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If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.
Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode… Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019
Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.
I don’t disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author’s key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn’t investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn’t too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve’s attention. So who is being “anti-consumer” in this example, Valve or Apple?
I wouldn’t say Apple disregards backwards compatibility, but they certainly don’t prioritize it to the degree Microsoft does, or that the general open-source community does. For Microsoft, backwards compatibility is their bread and butter. Enterprise customers have all sorts of unsupported legacy shit, and it dictates purchasing decisions and upgrade schedules.
Apple gave devs and users a ton of lead time before dropping 32-bit support. The last 32-bit Mac hardware was in 2006 (the first gen of Intel Macs); it wasn’t until Catalina’s release in 2019 that 32-bit apps stopped running, and Apple continued releasing security updates for older OSes that could run 32-bit apps for a couple years after that. So that was basically 15 years of notice for devs to release 64-bit apps.
That was much more time than they gave Classic Mac apps under OS X, or PowerPC apps on Intel. I was much more annoyed when PowerPC support was axed. Only a matter of time until Intel apps stop running on Apple Silicon, too. That’s gonna be the end of the world for Steam games. Ironically, it’s already easier to run legacy Windows and Linux games on Mac than it is to run legacy Mac games.
Agreed. This is a superficial history lesson masquerading as an article. While nothing lasts forever and Steam has its issues, the examples being cited are not supporting the not outrageous prediction that Steam might get worse in the future. It’s just not very insightful.
Anyone who, unlike the author, actually had to deal with early versions of Steam can attest to the fact that in most ways, the platform has dramatically improved.
It’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. Apple very obviously doesn’t want the Mac gaming ecosystem to exist in the same capacity as Windows and Linux, but Valve also has an obligation to its customers using Macs to keep the service running well.
macOS 10.14 has been EOL for more than 2 years now and basically every Mac released since 2012 is compatible with 10.15. Valve also didn’t actively flip a switch and disable functionality; they’re just no longer providing updates. I don’t think Valve shoulders any blame in this specific case - it’s unreasonable to expect any company to indefinitely support platforms that are effectively obsolete.
I meant more that the Steam client needs to be fully functional on modern macOS. Dropping older operating systems is more justifiable, but does still add to the picture of Valve not treating Mac owners all that well.
I got my first mac a few years back off the side of the road, a 2009 imac that didn’t work. I went to a lot of trouble to find and install the most up to date mac os I could get on it for the challenge and because I’d never used a intel mac before.
Believe me, they absolutely did just flick a switch. everything about steam worked fine until the day it didn’t even load up. removing support is one thing, actively bricking your product is a total scum fuck move that is just common practice in gaming now.
Isn’t it trivial to install boot camp on this thing?
On Intel Macs, it is fairly trivial.
On the modern ARM based Macs (the M1/2/3/X processors), it isn’t an option. The only real solution is to use desktop virtualisation software like Parallels to install Windows (ARM based) and try to get Steam going. There are cheaper alternatives to Parallels, but they are often a faff.
I have an M2 Air which can run the Windows version of Steam via Whisky. Its ability can be patchy, but the fact it runs any games at all is little short of a miracle. I’ve been playing The Talos Principle II that way, and while my wife thinks the glitchy graphics are hilarious, I’m not too fussed because the gameplay is still there.
Of course, it’s not perfect, and while I can get Fallout 4 to run, it looks like shit even on the lowest settings. However, in the context of the gripes in this thread, it means I can play Portal 2 and its various mod packs on my Mac. And they look great.
I completely forgot about Whiskey. Managed to get GTA V running at 120FPS on it, which was (and still is, IMHO) absolutely mindblowing.
Yeah, Valve has put a lot of effort into bridging the compatibility gap for Linux. Most of that work could also be ported to macOS, but they just don’t care.
It’s a shame, because getting 32-bit to 64-bit compatibility working would help Linux as well. I don’t know how much longer distros want to keep supporting 32-bit libraries, and some distros have already dropped them.
That said, macOS compatibility seems like a non-sequitur for an article calling Steam a “time bomb.” DRM is definitely the bigger issue here.
