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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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I have some personal qualms about supporting "the biggest fish" in the pond, since that tends to lead to the Apples, the Googles, and the Microsofts.
However, Steam hasn't particularly abused its market power, and has even used it to create a very successful Linux handheld that has both helped propel Linux desktop adoption and added upstream improvements to Linux in general.
I'll revise my opinion when Valve changes to a more overtly predatory model of capitalism, but for now, I'll enjoy only needing to keep a partial eye open.
I believe as long they’re not publicly traded )and Gabe is in charge), that’s not a concern.
Being public (or owned by a publicly traded company) tend to bring out these nasty traits. It’s more about finding ways to bring value to shareholders than the customers.
Private companies can be dicks. Public companies can and will be sued by their shareholders if they aren’t big enough dicks.
I'm terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He's been amazing for the company and I don't trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.
I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don't invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they'll change over time, but I've been so happy with Valve that I've gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don't know what I'm gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I've bought, because that's a massive library to lose.
I've never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam's functionality, I won't ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we're not just starting over from scratch with a new service.
That's what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam's store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That's how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I've been a Steam loyalist ever since.
There were a few older games I owned that had trouble with running well on newer hardware because of the messy manual updates. Did the seriel bumber i to steam and it installed and updated to a smooth running version on steam at no cost.
Yes, this tied the hard copy to the steam account so there was a loss of reselling unless they changed that at some point. But I never bothered with selling used games and these were old enough that nobody wanted them anyway so I got some free use out of something I was almost ready to throw out.
WAIT WHAT.
Does this happen even if the game wasn't on Steam at time of purchase so long as it has a Steam version now? Because that would be amazing.
I really hope GabeN has a continuity plan that involves a nonprofit governance board when he's no longer in the picture. I don't even want to imagine valve as a publicly traded company (or owned by a private equity company for that matter.)
Anyone in charge of a non-publicly traded company will want to do what's best for the company in the long term instead of milking as much from it as fast as they can, so I don't think that replacing Gabe by someone else will be the end of Valve like so many people claim.
The problem is that you can never be certain about someone's ability to stand their morals atop money until it is truly offered to them. Supposedly Gaben has turned down Billion dollar offers for steam. It is certainly not every person who will do so and it is hard to know how a person will react until that is truly offered to them. I don't know that I'd turn it down (though I also don't know how much Gaben makes).
Not necessarily. Sometimes even owners just want to milk as much as possible as fast as they're able.
Source: life.
The joys of not having a duty to shareholders.
They're also directly funding linux devs to work on related projects, which the most mutually-beneficial way to build products around linux
this is the correct approach towards how a society should support big buisnesses. the companies that don't fuck us over will continue to get my public support and money
GoG exists and I always check there before going to Steam. I just won't deal Epic.
GOG is great, but they need to make a Linux launcher, already. Or if they can't, they should make it so the community can.
The heroic launcher supports GOG.
For sure, but it's not really the same functionality. You can play your games, but you can't buy or redeem any others from Heroic or Lutris.
It has a store page, basically an embedded web browser, I redeem free epic games through it, don't know about GOG but I'd imagine it works the same.
It's still a third party solution. There's no reason they couldn't make a Linux client for Galaxy, and some people want to use the official launchers.
True but paying customers can expect that CD Project to that by themselves from the cut they take from games on GOG and the insane amounts of Cyberpunk money they earned. Randy Pitchford claims that "Steam does very little to earn the massive cut they take and continues its effective monopoly" and that "very little" includes making clients for three operating systems, a VR platform, a handheld, and a whole operating system.
It's clear that Valve's competitors undervalue the user experience that Steam provides and don't understand why it's so sticky.
Yes. It's not like you can't even buy linux games on it. It was some jumping through hoops, but if you buy Factorio on GoG, you can get the linux version.
Wube (creators of Factorio) have the best customer policy in game development.
The only way I would like it more is if the game was open source but since that's impossible to sell I will take this.
I don't view games as needing to be open source as the end users doesn't need them to be productive in work. They aren't a part of a productivity pipeline and the discontinue of a game's support or radical change in fuction can't throw a person's livelihood into jeopardy.
Games should have a plan to release the source and assets if support ever gets dropped and I believe that it should be a requirement if a games gets to enjoy copyright protects that there's a plan for when it enters public domain, but that's a different discussion.