, and when they inevitably aren’t they don’t use it. That’s how a monopoly works.

I agree it sucks, and that Steam is a nice piece of software, and the Valve has done good work supporting Linux. That doesn’t change whether or not they hold a monopolistic position in the market though. The barrier for new entries into the market is too high because Steam is good. It’s nothing against Steam, but it is a monopoly and that isn’t good for consumers —which includes game developers, not just end users.

stardust , 2 months ago

That steam didn’t have features is like comparing steam from decades ago. I don’t feel like that is even a valid defense anymore when new smartphone companies are expected to come with a feature filled OS as opposed to pre smartphone expectations. Same for any other products be it televisions, monitors, etc.

Barriers can be brought up, but if someone is introducing the equivalent of a dumb phone to the market to compete against a smartphone and expecting to make money for just existing and only bothering to try to corner the market with removing products then no wonder things are playing out the way they are.

Cethin , 2 months ago

That’s why all new smartphone companies use Android. It comes packaged feature rich. It is a good comparison.

stardust , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

And Epic is a billion dollar company making stuff like unreal engine yet can’t scrap together a launcher that doesn’t feel like it is from decades ago. Or chooses not too. Can’t even put in Linux support despite community efforts like heroic launcher.

You can’t put out a shit product and then cry about why people aren’t buying it. It doesn’t work for any market. Can try to coerce people with monopolistic practices of trying to deny product availability, but that’ll only get you so far.

If anything if your argument is that it is hard then that just seems to bring to question of maybe a low cut actually isn’t realistic if a company wants to make a feature rich launcher and platform if even a billion dollar company is finding it hard to accomplish. But, it seems to me epic is only choosing or only knows the approach of trying to buy their way in and not want to “waste” resources improving anything else and banking on consumers not being able to resist not buying a product epic paid to only be available on their launcher.

Cethin , 2 months ago

You keep making good points. Unreal Engine has been around since 1998. They’ve had a long time developing the engine and it makes it hard for other engines to compete. There are a few, but not many. They’ve invested a lot of money into making their engine the premium option and making sure consumers avoid alternatives that aren’t as feature rich.

You can’t put out a shit product and then cry about why people aren’t buying it. It doesn’t work for any market. Can try to coerce people with monopolistic practices of trying to deny product availability, but that’ll only get you so far.

You clearly can coerce people with monopolistic practices. You’re defending Valve over Epic, which Epic has a much smaller market share. You can call it anti-consumer if you want, but monopolistic? Yeah right. When one store is the default, devs have to sacrafice to not be a part of it. Again, I agree it sucks, but it’s a monopoly by Valve, not Epic.

If anything if your argument is that it is hard then that just seems to bring to question of maybe a low cut actually isn’t realistic if a company wants to make a feature rich launcher and platform if even a billion dollar company is finding it hard to accomplish.

There are two consumers here. There’s consumers who purchase games, and consumers who utilize the product to sell their games. Epic gives a smaller cut to entice devs, because otherwise they have no reason to participate because all the game purchases happen through Steam.

It all sucks for the consumer, which is why monopolies are bad. We shouldn’t be defending some company who’s making tons of profit just because we are simping for their product. Steam is undoubtedly superior, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t monopolistic.

stardust , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Point is that the alternative isn’t even trying to be a legitimate option. It’s like wanting better streaming options for videos and blockbuster popping up and removing videos from being available on other steaming options.

There’s nothing that can be done when other companies don’t even bother with the new competitor being a billion dollar publicly traded company taking a monopolistic strategy. They aren’t even trying except throw money around to remove options. For there to be competion that is good for consumers the competion has to actually try, but they think just talking about cuts that don’t matter to consumers and taking a monopolistic approach to games is going to bring people who actually spend money.

All these cuts talks are useless when the company hasn’t even proven to have an sustainable actual business model with it not turning a profit. And given trends of other businesses that promise low prices then raise them is one of the least reliable ones. I’m not sure why you are simping for epic and defending them when my point is they aren’t even a good option worth defending like you are. It’s like defending a Walmart that showed up in a town despite all their strategies being more red flags.

I get pushing for gog or itch. But some company just existing doesn’t merit defending if they aren’t bringing value. The defense of them hasn’t been earned. Their end goal seems more suspicious to me. An option just popping up doesn’t entitle it to being defended if they haven’t earned it.

Cethin , 2 months ago

Another good point about video. Go try to stream Battlestar Galactica right now. It’s one of the greatest sci-fi shows ever made, and it’s impossible to stream reasonably. There actually is competition in that space, yet stuff like that still happens due to licensing deals. It used to be available on Netflix when that was the only streaming option, but it left a long time ago.

There’s nothing that can be done when other companies don’t even bother with the new competitor being a billion dollar publicly traded company taking a monopolistic strategy. They aren’t even trying except throw money around to remove options. For there to be competion that is good for consumers the competion has to actually try, but they think just talking about cuts that don’t matter to consumers and taking a monopolistic approach to games is going to bring people who actually spend money.

