I love steam, but let's get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
GabeN will not live forever. The vultures circle endlessly, and one day they will win. There is no good ending here (for now).
Consider building a tower, downloading everything youve purchased on steam, and keep it offline. Maybe have a 2nd set of hard drives as a backup. Put these priceless artifacts in your will.
Plan accordingly and enjoy the ride while it lasts.
Not gonna happen
I love steam, but let's get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
Steam is an example where I'm not sure when it would happen.
It already comes with a hefty fee of 30% per sale on the platform. I don't think they can raise that without serious backlash. And there also isn't really a need, Steam prints money. It prints money because it's where users are. Users are there because they like the features. Some good features are only there because of laws (e.g. refunding); Valve can't remove these.
So how would you make the service even more profitable?
Enshittification happens because corporations want (more) money out of a service that built a userbase. These were often running at a loss. To turn a profit, they need to change.
Steam can sell you licenses to games you don't own already. It's up to each publisher. Valve doesn't care, they just deliver.
They could add a fee to re-download games, a subscription requirement to use friend invites, start throwing spam notifications on your screen/in your email inbox about “sponsored content”, upload your browser history for better ad targeting, etc. the list gets pretty long pretty quickly. Just look at what the Epic store does right now (hint, it’s almost all of those things already).
The Epic "Store" barely qualifies as such, no wonder they're trying to get at least something out of it
Think of it more like Netflix. Netflix was great, then the market fractured and Netflix enshitified in response.
What it would take here is for a publisher to become a real distributor in the space, but competition is weak right now. Just like it really took Disney wading in to disrupt Netflix, it would take someone equally large, like Microsoft, to disrupt Steam. Sorry Ubisoft, but you don't cut it.
Publishers already tried this (EA, Ubisoft, etc) and it didn't really work. They came back to Steam.
Arrg matey!
I don't play many AAA games but I'm forever gutted that the fight to make them able to be pirated is a losing battle. I want to pay for my indie games but on occasion I look online at the crack status of AAA games from oecen 2-3 years ago and they're still not playable.
It creates a weird dichotomy where people who pirate or at least don't buy expensive games don't take part in the mainstream gaming conversation at all, which is totally different from the rest of pirated media.
Which AAA aren't cracked?
The only two I can think of (that I've ever thought of playing but haven't been able to pirate) are the newer Dragons Dogma and the recent Black Myth Wukong game but those arent from 2-3 years ago so I'm curious which ones you are thinking about.
The game I always think of checking out is Assassin's Creed Mirage, just to find it hasn't been cracked.
I know assassin's creed is a bit of a crap franchise but I have a love / hate relationship with the game and think mirage looks made for me. Every few months since release I've looked up it's crack status and not just has it not been cracked but generally the comments around it are that it's from the new era of uncrackable games.
They will never go public so enshittification rules don't necessarily apply
Never say never, but I don't think it's going to happen while Gabe is in charge
I doubt gabe would choose a successor that would make steam public either, though.
Maybe, maybe not. As equity holders get older they may be looking to cash out so they can fuel their retirements.
I don't think that's something Gabe is interested in, but we're talking about what will happen when he dies.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
Was valve ever good to begin with? Their main products is a useless proprietary software launcher and they make billions off abducting kids into gambling and selling their data.
I loathe their lootbox system but I'd say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I'd put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.
I don't think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.
You don't need a proprietary launcher to run software. A company who abduct kids into gambling to make more billions to me sound quite bad.
steam survey says 1.92% is on linux. So there's about 736,651 linux users on steam?! neat
Many of those Steam Deck, I bet.
Bazzite on my desktop and a Steamdeck here!
https://partner.steamgames.com/ says there are 132 million monthly active Steam users, so that's more like 2.5 million Linux users on Steam.
Wild that the video game industry is so big, and this still isn't even 1% of people on earth.
Also keep in mind this is peak concurrent players. I imagine the MAU is much higher, since most of the world doesn't game at the same time.
This is just steam. It's estimated that about 3 billion people regularly play video games.
Yeah but you'd think more what use steam. I wonder what the platform breakdown is .
90% mobile phones my guy.
Sure, but 38,000,000 x $60 = $2,280,000,000. And that's if they all spend only $60/year, and only on Steam, and the average I'm sure is much higher.
huh, what dropped in 2020 that caused that big spike?
COVID-19. 😏
Damn, you reply quick. yep, I realized the instant i asked and felt stupid, eheh.
Don't delete your comment for asking a legit question! Others might be ignorant as well and benefit from the Q&A.
I remember when 9 million was a lot.
I remember when 1 million was a lot.
It's still crazy to me that this is the same program I used to browse CS zombie mod servers. There was no real store to speak of then.
Still wild to me how competition shoots themselves in the foot. It's even worse than streaming services.
Fuck this platform.
Fuck mandatory DRM.
Fuck the garbage runtime that takes minutes to start every time I wanna play a goddamn single player game.
Fuck mandatory updates every time I want to play a goddamn single player game.
Fuck popup advertisements for events that reappear year by year no matter how many times I've disabled them
This platform prevents you from owning anything..
I don't know how anyone could support this garbage.
Steam forces games to have DRM?
I guess i didnt notice the DRM of the games installed from steam that i was able to play without steam installed
Steam does not force DRM
If like you say Steam is only garbage, make a list of good alternative.
Epic Game (worst)
Gog (need more game and feature)
From what i can see, Steam is not perfect but it's better than Epic for sure, and have more feature and game than Gog. I don't include itch because for me it's not a gaming store.
If anyone have another store, or want to correct anything.
All of them playing that KFC dating Sim
Cant believe this actually exist xd https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colonel_Sanders_A_Finger_Lickin_Good_Dating_Simulator/
Believe in Gabe 👁️ 👃 👁️
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