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Video game industry will collapse in on itself when Gabe Newell dies, and enshittification creeps into Steam.
I shall seize one of his yachts (probably metaphorically) and sail under the Jolly Roger when enshittification comes for Steam. Until then, it’s a pretty solid solution for buying PC games.
Steam Deck is also amazing, in that it’s as simple as a Switch to get playing but open enough through desktop mode to do so much more. As your customer, thanks for not treating me like a paste eating delinquent.
What concerns me about the future of sailing is the sea monster known as denuvo, as there haven't been a way to reliably hunt it down
there are three people on this ocean who can reliably hunt that beast.
- one is a transphobe
- the other is a trans
- and the other only cracks football games.
Not really looking good for the scene if only three people can crack it.
Something I've been worried about for some time. I mean, I hope his death isn't soon, but we all know whoever steps in is most likely to royally fuck it up.
He just needs to make it an employee owned company. I believe it would make it a stable institution.
I actually have hope for the company after he is gone. All they have to do is keep steam going and they win. They just print money. There is no reason to go evil and sell the company and go public. They just win.
provided the can safeguard themselves from parasites that might try creeping in and try to change things for worse
This could be said for most companies I think. But the principle of enshitification applies regardless
Already moved on from Steam. Had 750 games there. Deleted the client and started GOG collection. No Galaxy client for me. No more cancer social media, achievements, friends.. just Offline installers and the satisfaction that I actually own these games now.
Steam is already enshitified. Every other marketplace just sucks that much.
No it isn't. I have yet to pay a single cent or subscription in more than a decade.
Are you trying to imply subscription fees are necessary for something to be called enshitified?
Well you haven't given any practical examples of how you think Steam is enshittified, so you've left people to draw their own conclusions and definitions.
To me it just sounds like someone who's trying to justify pirating indie games.
Nows a good time to articulate a defense. Because as far as their impact on gaming as a distributor, theyve enabled more than any other company by far
You view this as me saying it's a bad platform. I don't think it is. I love it and use it often. GoG is probably the only one that's not enshitified.
You've still yet to actually say how steam is enshittified despite several comments asking. You reply but dodge the real question.
Dodge the question
Yeah, I'm not interested in getting interrogated over my opinions today. Especially by someone literally named "AngryMob".
Edit: after they said "its entertaining how sensitive you got about this." I now feel justified in my hesitancy.
Oh, I see. You're just being a contrarian. 🙄
No, I just don't see any point in adding nuance to my opinion when everyone is already shitting on me for it. Do you know how shitty it feels opening my inbox, excited to see folks to chat with, and it's just people getting angry about stuff I said? Why would I want to add context? Just so everyone can shit on me more? No, I'm good.
Nobody has even shit on you, its not shitting on you to simply disagree. You seem to just have thin skin. You've typed endless replies and it would have taken much less time and effort to simply explain your position. I think the real issue is you can't justify your position after you thought about it more. Because steam is many things, good and bad, but enshittified aint one of em. But just like many sensitive posters on social media, you'd rather comment repeatedly about every other sentence people write, rather than the topic at hand. Like my username, since that's so relevant lol...
It's the tone. The first time I even began to very briefly breach the topic of why I actually believe it's enshitified I had someone telling me "so no real examples then?" Seriously, tell me, why would I want to respond to that? Everyone is telling me to actually share my opinion, but as soon as I did someone just immediately dismisses it. Then I've got people calling me a contraian because I'm unwilling to share my opinion because I don't want to get bullied. I've got you calling me names in the same post as you saying no one is shitting on me. I've got you twisting what was a jovial pun based on your username into something malicious. (It felt like an angry mob was attacking me, har har, I guess the humor is far too advanced to understand.) You say I'd "rather comment repeatedly about every other sentence people write, rather than the topic at hand" when it's pretty fucking clear that the topic at hand right now has shifted from my opinions on Steam to me defending my right to not share my opinion when people are just being condescending about it.
Because steam is many things, good and bad, but enshittified aint one of em.
???
You're just trolling at this point but hey i'll do what you can't and justify my own words.
"monopoly" in some peoples' opinions (not mine but im open to their dominance being a bad thing anyway), 30% cut (still an industry standard but could and should be lower despite the value it provides), drm (optional but fuck drm in any form), gambling (no parenthesis needed i hope), returns and support itself being rather limited. Im sure we can come up with more.
None of those are enshittification.
Then don't announce your random opinion into the void then?
If you're going to stand on the street corner and shout about how the world is coming to an end, don't be upset when people ask you to provide some evidence.
I'm not trying to suggest people shouldn't be allowed to respond negatively to an opinion. But I'm also allowed to not want to engage. Any "evidence" I provide is just going to get shot down. Everyone's mind is already made up on the topic. Steam can do no wrong, apparently. Despite the fact that I even said it's the best and that I like it, everyone just wants to attack for me for having the gall to suggest it's less than perfect.
It's not like I hate it. The criticisms are minor. I just don't want to get online and feel like I'm being interrogated. So no, I'm not going to "provide evidence." There are hills I'm willing to actually willing to argue about, but this isn't one. Life's too fucking short to explain my minor criticisms with the best digital PC game store when we all know everyone is just going to respond with things Valve does that are good and act like that magically erases the bad. Everyone's already been doing in this thread.