There is something that can be done. We have a government for a reason. It has laws in place to handle when monopolies appear. That shouldn’t matter if you like them or not. Monopolies are bad. For example, look at GPU prices. They are as high as they are because Nvidia can set them that high. They could be better than they are currently too, but there’s no reason to do that when they’re in the front. They’d rather sit on it until they need to advance to stay a step ahead. It’s bad for consumers, even if you like Nvidia for some reason.

Don’t simp for a corporation.

Appoxo , 2 months ago

Epic could compete. But I believe they did their approach too forcefully.

I personally refuse to use EGS because I don’t like how they approached the market by starting this exclusive war on PC. I wished they kept that to consoles only. If they did a co-release on both Steam and EGS but offer a consistent 10€ discount compared to Steam I’d be more open to it instead.

This in addition to Tencent (and by that extent the chinese gov) have a ~40% of shares of the company. That’s a considerable amount of foothold. And I vote with my wallet by not giving them more of my data.
I have to mention though, that I have an EpicGames account and have played Fortnight as well as use and play UE-games and tried out the UE-engine. But I have the option in life to not give them more.

exanime , 2 months ago

Steam DOES have a monopoly and that’s inherently bad

Being popular does not make steam a monopoly… My son plays 80% steam games but has Epic launcher installed and plays rocket League regularly

There is nothing in Steam preventing or even making it hard for you to run PC games in any other way

PotatoesFall , 2 months ago

having a market share like that is a form of monopoly. It’s obviously different from absolute monopoly, but they wield too much power as is.

And to be fair, running games on linux without steam is definitely more tricky than without.

exanime , 2 months ago

But I always assumed that, unless you are blocking competition, it’s not legally a monopoly and harder to penalize (not that they actually penalize monopolies much in north America)

Other than making a good product and easier to run games on Linux, there is nothing preventing anyone to install other launchers or games on their own or game makers from selling through other launchers or independently, etc

jarfil , 2 months ago

There are two requirements to be considered a monopoly, or fall under antitrust laws:

1. Have a large market share
2. Be able to force competing products out of the market

Steam meets point 1, it doesn’t meet point 2. On the other hand, things like the Apple App Store, don’t meet point 1, but meet point 2, which makes them more likely to fall under antitrust. Windows meets both points, which is why the US sued Microsoft for not letting people choose their browser.

Onihikage , 2 months ago

Yeah, we only have to look at the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon to see what they consider an antitrust problem:

[…] Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance.

That isn’t what we see from Valve - in fact it’s the opposite, as Valve’s strategy with Steam is simply to provide the best service and be the gold standard. The competition is almost always compared unfavorably to Steam, because gamers know how it feels to use a mature platform that isn’t trying to abuse them.

Valve has even taken some steps that wind up increasing competition in adjacent markets, such as operating systems (Proton has contributed significantly to Linux popularity) and even handheld game devices (Steam Deck set off an arms race when electronics manufacturers realized Nintendo is asleep at the wheel). Steam is as pro-consumer as it gets, with the exception of GOG and possibly itch.

Appoxo , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Not like any other app store does take 30% except for some high volume games/publishers.
Apple does the same. Hell they seem to have custom rules for each of the app devs (according to Linus and Luke from LTT: I believe this clip contains most of it. They recently talked about it again. Essentially they developed the app payment like Netflix. Apple said “No, that’s against our rules” and refused the submission of the update. Meanwhile Netflix supposedly still had the same communication for a long time.)

Same goes with Google and probably a number of other external stores.
Amazon seems to take up to 20% depending on the item (Source: sell.amazon.com/pricing.

At least Steam does provide a forum, community features and the update framework and infrastructure.
Personally I would be happy to take the offering over maybe needing to host and maintain the tech stack myself. Now mind you, maybe some other dev would rather do it themself and maybe wish to opt-out of the ecosystem. That is totally valid.

(Warning/Disclaimer: I only heard about that. I do not have first hand experience!) Apple for example takes a percentage for processing a payment and offers an invoicing system. Some may like that. Others could maybe negotiate a better deal with another provider and maybe even offer tools that integrate better with their existing accounting and ERP software.

Grimpen , 2 months ago

Can’t you use Proton on Mac? I’d think that would solve most compatibility problems.

nickwitha_k , 2 months ago

That or Rosetta, the built-in, hardware-accelerated x86_64 compatibility layer.

Railcar8095 , 2 months ago

The problem is that proton needs to translate direct X to Vulcan, but Apple doesn’t allow Vulcan, it has to be their own thing, Metal.

So it’s a lot of work for valve and fully dependent on apple not screwing them.

stardust , 2 months ago

This reads like an epic ad that expects people to buy from epic for just existing. Like arguing people should buy from the new Walmart that opened up in their town because it’s competition.

muhyb , 2 months ago

Hahaha, this article mainly sucks.