this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
297 points (92.3% liked)
Technology
80273 readers
3445 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Are brainwashed G*mers finally going to see Valve for the monopolistic anti-consumer sack of shits they are.
Looks at comments
I guess not.
It's not about defending valve, it's about not buying epic's pro consumer rhetoric. They have a worse product, a history of anti consumer practices, and you shouldn't let them use you to gain leverage to be able to abuse you more.
Steam is DRM, but so is Epic. And if the two, Steam/valve have contributed meaningfully to open source software and the gaming industry. In a world where capitalism rules, Steam/Valve is hardly the worst option.
I for one look forward to the Steam Deck; my HP Reverb G2 became a paperweight when it lost support overnight after a Windows update, and while it's not completely open, I expect valve's headset to be supported for as long as the hardware survives.
Fuck DRM, but if you want to pay for convenience and don't care about owning your games, Steam is the best option.
That's the problem. EA, Nintendo, Blizzard, etc all use to be "cool" pro-consumer companies until they suddenly werent. I hate ppl getting so use to convenience until its too late and then when we all own nothing we bought anymore and everyone is standing around going "How did this happen?"
But I want to keep using the convenience until it's not. Nothing lasts forever.
I don't buy games on steam so I can have them in the future. I buy them on steam so I can play them today, so I can easily reinstall them, so I can have my save files synced across devices and and reinstalls.
The day steam gets enshitified where it isn't giving me that convenience is the day I stop using it. Most of my library was purchased for <$10 in summer sales, I've played their worth and then some. If Valve disappears tomorrow and my steam library with it, there's only a handful of games I might repurchase, I wouldn't be that devastated.
I don't make a living off it, my life doesn't depend on it, I don't need it... it's entertainment and convenience that I want today, and valve allows me to play more and more of library on Linux every day, which is great because I've completely uninstalled Windows.
In contrast, I don't use streaming services, where you're not even guaranteed access to the media TODAY. I wouldn't use Steam if it was a subscription.
What anti-consumer is exactly about Steam? Comparatively to pretty much any other online game store, Steam is a super-pro-consumer-the-only-good-choice store.
They have the most generous refund policy of any store and don't force any DRM on published games. The horror!!
I think it's satire
Spent a decade saying refunds weren't possible until the EU told them to wise up. And even then it's the bare minimum.
Selling broken and abandoned games.
Entering deals with publishers to force physical copies of the game to use Steam. Making the disc worthless.
They probably will when the steam store turns to shit, valve stops supporting Linux and making hardware they want, stops doing family sharing, and pretty much removes everything from the steam client except the store.
You have to admit, valve has a pretty good reason to be liked.
Lots of holiday deals, fair regional pricing, massive open-source contributions, hanging back from making era-defining, envelope-pushing games to just make the gaming industry on PC better.
Valve only has a good reputation because for generations of G*mers it's the default option.
They have been indoctrinated into Steam's system.
It wasn't the default, it literally led the way.
By striking exclusively deals with publishers for digital distribution and using it for DRM for physical releases.
And now the generation that allowed that say to the next that Steam is the default.
Yes because before steam this never happened. Ever. They are the worst, oh hello Epic, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, didn't see you there.
Looking through my favorites list games on Steam, most games have at least one alternative place where they can be bought between GOG, Epic, Itch or the publisher/devs own store. How is that a monopoly? This is without even mentioning other consoles (which you could argue are monopolies on their own).