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What do you think of this prediction?
(programming.dev)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Steam
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Anyone who thinks their steam libraries will be safe forever is delusional.
Eventually a for-profit motivated individual will gain control and they will use all their MBA learnings to maximize subscriptions, per play revenue, per download revenue and overall provide a cheaper platform.
There isn't an mba on the planet that doesn't recognize that advertising is highly lucrative and being the company that sells the most pc games means you have metrics no one else has. They'll instantly monetize advertising and the popups we get when we log in today will turn into mandatory non-skippable ads on the free tier to start a game, and they'll add their wrapper on top of games in their store, especially games that do not currently need steam to play today.
It'll only get way worse. Expect everything to be pay to play.. once gaben is gone. They have a monopoly and any leader would think they are too big to fail. No one can just take their games elsewhere... we're locked in. We're committed. We can't escape. They've got us by the balls.
We can switch to piracy. I don't only because of the benefits steam offers. If that ever changes in a way that tips the scale I'll never buy a game from them again and I'd never need to. Even if they start making all new games online only in a way that can't be circumvented there's a big enough backlog of games to keep me going the rest of my life.
This so much. The thing for me is, pirated I get everything from my library back FOR FREE. So there is no loss money wise for changing things up for me. Without the convenience and fairness there is nothing holding me there. at all.
Steam with Gabe at the helm cannot ever fail. Steam without Gabe, that's a while different story.
Sure you can escape, at least for any future purchases. There are other stores and you can take your business there, and the moment Steam does any serious enshittification under new management post-Gaben those other stores are going to be trying to pull customers from them hard. Likely to EGS or GOG (probably EGS unless GOG makes a big move at that point, like bringing back and expanding GOG Connect).
A couple of years down the road from there and Steam is known as that thing you only use to play older games and exclusives.