Yeah, totally agree that we shouldn’t go all in on trusting valve, but apple is definitely the anti-consumer one here. I don’t think valve would support DX if they could get away with it. Apple deprecating everything but metal without making it an open spec basically said, “we don’t want anyone gaming on our platform”.
To be clear there’s only been a single generation (2006) of x86 based Macs that weren’t 64bit. They’ve been telling everyone since 2007 (well actually earlier even, the final PPC generation was 64bit), that the 32bit was going to go away.
I hate to defend Apple arbitrarily but all us developers had plenty of notice, and had to specifically reconfigure the default settings on their projects to only be 32bit. If developers ignore deprecation notices for over a decade, then is it really the fault of the other side?
I am not a developer and honestly curious about this. What’s Apple’s reason for ditching 32 bit programs? Isn’t backwards compatibility a net positive for both developers and consumers?
The article in no way describes any actions taken by Valve that leads me to believe there is any impending enshittification. They simply have made decisions, a lot of which they have stuck with for many years.
Enshittification has to do with bait and switch, effectively. It’s luring customers into a false sense of loyalty and then abusing that to their financial gain (see: Reddit and Spez from 2023).
The article basically says “there are some decisions by Valve I like, and some I don’t.” That in no way provides any path toward some bomb going off. Perhaps time will prove the author right, of course, because any company can easily decide to screw over their customers, but the article is click-bait and completely speculative as to what may happen.
And due to all of the above, I think the bomb is about to go off where elephants will fly out of my refrigerator and steal my soda.
I don’t know why the article doesn’t bring up Valve being the company to bring loot boxes and that business model to gaming as the prime example. Valve earns extreme money from the skins market and gambling in CSGO / CS2 since they sell the keys and take a cut of trades as well. They’re far more concerned with money than actually caring for the people involved. Gambling ruins lives and Valve is the gambling company that faces by far the least vitriol in that horrendous crowd.
Probably because Valve doesn’t make games anymore. Not on any serious level anyway.
Most of their games are old as hell, and most of them where in the “proof of concept” relm. They only really made games to push the technology they were working with.
It’d be a poor argument to bring up their old catalog of games from 20 years ago as something that made them a worse company today.
Hahaha, this article mainly sucks.
It’s amazing that a company who’s primary product is a DRM system managed to make so many people think they’re the “good guys”
You mean the trivially easy DRM that is a single patch found on GitHub?
Shitty DRM is still DRM.
Truth be told, it’s a little bit more complicated than that.
PC Gaming has had tons of DRM examples - from SecuROM (anyone remember those times?) to modern day Denuvo DRM.
So there are a few unpopular DRMs out there:
- Disc checking based DRM (if the disc was cooked, that’s your paid game down the drain)
- CD Key based DRM (if you lost the CD Key, that’s your paid game down the drain)
- Online activation (you registered the same game on two different PCs? Try that again one more time and you’re done for. For added bonus, sometimes the activation software would register the same PC as different hardware because someone had the audacity to upgrade their hardware!)
- Always online - need I say more?
- Cloud gaming - now with the added joy of not owning the ones and zeros you paid for!!
Steam has managed to use account based DRM while avoiding the trappings of pretty much all of the above (for some games you can enter a CD key, and that game is permanently attached to your account, which is great if you lose the disc, but sucks if you want to sell the physical game on afterwards), while the competition used any of the above (some used multiple layers of DRM, which is eurgh).
Then on top of that, hats off to Valve - they do tend to listen to their customers and give them what they want, even if the whole point is to keep them tied to using Steam and strangle out the competition:
- Cloud saving
- Steam Workshops
- Game streaming via local network
- Sharing the game library with family
- Controller support with button remapping for legacy games with poor support
- In store game reviews
- Store algoritm suggestions based on the game categories you buy and what you friends buy
- Discussion forums (even if they can be thoroughly toxic at times)
- Guides (the formatting is awful)
- Fairly deep and independent social integration
- Built in audio streaming via Steam
- Those card things that you can sell for a bit of money or craft
Compare that to Origin, Epic Store, GOG etc. They just cannot compete with what Valve offers in terms of features on top of features.
What bothers me about Valve is that
- They have such a chokehold on PC gaming that everything else feels inferior, and no other company can really compete in terms of features
- They have fought refunds in the past (as mentioned in the article)
- The whole paid modding fiasco because Valve really wanted to financially exploit a community known to give stuff away for free
- How they often abandon their own products due to lack of customer attention and their limited size due to wanting to remain a limited company
- I’m looking at Valve Index, and apart from Half Life: Alyx, I don’t see much in the way of new games. Even worse is that I watched someone on YouTube basically explain that there are still glitches and weird stuff that occurs in the Valve Index - aa product that costs £919 here in the UK.
- I’m also looking at the Steam Controller, which has been very, very neglected with no talk of a sequel (given how successful the Steam Deck has been, I’m shocked at the lack of a “companion controller”)
- I’m also looking at the infamous Steam PCs that completely flopped
- How TF2 started the trend (at least on Steam) of microtransactions in games, and how CS:GO has carried that flag (and started a gambling community which has probably done untold damage to young children as they grow into adults and are confronted with the world of gambling)
- How Valve, as a company that started off making games, has absolutely no desire whatsoever to make games anymore because of how wildly successful they are.
And this is the stuff I can think of at the top of my head. I was going to say it also concerns me they don’t have a bug bounty program, but it turns out now they do.
There’s a lot of DRM-free games on Steam. It’s up to developers to use their DRM, it’s not a requirement by Valve.
The person you’re responding to is one of those people that thinks Steam is the DRM, because 1) it checks games against your account the first time you run them, and 2) they don’t provide offline installers like GOG.
Yeah, the lack of offline installers sucks, but it still updates the game and you can copy them files away whenever you want.
steam’s drm is a complete joke though? Tons of game developers add their own drm on top because it is so trivial to bypass steam’s own.
Their main product is a marketplace/content delivery system
The only “DRM” that they have is checking the game against your steam account the first time you run it. Is that great? No. Would it be nice if they offered offline installers? Of course.
That has to be one of the dumbest articles I’ve read in a while.
While I personally use Steam very rarely (I prefer to use DRM-free versions of games), Steam has done very little to be considered on its way towards enshittification.
The macos situation is completely irrelevant because at this point its market share on steam is lower than linux and it makes no sense for them to invest only to be constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms. My guess is it will be dropped within the next 3-5 years.
The author points out the deprecation of Steam on older platforms, but fails to mention the fact that this wasn’t always their choice, for instance the recent drop of Windows 7 support was caused by the fact that there’s an embedded chromium browser in it and google dropped support for Windows 7 around that time. A similar situation happened for Windows XP, which was dropped in 2019, a full FIVE years after Microsoft dropped support for it, and at this time Steam on XP was only used for retrogaming, it made no sense to keep supporting it, there are better ways to get old games on XP.
There’s barely a mention of all the good things that Valve has done for Linux gaming, but the article complains about Steam being 32 bit (which is still a requirement for wine to run, at least until the new wow64 mode becomes stable, and steam comes with its steam runtime specifically to avoid distro compatibility issues); they could have made proton only work with steam, they could have made their dxvk and vkd3d forks proprietary like nvidia did, but instead it’s all open source and very easy to build on all platforms and I use my own fork every day to play games without steam. Heck, there are even competitors for the steam deck that run proton.
Also, can we mention the fact that Steam has not turned into yet another subscription service like some of its competitors?
If I had to point at something that Steam absolutely did wrong, I’d say it’s allowing third party DRMs on the store, it’s a consistent source of issues, especially for old games. I understand that when they made the choice we didn’t have cancer like kernel level anticheat and denuvo, but still, Steam launching a launcher launching another launcher that launches the game is a trashy gaming experience and adds points of failure as we’ve already seen several times when big titles launch and their DRM servers go down, or when games get old and the DRM servers are shut down permanently.
While I’m sure Steam will eventually become enshittified, I don’t see that happening any time soon, maybe after Gabe retires, and that’s why you should keep a collection of DRM free games on your drives and not rely solely on Steam and other stores.
Just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree.
constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms.
This was it for me. Like, you’re going to blame valve because apple keeps pulling the carpet out from under devs and users?
I disagree because the biggest they did and continue to do is loot boxes. I argue that it was Valve that popularized that business model with CSGO and it is the most predatory shit that has ever entered the gaming sphere. It’s a complete cancer and Valves implementation is amongst the worst there is because of their market giving the items easily accessible real money value. This makes it not just like gambling in my extremely firm opinion, it makes it actual gambling. They’re also double dipping with the community market since it also takes a cut from aforementioned gambling. How Valve has escaped the vast majority of loot box hate is completely beyond me. And how they’ve managed to so far avoid a world wide crackdown on the unregulated gambling is also to me mind boggling. I despise Valve for this to the very core of my being because I know first hand how easily that shit can ruin lives and I know people that have got hooked and fucked up their life big time from CS skins. Left at the altar fucked up levels.
I am also always immensely confused how gamers don’t see valve taking 30% of pc sales and not recognize that as greedy shit bag behavior.
We all know when google or apple does it on their app store its bad, or when spotify pays artists pennies its bad, or when actors are striking because of its shady residuals payout from streaming its bad. But when king gaben does it, its fine perfectly ok. Even though game devs are some of the most overworked and underpaid workers in tech. And then people wonder why games suck lately.
It’s about more than just taking a 30% cut of sales. Everyone agrees that it’s a high price. So what else might the potential competition do that make them stand out as worse than Valve?
Also, overworked and underpaid Devs are a different matter. You have look at their Publishers about that. I believe Valves Devs are quite well paid and far from overburdened.
Yeah, same goes for Apple and Google. People just look at cuts, but these companies do pay their employees well and the cut they take may be a large part of it, and they branch out to other things like Apple with Vision Pro, or Google and their many failed projects like Stadia. Companies that run on razor thin margins can lead to Amazon or Walmart working conditions. The treatment of devs is more the publisher issue with the company not taking care of their own employees.
Could cuts be better for creators? Yes. But, just fixating on cuts is a very simplified metric, and even Epic has shown themselves their inability to dedicate resources operating on the cut they are now that is losing them money and still years later struggling to be nothing more a worse fanatical or humble bundle with a launcher. Which tends to lean towards if you want to offer low cuts being a more simple key reseller storefront is more realistic than trying to maintain an ecosystem off of it and profit, since making a feature rich launcher is turning out to be much harder than thought.
I personally don’t have an issue with Google or Apple doing it. Even GOG does it. And given the state of other launchers it seems more expenses may be necessary than thought to make an ecosystem that is feature rich, pay their employees well, and branch out into other ventures that might not pan out for a long time.
And when it comes to places like Steam or Android it’s not in a locked ecosystems either like Apple, so people aren’t locked to one store like with the PS5 or Nintendo Switch. But, yeah it could be lower, but it just one part of a larger issue.
Ok, I had no idea they were the first to do that lootbox shite, I’m not into multiplayer games. That could be considered worse than allowing third party DRMs, since it pretty much introduced kids to gambling.
I’m not sure that’s true - I’m pretty sure it comes from Japanese and other Asian games like Maple Story, then it got picked up by mobile games companies as they were figuring out monetization there, especially Zynga.
TLDR - Steam is shit because it’s still 32bit?
More like, if the Steam app ever goes 64bit, watch out. A non-shittified app like so should never require 4gb+ of RAM or anything more complicated than a 32bit instruction set.
not correcting you on the contents of the article or anything, just that 32bit is nothing close to a mark against the Steam app.
Isn’t supporting 32-bit apps on a 64-bit OS a security concern though? I thought that’s why some linux distros were disabling 32-bit repositories by default on their 64-bit versions
Not by itself.
Distros are shutting down system 32bit repos, because they require effort to be maintained: people who patch possible security holes, and people who test and package them. As most people have switched to 64bit systems, developers are no longer maintaining 32bit versions, no longer patching them, and barely anybody cares to check or run them, so any possible security flaws can slip through.
This is all irrelevant if you run stuff in a VM, or a container: so it has a security flaw? Cool, let it get… nothing, it’s contained.
Games running in a contained Wine, or in a OS container, can have all the security flaws they want, who cares. Games also rarely get security patches, or any kind of patches at all, so running them contained should be standard practice anyway.
32-bit apps use a sub-set of the same instructions that still exist on current 64-bit systems. Running 64-bit alone does nothing to eliminate any flaws, real or imagined, from the 32-bit side of things.
As @jarfil@jarfil@beehaw.org has stated, 32 bit repos are being de-listed because no one can be bothered to maintain them, and that lack of code and functional review could allow flaws to slip through. Meanwhile, a lot of those same 32-bit repos continue to exist(as community-maintained versions - my preferrence anyways) and can be accessed by interested users from most distros. They aren’t blocked, just de-listed and unsupported by those distro maintainers.
Thanks for the explanation! I didn’t realize it was mostly a maintenance limitation, I thought maybe 32-bit instructions could be an extra attack vector on a physical CPU instruction level or something like that.
More like it’s because it doesn’t support Mac as much as they want them to.
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I do this too. If it’s on Gog I buy it there. I hope gog manages to stay around but even if it doesn’t I can grab the offline installers for the games I have purchased and back them up elsewhere.
Does anyone actually use offline installers on a regular basis? I tried a few times and I had problems. Dunno if just bad luck. Never managed to install Pillars on eternity with it because it errored out every time. Another game’s offline installer (can’t remember which) would stall for hours then crash. I suspect a lot of users would be in for a surprise if they actually tried them.
This looks like a problem with your system to me. Run a few checks on your RAM and storage devices. I had files corrupt on my NAS and a PC of mine, because both had defective memory. I only noticed it, because installers and 7zip began to produce errors.
I use them regularly, and have never had issues
Good to hear, I’ll check it out again and make sure I’m not having an issue on my end.
Just weird aside, but the meme they use as an example implies that you have to pay to add friends on steam, and that is just a weird example to use.
This is why beehaw needs downvotes. Crappy submissions like this article that don’t make any sense
Thank you… I was reading and thinking “this makes no sense… Does the author know what a monopoly actually is??”
Might be due to my instance, but I see downvotes. Not nearly enough as it should have after reading the article though.
No, Beehaw doesn’t need downvotes.
I think it’s fair to acknowledge that everything is a trade-off, and without downvotes, we have to accept the downsides.
So basically Steam is fine, has been for 20 years, and has competitors waiting to step in and take over the market if Gaben and co ever succumb to the temptation to cash in for a quick boost to corporate profits for a few years at the expense of ruining the business forever after, as impatient shareholders might demand if it were a public company, which it isn’t.
It’s true though, it could fall apart at any moment. So could anything. I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.
Luckily it’s not a public company and it seems its shareholders aren’t interested in making a quick buck. If they were they’d have already made it obvious. If they decide to sell or IPO on the other hand (also sell), then quick buck will be the name of the game in no time.
I wish that in the future developer can just host their own game with very minimum cost/overhead unless they really need some platform’s backend feature. (multiplayer game mostly.)
For single player game I really don’t see why it is so difficulty to host (even torrent it) would be a hard thing to do. During the shareware/pre-steam days where you may have downloaded the full game with a soft lock, I’ve played a whole game and then try find way to send my money as well. (was not living in NA at that time and there was no guarantee that a game will be imported with official vendor.)
Hosting it is easy, making sure people pay for it is not
That isn’t going to happen. Major have studios have developed their own ways of distributing games and found that the public don’t really like it. For minor game studios, it is probably a lot cheaper to rely on Steam or an equivalent to do what you are describing.
Not just cheaper, but the vast majority of Indie games need the platform for exposure, despite it being so crowded. Those first few hours on the front page are when most sales are happening, especially given how abysmal to nonexistent the marketing of most small games is.
