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.
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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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
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.
I do hope to see more competition in the Linux gaming space. It's not good long term to fully rely on Valve for everything.
Its the “if you build it they will come” type of scenario. I want to switch to Linux really badly, but my driver is for gaming, i don’t want to adopt a pet project of getting my games to run in the first place.
Though i know valves interest in Linux is not completely motivated in philanthropy. They want to be able to separate from the dependence of Microsoft, for the safety of their businesses future. But so far our interests align
The article makes some good points. Most people downvoting it probably just see a title that attacks their favourite game distribution platform, if there even is such a thing.
Personally, I treat Steam like a rental service, because that's what it is. Meaning I exclusively "buy" games on Steam at deep 80-90% discounts. So, when the enshittification inevitably hits the fan, I can jump ship without feeling like I'm loosing too much.
I'll just link this reply. They lost me when they said "The lock-in effect with Steam is so great that [Epic] giving games away for free is not putting a sizable dent in Valve's dominance."
It doesn't matter that Epic is giving away games that only run on a platform I don't use. They won't get my money until they get their heads out of their asses about Linux.
EDIT: Yeah the link says pretty much the same things (and more) than I did below.
I think it says more about Epic's launcher and sales tactics than about Valve's dominance. I mean, up to a certain point you can compensate your inferior product with a lower price point but if the trade-off is too high, then even giving something out for free doesn't help. Epic's launcher has been quite bad without any clear development in my eyes for a long time, and I can as well relate to the other commenter about not being able to use it natively on Linux. It's just not something worth a few saved euros to put up with.
I do wonder what's the Steam users' demography nowadays. Are there so many adults who earn a decent salary that they can afford actually paying for their games and enjoy a working platform (Steam) instead of saving a buck and losing their hair on the rare occasion they have the time to play something? That can be a tough crowd to lure in with some occasional free games.
