Steam is a ticking time bomb
Steam is a ticking time bomb
The 'enshittification' of the Steam games platform is inevitable, and there are already warning signs.
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One extremely important factor that this article neglects to address: Valve is a private company - it's not publicly traded in Wall Street. That is the reason Steam has remained the best in the business; it's not beholden to shareholders' short-sighted meddling. It's also the reason Steam is effectively immune to enshittification.
The unspoken part is that unless Gabe has a very strong plan involving some sort of employee co-op, when he retires or dies the company will likely get sold by the estate to private capital which is 100x worse than being a public company.
Maybe Gaben will go all Willy Wonka when the time comes
Valve has avoided many of the same anti-consumer moves as other tech and gaming giants, likely due to its smaller size, status as a non-public company, and the long-time leadership of Gabe Newell and other executives. 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.
Valve is not immune to enshittification, and it has already happened on some level with minimal current Mac support, facilitating gambling through item trades, etc.
Who is trying to game on a mac? Their hardware blows for gaming.
Apple has never wanted to play ball with the gaming community either, look no further than the lawsuits Epic is waging on them over the app store. Apple loves their closed ecosystem, and giving Valve any room for a foothold is counter to their strategy. There is no incentive for apple to court getting steam on their machines, and with such a small player base valve has no incentive either.
When it comes to enshittification Valve is a shining beacon resisting the tide of trends. No paying for online play. Free cloud saves. An open ecosystem with marketing methods that give everyone a chance in the spotlight, regardless of AAA status. No exclusivity for games (Epic can fucking suck it for bringing that bullshit to PC). Instead of squashing competition with shit business practices like Epic and Apple they encourage competition! They purposefully made SteamOS open source so that other companies can easily release portable PC gaming products!! They created controller compatibility when Microsoft wouldn’t, notably for playstation controllers while still releasing their own Steam controller. They created one of the first and only digital goods return policies, and frequently accept returns beyond the time limit. No one else in this industry is doing things like that. Epic wants to break in with subversive tactics while Valve is continuously improving the landscape for gamers, developers, and hardware makers. As long as Gabe Newell is alive we are in safe hands.
That said, who knows what happens when he dies? Everything is still just a license, so check out GOG for DRM free goods while you can. Buy things on other stores when they’re cheap so you have a distributed library. Maybe the ticking time bomb is there, but for the moment Valve is the last gaming company that isnt trying to fuck us on a daily basis, and I will continue to support that as long as that remains true.
No exclusivity for games
Valve doesn't need to pay for exclusivity because it already dominates the market. There are many games that are effectively Steam exclusives because they are not available through other methods on PC. Half-Life 2 received a lot of criticism at launch for requiring Steam.
They purposefully made SteamOS open source so that other companies can easily release portable PC gaming products
SteamOS is open source, but you need a license to use the Steam brand, and Valve doesn't allow that. One company tried to make a handheld console with SteamOS, but it can't be legally bundled with the hardware: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033161/ayaneo-next-lite-steam-deck-competitor-steamos
That said, who knows what happens when he dies?
Yes, that's the point of the article. If you need one specific person to stay alive for something to continue functioning well, you don't have a business, you have the British monarchy.
I am not aware of any stream agreement with game developers that prevents them from releasing their game using any other method. Your argument about streams “” monopoly “” is 100% due to market forces working as advertised. They offer a service that no other company either can or will match. And that is not the fault of steam and was not achieved by illegal means. There’s dissent even need to be a launcher at all! Game companies can just sell us the game alone without a launcher. What other companies want is market dominance, not a fair market place. Because the fair market place gave steam the current win
Whether or not the exclusivity deal is between the publisher and the store or just the publisher doesn’t make a difference for the consumer. There’s no functional difference between Counter Strike 2 requiring Steam and Fortnite requiring the Epic launcher except that gamers are used to Steam.
Yes there is. Because it gives the games companies the ability to sell however they like. What to make the game sellable privately? No problem. What to sell an apple version, go for it.
So what part of the open market covers preventing the consumers from being able to choose which launcher they prefer, if any? Valve didn’t do that. EGS did. You should blame the competitors for failing to meet market standards
When you are upset at Valve for not doing for apple what they did for Linux, who you are really mad at is Apple for having terrible… everything, and game developers who don’t want to put the needed effort in for such a modest return.
You are upset at everyone BUT Valve. Or at least you should be.
While they may be functionally Similar to the consumer, there is a massive difference between first-party and third-party exclusives, and another huge gap between exclusivity decided based on publisher choices and based upon storefront bribery. These differences are especially applicable to the topic of enshittification the driving element for this conversation which your response seems to have forgotten in this instance.
Who is trying to game on a mac? Their hardware blows for gaming.
I am. And there is no closed ecosystem on Macs, I can download a game or program from a website and install it. Most of us run the windows version of a game, or dual boot into windows and run games that way.
Just because you do not like or understand something does not make it invalid.
What it does make invalid is the argument that valve is enshitifying because they don’t cater to apple users. You can put that blame on apple all day. Valve? Not at all. Its a huge waste of time, and all efforts tword Linux advancement is much better spent.
Have you ever developed for apple? Apple is it's own biggest gatekeeper. People don't want to develop for them.
When Valve makes a change to Steam that you disagree with your choice is to give up using Steam, and your purchased games, or just accept it and continue. Steam is proprietary software: it gives unjust power over user's computing. Even good people are not immune to the temptation to use power for themselves at the expense of others. While Valve have done a lot of good, indeed are the best, no one is perfect. I don't understand why you think it has no potential to become a lot worse.
Nobody is talking about "no potential". Just "a lot less potential than any other option out there", and that's currently the best we got
GOG doesn't contribute to Proton AFAIK, and doesn't offer amazing QOL stuff like Steam Input. But what you buy from them is yours forever, assuming you sensibly back it up yourself. So "best we got" is debatable depending on what you value.
My "best we got" was in regards to the potential to become a lot worse because of shareholder pressure. Given that CD Project is a publicly traded company, GOG is much worse in that regard than Steam.
I fully agree that GOG, as it currently is, could be the better product for you depending on your values, but its defenses against enshittification are objectively much worse than Steam's*, and that's all I was talking about.
*That is, until Gabe dies, I guess, who knows what'll happen then
Ah, I see. That's a fair point, and yeah I do worry about GOG's potential for enshitification. But knowing at least my past purchases will not become shit is some small comfort.
Right, that's definitely an important thing, that at least with gog, you can defend yourself against that possibility.