Developers seem to be under the impression that a few social media posts shortly before or after release are enough, whereas in reality, they need to create a community that is eagerly waiting for the game beforehand, spend at least as much time on marketing and community management as on the game itself.
Then again, the majority of games - and this is something few people are willing to admit, least of all their developers - have absolutely no commercial value, no chance of ever making any money, no business being on any store front and even, in the majority of cases, no business even being distributed for free other than among close friends and family. Over 12000 games were released on Steam last year. Does anyone believe that more than a few hundred of those are even worth looking at, let alone being purchased and played?
Nobody is waiting for the billionth card game or sidescroller with unattractive amateur art. Nobody is waiting for an ugly looking game with a poorly written store page that costs 15 bucks and is coming from a new, unknown developer while similar, better games are routinely on sale for a fraction as much. I’ve received outraged reactions from both developers and gamers for comparing some first marketed at release titles with other games out there. Almost every time, they were trying to sell their games through sob stories like “I worked seven years on this solo, surviving only on ramen and tears”, as if anyone actually cares. Those stories are bonus trivia that you look up and are impressed by after having played a game and caring enough about it to read its Wikipedia article. I’m not buying your terrible time management skills and unrealistic expectations, I’m spending my limited disposable income on entertainment and escapism - and if your seven year amateur project can’t keep up with a two year project by an experienced team of fifteen people even at the very first glance at the first screenshot of the typo-ridden store page, then you’re out of luck - and I like weird “auteur” Indie games. Those 12,068 titles are not just competing with the other 12,067 released that year, but the entire catalogue on Steam (roughly 73,000 at the beginning of this year), as well as older games, games on other platforms and other types of media.
One has to assume that most people brave enough to dive head-first into Indie games development are either ignorant of these facts or hopelessly optimistic. We kind of need this optimism, without it we would have never gotten gems like Stardew Valley (which did not make any of the mistakes listed above though) or the equally amazing and divisive interactive art that studios like Tale of Tales have produced, but it’s still frustrating to witness it pan out very predictably every time. Every single Indie success I’ve observed from the start was clearly on a winning path and every failure was obviously going to be a failure. I’m shocked how predictable it is, which is what gives me hope. At least success in this sphere is based on clear rules.
One thing that I think is missing from the equation is good video games journalism that covers indie games. Video game journalism has never been doing amazing but it’s practically dead now.
Tying discovery to the same platform that you consume things on is really bad, because it always gives that distributor way to much power. Similar story with spotify, but journalism about underground music is at least in a slightly better place.
Yep, I follow The Verge, Kotaku, and PCGamer for gaming news, and I think PCG and Kotaku both have a weekly “Steam releases you might have missed this week” article, and they’re always the stuff that no one who checks Steam new releases would have missed. The authors aren’t actually diving deep to discover the hidden gems, they’re just checking the top releases that aren’t AAA publishers.
I get there’s not that much money in video game journalism anymore now that they aren’t all getting review copies to drive ad revenue (you can actually thank Steam for that in part, since it’s more trustworthy for most people just to read user reviews there, and the other part you can thank all the paid YouTube game reviewers for, since publishers much prefer them to an outlet they can’t directly write the ad copy for).
I’d think game journalism has been mostly replaced by youtube reviewers / video essays, no?
I do love me a good video game video essay, but I think that a more traditional journalistic format has a lot of strengths when it comes to covering small games. It’s probably true that youtube has replaced a lot of traditional journalism but I think that this is overall bad for the video game echo system.
Looks like an article paid for by Epic.
Here’s a repost of what I said the last time the Steam vs Epic Games Store “debate” was brought up:
My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let’s be honest. They have many ties to China’s Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.
There’s also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don’t know.
As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.
Plus, any good will that they’ve purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They’ve been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They’re going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.
They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they’re fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it’s projected that they won’t be profitable until 2027, which means they’ll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.
Lol at the last section of the article. Valve is actually bad guys! Just trust me!
Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.
Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full ‘enshittification’ of Steam will commence.
