This genuinely doesn't get talked about enough. Steam is a private company and Gabe Newell seems to be the de facto "head" of the company, despite its famously "flat" management structure. There is no guarantee a new leader will have the same values or lead the same way. There is ripe opportunity for Steam to become a steaming pile of shit. I don't know about the exact ownership structure beyond Newell, but unless the employees are far more empowered through things like ownership stake in the company, new leadership could effectively destroy how things currently work at Valve to be replaced by any number of terrible business decisions.

Gabe is old as hell. It's coming.

It's not Steam's fault if their competitors can't make a good product. Steam is still the only one with Linux support.

In an ideal world, if Gaben was a real saint, he would turn Steam into a foundation or steward-owned purpose organization before he retires, that can't be sold.

I'm just glad GOG is surviving. It's even closer to an ideal of DRM-free games you own. I try to buy from there whenever I can.

Steams biggest competition isn't another launcher, it's piracy. Gabe is wise enough to know that, if the next guy to take over is a chode they'll learn the hard way.

It's absolutely weird and unhealthy to celebrate it.

Gaben is old, and he's gonna retire. It'll likely be a lot sooner than anyone here is comfortable with. When Valve gets sold, or even when gaben isn't in total control anymore, things are going to start changing, and there isn't going to be a healthy, diverse marketplace to soften that.

This is it. Look at history and every major company in the past 200 years. Once the shift happens, it all goes to hell. And yet people are still shouting about some "Steam Victory" like wtf?

Or Pheonix Point, where Epic bought an kickstarter game that was funded under the promise of releasing on Steam, GOG and potentially other stores and promptly made it exclusive - and this was in the early days when their launcher/store was in a much worse state too.

Especially GOG being DRM free but they really need a Linux client.

I'm fine with them existing, but if there are clauses preventing publishers from proposing their games both on steam and elsewhere while they can't make it cheaper elsewhere, I would like these clauses to stop. I read somewhere there are such clauses and these kind of clauses seem very uncompetitive to me and I wonder why they are legal (if they are).

Steam does keep winning and it’s because of convenience for consumers.

As a Linux user, nothing else comes even close. I can read on ProtonDB if I can expect a Windows game to just work, and more often than not, it does.
GOG is also a great concept, and somewhat Linux friendly, but it doesn't have the Steam "click and play" convenience.
Epic Game Store however, has been decidedly Linux hostile for some reason??? As I see it, Steam and GOG are for gamers, Epic Game Store is for business. It would be a dark day for gamers, if Epic ever became dominant.

Valve is also a privately held company, unlike most (all?) of the other big players. Therefore they don't have the ever present drive and threat of "the line must always go up" to contend with. Valve can do whatever the fuck they feel like, however the fuck they feel like, and as long as they're bringing in enough revenue to keep the lights on and keep Gabe Newell in Acapulco shirts and Cheetos, or whatever his jam is, there's nothing anybody can do about it.

They can gamble and release a VR headset or two, and if it's not a huge success, who cares? There are no shareholders breathing down their necks. They can support the Linux community and if it pisses of Microsoft, or whoever, so what? They want to wait 16+ years before getting around to releasing the sequel to their flagship franchise? There is no boardroom pushing them to slap it together and shove it out the door before Christmas, so they can just do that. Etc.

GOG is also good for consumers, too (in some ways, moreso than Steam, like DRM-free games with install files) but it doesn't get the same love. I understand why, Steam was already the market leader, has a way more polished product, and GOG really still focused on "what's in the name" of Good Old Games. Most of their catalogue seems to be focused on older titles, which definitely makes it seemingly more catered to an older, classic gaming audience.

Steam Input is another underrated feature, makes use of any controller plug and play.

What's funny though is that a game was exclusive to the Epic Games Store, the devs of the game recommended to launch the game launcher via steam to use steam input as EGS or game had some controller detection issues lol

But like seriously, it's 2024, all games should support all controllers natively, without the need for steam input/rewasd/ds4windows etc

While some games do support dualsense and dualshock natively, but they don't support switch controller?!

If Epic had required developers to, say, sell games 15% cheaper (they only take a 12% cut instead of 30%, so the devs would still win out!) then they could have had a really cool argument on their hands. "Look how much Steam costs you as the consumer just from them enriching themselves!". Then the dearth of features would have been excusable, sure the shop is shit and does ˜nothing but hey, 10% cheaper in return!

Instead, as you say, they wanted to completely brute-force consumers onto the platform by putting their big fortnite money dick on the table, and it backfires and they spent a ton of money on a fat load of nothing.

Plus they've nicely trained their consumers that all the EGS client is for is launching it once on Thursdays to get your free game. Not the thing you want customers to associate with your supposedly money-making scheme.

And you can properly UNINSTALL games on steam. Epic is a joke when it comes to this. Have to right click and delete folder contents like it’s a 90s version of hacking a game illegally downloaded. They just need a little key generator with an 80s game sound you can’t mute. I thoroughly hate my experience with epic. Archaic POS.

Such a weak article. One of the arguments is that valve is awful because... people talk about steam sales, thus giving them free marketing.

Personally, I just don't want to have to use 6 different game stores/launchers and I'm happy with steam. Just having game pass also is enough to illustrate how much of a pain it would be, since I've bought a bunch of games and have later noticed I could have tried them for free on the Xbox app.

Oh god, I just realized... Imagine if they brought Portal back, but in VR like they did Half-Life.

We'd get so many videos of people falling over in their living room

Steam sucked, really bad. For 8 years, maybe? Maybe more? It takes time to build something, but consumers demand everything immediately.

I think it's just priorities, those other companies weren't interested in making a launcher, they were interested in tying their customers into their eco system.

Steam started out like that in appearance at least, nobody really wanted it and it was kind of forced on you if you wanted to play HL2 but since Valve seemed to understand the value in a platform like steam and actually work at making it good it became pretty good.

At this point it's actually kind of hard to fully appreciate how much work has gone into steam. Not just the basic stuff like chat and forums and a store with a functioning search, or the banal stuff like inventories and trading cards and points I still don't understand, but also the stuff most people don't see like all the stuff for developers launching a game on steam and managing sales and keys and betas. Not to mention all the experiments they've done along the way to try and figure out what the best way forward is.

Steam is kind of a huge undertaking and unless a company is really invested in competing with it they're simply not going to be able to.

Not just a refund policy but a refund policy where you can just say 'yeah this shit sucks yo'