I experienced the same shit back with BG3 when the hype train was at critical levels. I'd talk about my frustrations that everyone said it was a "polished" game by talking about the bugs/UX difficulties I was experiencing. I'd get mocked to no end. Even then I'd always say the game is great and I'm loving it along every criticism. But people don't care. It's just tribalism. They see someone criticizing a thing they like and can't handle it.
So no, I'm not going to explain why I view Steam as an enshitified platform. Because it's pointless and I know everyone is already going to disagree and pile on even further. And it's a minor criticism.
I swear, it's like people are thinking I'm saying EGS is the bastion of Linux gaming or something because I said I have minor issues with Steam. It's just exhausting.
GoG is more enshittified than Steam (which really isn't enshittified). They spam emails now with random deals, like several emails a day with "(code for deal here) expires in 24 HOURS" and it's always some random shitty game. Steam just send emails for when a wishlisted game goes on sale or releases, exactly what I want. But GoG has gone full unwanted spam with theirs, random games I've never seen before and no info about what game in the subject line so you have to open the mail to see. It's so shitty.
I was referring more to the DRM, but yeah, that's a fair point. I don't use GoG much so it's possible that's why I haven't seen this.
Any examples? AFAIK they improved a lot, especially in Linux space which I am very grateful for. I wouldn't be using Linux if it wasn't for steam. Although there are still a lot of things to complain about but if it wasn't better before then it isn't enshiftification by definition.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a marketplace that isn't enshitified in some way. Most are going to shove ads in your face which is shitty, but most people aren't going to recognize it as a bad thing because they're there to shop.
Right so no actual examples then?
And you can't say advertising because of course there's going to be adverts up for games sold on the platform. I think most people would argue that if you go into a store, and then see a sign in that store, for something that is sold in the store, that's not advertising, that's just signage.
The goal of advertising is to try to convince you that you want a product or a service. But if you are already in the store you've already made the decision that you want that product or service, so by definition you can't be advertised to at that point.
I can see how you can say that about the Steam's UI in some spots, but not Steam as a whole. They have a great business model, as far as video games are concerned.
They have some of the highest paid employees, and they keep prices low.
Just because Steam is objectively the best doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize them when it matters.
Sure. But what exactly are you criticizing? All you've really said is essentially "Steam sucks too" with no reasoning.
I agree, but I don't think that backs the claim that it's already enshittified.
Because he maintains a near monopoly.
He doesn't tho. He just offers such a good service to people that they don't want to use anything else. That's not a monopoly.
and he maintains a near monopoly because Steam is just a great platform for gamers, as Gabe has said:
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.
and he's right! i almost never pirate video games because of their price, i can wait for a sale, there's a billion other games i can play in the meantime
when shit like Epic takes years to implement a shopping basket, and still have yet to recolour their payment page so it stops flashbanging gamers across the world, Steam doesn't even need to try very hard to be the best. The biggest changes on Steam in the recent years are what - updating the UI aged ago? adding a points system so people can get silly profile decorations as an additional reward for buying a video game? Steam has created a platform so good all they need to do is sit back relax, and think of what other sprinkles colour to add to the
cakepie?Steam has competitors, but the difference is Steam is for gamers, and most of their competitors is for money
god help us all if that ever were to change, the second Steam enshittifies the internet will implode
Steam recently the added the ability to easily record gameplay footage. They are also updating the family sharing system (that feature alone would probably never come to other platforms). They also continue to improve gaming on Linux. I don't remember how long it has been, but they massively updated the library with a lot of really useful features such as being able to select a friend and it'll show what games you have in common so picking a game to play with a friend is a lot easier.
Further back we see the remote play together feature added to Steam; I was hesitant to use it for a long time but as long as you and the host have a decent internet connection it works pretty flawlessly.
Their custom control settings and community sharing of the different controller schemes is incredibly helpful with some games.
Their review system is pretty good and always helpful to me when exploring for new games I haven't previously heard of. They have also seem to try to keep the reviews more legit and less spammy/meme-y and more relevant to the actual game itself.
They also implement rules to keep game pages on the store less spammy, they had a big overhaul on the rules around thumbnails for games to keep text off of them because developers started overloading them with advertisements for other games.
They have also recently announced allowing for refunds on season passes when the developers take too long or never deliver on their promises they sold you on. This of course should have always been the case, but at let they're coming around. I also don't know if any of the other platforms make it as easy to get a refund as Steam does, but that's been around for a while now.
I believe there has also been a lot of work developing server side cheat detection so maybe one day we won't have to rely on client side anti-cheats so much. I also believe they recently made a change to their rules where if a game has a kernel/root level anti cheat that they have to flag that on the store page for the game.
Steam (Valve) actually seem to care about games and the industry in general and want to see the environment around gaming improve.
From my current view point Steam is an actual platform everyone else are just store fronts that provide no additional value to the consumer. So yeah, pricing is rarely the issue when it comes to piracy and Steam really shows how true that statement can be.
Also, most people don't realize that Steam doesn't force games to use DRM, that's purely up to the developers.
Edit: fixed some typos.
What monopoly ?
Steam has something like 75% of the PC market share based on a figure from the anti trust lawsuit.
Yeah but they aren't doing anything to enforce that. They have market share because their product is good and everyone else's equivalent product sucks nuts. That's not a monopoly, that's the free market at work.
No such thing as free-market buddy
Not a monopoly, Epic should be called out for that
Epic doesn't have a monopoly either.
I think the term you're looking for is "anti-competitive practices."
Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars!