this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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I'll never understand why some people look at the fact that steam is popular because of their policies, and can't help but make a comment like this equating that popularity to cock worship.
Like, we get it bro. You're thinking about cocks and you're mad about a half decent game store. What compelled you to combine those thoughts on a public forum?
The weird thing is that this isn't even the first comment I've seen like this. Dudes that are mad about steam want everyone else to know about steam's massive, throbbing cock for some reason. This guy alone has posted 3 of these.
Valve abducts kids into gambling, mine people data, promotes DRMs and proprietary software. All of that out of geed and seeking profits.
Especially to kids videogames are really alluring, it's important to warn everyone against evil and greedy companies.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
Ok, let's take this point by point:
Steam doesn't allow actual gambling. It's illegal in the US and they typically don't sell games that are not legal in the US. Conflating other types of games as gambling when there is no actual money on the line is a dishonest and transparent attempt to make steam look bad
Valve has no control over the DRM policies of the games that they sell. Valve creates an anti-cheat and that's about as involved as they get. DRM is a gaming company corporate decision not publisher or distributor. If simply allowing DRM is what you mean by "promoting" then that is another count of dishonesty.
What data can they possibly mine? They get an email address, some gameplay time, location data, and Hardware data. All of this stuff is pretty freely available and doesn't really sell for anything, nor is it really violating any privacy. And besides that, you can directly opt out of Hardware surveys.
Asserting that video games are a problem for kids and that steam is evil or profit-driven because of that is also pretty dishonest given that there are basically no game distributors that keep kids from playing video games. What you are essentially saying is that we should start doing like China does and limit kids ability to gain at all. Even then that is a government regulation and not at all on steam.
I would like to just point out the absurdity of saying that kids should not be able to play video games because of steam. For the last 40 years video games have been marketed primarily to kids. Are you going to say the same about Nintendo or Atari? Are you now asserting that companies shouldn't Market to kids at all? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?
Thank you for this. For some reason theres new accounts showing up on lemmy who just start spouting nonsense and lies just to get other people to hate on something thats trying to make a difference.
Steam is great. For all the bad decisions they may have made, the good ones they've made outweigh them by a thousand. Compared to Epic who i believe has done more damage to the gaming industry.
Also lets not forget, Epic was the one pushing for crypto games. Valve comepletely banned those on their store. So who's getting kids addicted to gambling now?
I'm pretty sure Epic has shills or a pr firm doing anti-valve posts. They always use the same handful of talking points. There was never much hate towards valve until these last few years, other than comments on lame sales.
I can see the rationality of it. Once anything gets big enough there are always going to be people who look at the flaws and decide that the thing shouldn't exist or are maybe just upset because they don't face enough scrutiny.
But also covert marketing is definitely a thing. That is to say that people who may have an interest in seeing steam fail or lose market share one day definitely are a presence on social media that is as open as lemmy.
Steam might not be perfect, but despite what the critics would have you believe, steam is still better than a lot of alternatives.