Steam is a ticking time bomb

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?

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.

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.

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!"

This is why beehaw needs downvotes. Crappy submissions like this article that don't make any sense

Edit: OP has been spamming his nonsense across multiple communities, and has hundreds of downvotes on each of them. Except here on beehaw...

You forgot the Mac

Lol, fuck Mac. If Apple cared about gaming, they wouldn't have created Metal and collaborated on Vulkan. Fuck them. Valve went with Linux because they can change it to fit their needs. Can't do that with Apple.
Microsoft is only supported by Valve because it has large marketshare and can't be ignored, but it's clear that Valve is doing everything possible to get away from them: see Steam Deck.

In general, I agree with Steam wielding too much power and if they abused it, I'd be out. I have my gaming hours and can live without gaming no problem. They wouldn't get any more money from me as soon as they enshittified.

What would get me away from steam is an opensource gaming store with games that have no DRM and are predominantly opensource. Or another gaming store that worked on Linux and allowed playing games with my other linux buddies.
Get us that and I'm out.

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.

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.

That has to be one of the dumbest articles I've read in a while.

While I personally use Steam very rarely (I prefer to use DRM-free versions of games), Steam has done very little to be considered on its way towards enshittification.

The macos situation is completely irrelevant because at this point its market share on steam is lower than linux and it makes no sense for them to invest only to be constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms. My guess is it will be dropped within the next 3-5 years.

The author points out the deprecation of Steam on older platforms, but fails to mention the fact that this wasn't always their choice, for instance the recent drop of Windows 7 support was caused by the fact that there's an embedded chromium browser in it and google dropped support for Windows 7 around that time. A similar situation happened for Windows XP, which was dropped in 2019, a full FIVE years after Microsoft dropped support for it, and at this time Steam on XP was only used for retrogaming, it made no sense to keep supporting it, there are better ways to get old games on XP.

There's barely a mention of all the good things that Valve has done for Linux gaming, but the article complains about Steam being 32 bit (which is still a requirement for wine to run, at least until the new wow64 mode becomes stable, and steam comes with its steam runtime specifically to avoid distro compatibility issues); they could have made proton only work with steam, they could have made their dxvk and vkd3d forks proprietary like nvidia did, but instead it's all open source and very easy to build on all platforms and I use my own fork every day to play games without steam. Heck, there are even competitors for the steam deck that run proton.

Also, can we mention the fact that Steam has not turned into yet another subscription service like some of its competitors?

If I had to point at something that Steam absolutely did wrong, I'd say it's allowing third party DRMs on the store, it's a consistent source of issues, especially for old games. I understand that when they made the choice we didn't have cancer like kernel level anticheat and denuvo, but still, Steam launching a launcher launching another launcher that launches the game is a trashy gaming experience and adds points of failure as we've already seen several times when big titles launch and their DRM servers go down, or when games get old and the DRM servers are shut down permanently.

While I'm sure Steam will eventually become enshittified, I don't see that happening any time soon, maybe after Gabe retires, and that's why you should keep a collection of DRM free games on your drives and not rely solely on Steam and other stores.

Just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree.

Lemmy has gotten to the point everything is getting classed as enshittification or whatever

It's actually getting crappy being here

Like the whole section about macos. Apple constantly screws developers, and somehow, the author has seemed to blame Valve lol. There's a lot of reason lots of people don't develop for Mac, and they're mostly valid rather than political

Or GitHub. In the real world, developers don't have any issues. Only in Lemmy, where people are even focusing on stupid things, so a barely visible unobtrusive sentence on a table mentions copilot lol

Hahaha, this article mainly sucks.

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.

The article in no way describes any actions taken by Valve that leads me to believe there is any impending enshittification. They simply have made decisions, a lot of which they have stuck with for many years.

Enshittification has to do with bait and switch, effectively. It’s luring customers into a false sense of loyalty and then abusing that to their financial gain (see: Reddit and Spez from 2023).

The article basically says “there are some decisions by Valve I like, and some I don’t.” That in no way provides any path toward some bomb going off. Perhaps time will prove the author right, of course, because any company can easily decide to screw over their customers, but the article is click-bait and completely speculative as to what may happen.

And due to all of the above, I think the bomb is about to go off where elephants will fly out of my refrigerator and steal my soda.

TLDR - Steam is shit because it's still 32bit?

Lol at the last section of the article. Valve is actually bad guys! Just trust me!

Valve won't stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.

Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full 'enshittification' of Steam will commence.

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.

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.

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"

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.

Just weird aside, but the meme they use as an example implies that you have to pay to add friends on steam, and that is just a weird example to use.

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.)