this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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The issue is Steam and Valve being held up as the ‘one good company’, when there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Valve does many of the same practices as Epic, EA, etc., but there’s a double standard with Valve because it’s the default experience. The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.
It'll be fine until they go public (though maybe a few billion is enough for gaben and they won't, but I'm not banking on it), then it'll be an inevitable decline like all the others.
Whatever Gaben thinks, he won't live forever. The moment leadership changes, we'll see how money thirsty the new bosses are.
What specifically are you envisioning? If this is just a general kind of, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" supposition, I don't think that really holds any water; it's just a platitude. If anything, Steam being so ubiquitous could more easily make it's eventual decline a catalyst for legislation to give software license ownership stronger consumer protections. The idea that we should either condemn it now or stop using it, before its decline, makes no sense to me. Is GOG better? Sure. Can it fully replace Steam? No. Is Steam better than Epic, Origin, UPlay? Absolutely. I'm just not sure what the real point of all this condemnation is when they're by far trying, by and large, to treat consumers well. It's just blaming Valve for not being totally and eternally immune to the effects of Capitalism.
No one claims this. The only thing remotely close to that which people claim is that Valve is uniquely positioned to be one of the best digital games distribution platforms due to its private ownership insulating it against shareholder demands (which is by far the largest driver of enshittification), which is also true for GOG, but obviously Valve is still beating them out in capacity and capability currently.
Of course, it's a company. But it's still a billion times better than most of its competitors.
A sane and reasonable take? On the internet?
it's more likely than you think