Steam is a major problem for a lot of reasons,but basically none of the reasons the author gave are the main problem - It sounds more like a whining of a Mac/Apple user. Once again…
There are hundreds of more important problems with Steam.
Would you mind to name five of those hundreds of problems?
Not parent poster, but I’m going to see if I can come up with some.
0: If you get banned from Steam, you lose hundreds or thousands of games.
0.1: You can’t use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.
0.5: If you’re blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you’re locked out of all your games that use VAC.
1: Steam requiring other storefronts to sell at the same gross price instead of the same price net fees. This means nobody can compete with their 30% cut… On the other hand, they take 0% for activating games sold elsewhere, which kinda balances it. Still, this is probably the biggest barrier that’s maintaining their 30% cut.
2: Discoverability since they stopped curating the games list. (Maybe? Not sure if this is a problem, tbh.)
3: Normalizing the concept of games requiring a launcher to run/DRM.
4: Offline play functionality is inconsistent, so sometimes it breaks when people are traveling with no Internet access.
5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.
6: Region-locked censorship, like gore in Germany.
7: Some people would say region-adjusted pricing, but I disagree. Still, might be a valid reason for some.
(Numbering is wonky because I thought of actual real problems later.)
I think I did pretty well! It’s hard to find things to fault. It’s a pretty great platform.
0.1: You can’t use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.
This or similar actions are very common. Getting chargebacks can be very bad for a businesse even if they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s also a common type of fraud and the easiest way of reducing that is presumably to never dispute chargebacks and just ban the account and/or credit card.
0.5: If you’re blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you’re locked out of all your games that use VAC.
That’s kinda the point of VAC and you are only locked out of online play. The good and bad thing about VAC is that it’s conservative in handing out bans, so false positives are relatively rare. It does of course reduce it effectiveness against cheating.
5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.
Adult content is a setting which I believe is disabled by default.
Unrelated but I really like their new version of “steam family”.
I disagree with the author, the enshittification of Steam started ages ago. Day one, in fact. It’s come and gone in waves.
Yesterday there was an article on the explotative practices of Roblox doing the rounds around here. Some of the bad praxis around monetized UGC called out there was pioneered by Steam. Online DRM for single player games? Steam was there at ground level. NFT stock markets? Steam tried really hard, they were just bad at it. Gig economy automation replacing human moderation and greenlight processes? They banged their head against that wall until they uberified PC game development successfully. Loot boxes? They are remarkably resilient. Where others have moved on, Valve insists on keeping them around for CounterStrike 2.
Also, CounterStrike 2.
There are also ways in which Steam is ahead of the competition, or they wouldn’t have the near-monopolistic position they have. Their Linux support may be motivated entirely out of spite and an ironic fear of Microsoft’s monopoly, but it’s welcomed. Their client is easily the best in the market and there are crucial features from it that should have been universalized by MS or Nvidia and still haven’t been, somehow. It’s good stuff.
But it’s been enshittified since day one of Steam, when it launched torjan horsed with CS and Half Life 2, and it remains problematic in many areas, including its role as a single point of failure for game preservation on PC.
NFT stock markets?
Wait, Roblox and Steam’s “stock markets” are run on NFTs?
I think they’re implying that the digital items such as TF2 hats and weapons skins are NFTs
Yeah, I know. These and trading cards. I don’t think they’re run on NFTs.
They are, though, by any reasonable definition. Despite what the cryptobros would have you believe, there is no need for a blockchain to have a tradable, persistent token associated to an asset. Besides the fact that the tokens are stored on Valve’s servers instead of a distributed blockchain, there is no difference in how those work.
The cryptobros tried to convince everybody that a blockchain made the tokens “non-fungible” as in automatically interoperable and endlessly persistent, which was a lie that only survived until the first time the assets, which were all stored on servers and not in a blockchain, got deleted.
That’s a different discussion in any case. The point is it’s a stock market of tokenized, tradable items where the transactions are monetized by the company by taxing the trades. It’s the same on Roblox and Steam (and in all the NFTs people dumped all that money on).
