PC Gaming

I don't see it that way but Steam has never enshittified in way that was noticeable to me and the features they offer along with the games are valuable. They are also a big driver of Linux development for games. That earns them a lot of points. If they flip or something better comes along I have no loyalty to them.

True, we shouldn't be 'backing' them.

Consumerism and capitalism essentially dictate that large-scale gaming can't exist without publishers. Studios need to get funded, and most developers struggle with tasks like publishing, marketing, analytics, and handling payments. While a company could theoretically manage all of this itself, it demands a lot of specialized talent, which schools only teach to a limited extent in a manner relevant to the gaming industry.

Publishers (almost) can't help but be somewhat offensive to the public. They are there to make money and (the good ones, at least) put money back into the market so they can make more money.

Valve is less offensive than many/most. Gabe was an underdog story. Valve released some damn fine games before they primarily became publishers.

How a corporation uses its money and how it earns its profits should be under scrutiny. Customers can have a “fair” relationship with a company where everyone gets what they want - a good product at a fair price and a fair profit.

However, if a company gets their profits via enshittification, suppressing wages and benefits, using their profits to politically undermine workers and engage in monopolistic behavior, etc. they are just another run of the mill evil corporation.

Yeah, billionaires suck. You don’t get to be a billionaire by not taking as much as you can vs improving the costs to customers or employee benefits.

Yeah you are totally right, we shouldn't think of corporations as friends.

There is however a difference and that is that Valve is a private company while others like Amazon are publicly traded and therefore even more profit-orientated. As long as Valve makes enough profit to be able to cope with a couple bad years it is doing alright.