Everyone here who has drank the Valve kool-aid and pretends like they can do no wrong is dangerously short-sighted. Steam's virtual monopoly on PC gaming is a huge issue. You think Epic has a monopoly on the concept of "Store Exclusives?" Fucking spare me. It's a matter of time before Steam locks in its own exclusives, kills Proton, and locks every. single. game. behind always online DRM.

If you want to distribute your new PC game, guess what? You don't get to contract with both GOG and Steam. You don't get to say your game is Linux compatible because it runs well in the Proton compatibility layer. Oh, and if you say "games could run on Linux before Proton!" then you're deluding yourself by remembering a time when games were distributed with their own launcher and weren't packed to the gills with platform specific code so that the game integrates seamlessly with a specific third-party launcher and its DRM tools. You bought a Steamdeck? Cool. The version of Arch it runs is no longer supported. You have to upgrade to "Windows for Steameck." Yes, you have to pay for a fucking Windows license. Yes, it has fewer features than baseline Windows. No, it's not less expensive.

You think what's happening to YouTube is bad? Fucking strap in, boys. Welcome to digital content distribution in the age of unfettered capitalism. I wonder how many of you are gonna eat this shit up, huff lethal quantities of copium, and say it's "not that bad" once it starts happening and you're faced with either standing by your own stated convictions and giving up almost all PC gaming in general or bend the knee so you can get your precious Steam Library back. Probably most of you.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Considering how much money they make with gambling, I think Valve is not as saint-like as people think it is.

People make Games has done two great videos on Valve

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

They're getting sued often because they're greedy sloths suffering the ego trip just like epic did when Fortnite was on the top of the world second only to Minecraft of course.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

This is silly. Valve is already a profit driven company. You don't see the walled garden? The DRM? Valve supports proton because it's in their monetary interest to do so.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Since it's not publicly owned it doesn't have to focus on quarterly profits.

If it gets sold to Microsoft they're probably going to start stripping it down to please investors banking on how most people will be too lazy to leave it. We've seen the same thing happen with reddit and twitter. I'm pretty sure enshittification is inevitable.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

There's "profit-driven" and "seeking exclusively the profits of the next quarter". While capitalism has a lot of downsides in the long run, the vast majority of bullshit people get outraged about is due to publicly traded companies being organized in such a way that their CEOs and shareholders sacrifice all sustainability and instead try to loot your kitchen.

Whatever Steam policies you think are bullshit right now (and I can name a couple more, too), they're not too much in comparison to what they'd be under more typical management.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

How is it walled garden when you can add any non-steam game to your library?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Many won't like it, but this is the reason we need competition like Epic games and GOG.

The steam fanboys certainly aren't going to make this problem any better.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

We need competition like GOG. EGS is shit, we need competition better than EGS.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Bad competition is still better than no competition, because of the aforementioned issue.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I like Steam and I think GOG is great too

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Gabe is helping, sure, but he isn't holding up gaming. People were gaming on Linux before Proton even existed, myself included. Also, even if Valve went away completely, Proton is open-source and there are people like GloriousEggroll who work on Proton entirely as a community member. Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source. All the progress made on Proton won't suddenly disappear, all the games that were previously playable on Proton will still be playable on Proton.

It's a somewhat reasonable fear but it's not a realistic fear. Proton isn't going anywhere.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source.

Don't just thank open source; thank copyleft for the fact that Valve couldn't make a closed-source fork of it even if it wanted to.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Additionally, if Steam would start to morph into what is posted here, it would simply be integrated into Heroic and / or lutris just as Epic is right now. There would be no need to actually launch steam anymore but just use it as a background service to pipe your games into something else.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (5 children)

The life expectancy of 75 is an average (of the US population i assume), billionaires are likely to live longer

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Fit billionaires do. What happens to gaben's heart and arteries are anyone's guess. He is getting healthier but you can't undo damage completely.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

75 years of nation-wide life expectancy is also likely to include early deaths due to accidents, cancer and such. People who die of "old age" typically do later than 75.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yep, and that was true even going all the way back through history. People weren't routinely dying in their 30s or whatever before modern medicine; it's just that a lot more of them were dying in infancy/early childhood and that brought down the average. (That's the situation anti-vaxxers are trying to go back to, BTW.)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

When people talks about life expectancy 99.99% of the time they mean life expectancy at birth, at every year the life expectancy change. Using this life table someone with 61 years, have a life expectancy of 19.7 years, that means he's expected to live until he's 80.

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