Steam is a ticking time bomb
Steam is a ticking time bomb
The 'enshittification' of the Steam games platform is inevitable, and there are already warning signs.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
I have my criticisms of Steam, but I see no sign of it marching toward some kind of big anti-customer explosion as suggested in this article. Unlike most others, it's run by a privately owned company, so it doesn't have investors pressuring toward enshittification. We can see the result by looking back at the past decade or so: Steam has been operating more or less the same.
Meanwhile, the author offers for contrast Epic Games, a major source of platform exclusives and surveillance software (file-snooping store app, client-side anti-cheat, Epic Online Services "telemetry"), all of which are very much anti-customer.
AFAIK, only one of the other stores listed is actually better for customers in any significant way: GOG. (For the record, I mostly like GOG.) But it was mentioned so briefly that it feels like the author only did so in hopes of influencing GOG fans.
Overall, this post looks a lot like astroturfing. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be sponsored by Epic or Microsoft.
Edit: I forgot something that has changed in the past decade:
Valve has spent the past five years investing in open platforms: At first by funding key parts (often the most difficult ones) of the open-source software stack that now makes gaming great on linux, and more recently by developing remarkably good and fairly open PC hardware for mobile gaming. No vendor lock-in. No subscription fees. No artificially crippled features. This has already freed many gamers from Microsoft's stranglehold, and more of us are reaping the benefits every day.
This is the polar opposite of what the author would have us fear.
I get the risks of putting all eggs in one basket, but whenever people argue for competition using Epic as an example, a company that is demonstrably more anti-competitive and anti-consumer, it shows that they just think of the matter of theoretical ideals of evenness as opposed to benefits to the customers. I don't see any good coming from Epic having as much or more marketshare than Steam.
Unlike GOG which only offers DRM-free games, a substantial advantage compared to any other store.
Makes me think of a Walmart opening up in a town and people arguing that the residents should buy from there because it's competition. Company just existing doesn't make it good.
Well said, private companies are incentivized to make their customers happy. Corporations are incentivized to make their shareholders happy. Sometimes those goals align, but they are not the same.
What a garbage article lol. The only two arguments I can pick out are 1. Old steam games haven't been updated to work on macOS and 2. Some games require 3rd party launchers. I think the author was just angry that his mac dropped support for a 20 year old game.
Agreed, shitty read. The 30% cut is crazy high though, and IMO the best point the article has. Steam DOES have a monopoly and that's inherently bad
It isn't a monopoly though. Even ignoring the Blizzards, Epics and GOGs of the web, any developer can host their game on their own Web site and market it completely independently of Steam and keep 100% of their takings.
The monopoly on storefront argument holds water in mobile land where side-loading a game is not possible/easy. In the world of computers though, I don't think the same standard applies.
A 30% cut for steam games sold on steam and a 0% cut for steam keys sold by the publisher wherever they want with the caveat that they must give steam users the same sales at around the same time. They get their games hosted on Steam's industry best CDN, a page with support for images and videos, an API with features users like, workshop API for mod hosting and delivery, and other SteamWorks API stuff for stuff like multiplayer, patch management without charging a fee for it, forum hosting to hit the highlights. Pretty much all of that drives engagement and is mostly turn-key though you do have to programmatically interact with their API when it makes sense.
Steam provides a lot of benefit for a 30% cut of what is sold on their store front and a lot more benefit for getting all of the above for a 0% cut if they sell steam keys outside of steam.
Monopoly on a platform that they don't own? That being Microsoft? Then seeing how epic isn't even profitable on the launcher side and is a loss leader while their launcher is barebones it raises the question of what cut is actually realistic that allows a company to have a feature rich launcher and branch out into stuff like Linux, VR, and Steam Deck.
Current state feels more like Walmart expanding into new territory and trying to lure people with low prices, but isn't sustainable with the main goal just being expansion.
Not like any other app store does take 30% except for some high volume games/publishers.
Apple does the same. Hell they seem to have custom rules for each of the app devs (according to Linus and Luke from LTT: I believe this clip contains most of it. They recently talked about it again. Essentially they developed the app payment like Netflix. Apple said "No, that's against our rules" and refused the submission of the update. Meanwhile Netflix supposedly still had the same communication for a long time.)Same goes with Google and probably a number of other external stores.
Amazon seems to take up to 20% depending on the item (Source: sell.amazon.com/pricing.At least Steam does provide a forum, community features and the update framework and infrastructure.
Personally I would be happy to take the offering over maybe needing to host and maintain the tech stack myself. Now mind you, maybe some other dev would rather do it themself and maybe wish to opt-out of the ecosystem. That is totally valid.(Warning/Disclaimer: I only heard about that. I do not have first hand experience!) Apple for example takes a percentage for processing a payment and offers an invoicing system. Some may like that. Others could maybe negotiate a better deal with another provider and maybe even offer tools that integrate better with their existing accounting and ERP software.
Can't you use Proton on Mac? I'd think that would solve most compatibility problems.
The problem is that proton needs to translate direct X to Vulcan, but Apple doesn't allow Vulcan, it has to be their own thing, Metal.
So it's a lot of work for valve and fully dependent on apple not screwing them.
That or Rosetta, the built-in, hardware-accelerated x86_64 compatibility layer.
Well the third-party launchers is extremely annoying, I have to say. Buying a game on Steam and then it forcing you to install yet another launcher (I have like 8 on my gaming PC now) really pisses me off.
I tend to buy on GOG now if I have the choice because they don't stand for that kind of shit nor DRM either.
I also really love the overview of GOG of the games you have in different launchers. Before that it happened to me multiple times that I bought a game on sale without realising I had already bought it on another platform years ago on another sale. Oops.
Ethics, features that are actually great for me instead of stuff that's just great for them. Love it. Reminds me a lot of a company that used to be like that. It was called Valve I think.
Valve won't stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism
I'm glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn't choose that, and they're certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.
It really feels like this author is just saying, "they're resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo 'timebomb'!".
"Every person who isn't a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!"
“Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”
Never thought about it that way, welp, might as well get it over with.
The difference between Valve and almost every other company that suffers from "capitalism" is that Valve is a private company, they don't have shareholders, investors and an outsider asshole CEO demanding enshittification in the name of exponential growth.
The issue is Steam and Valve being held up as the ‘one good company’, when there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Valve does many of the same practices as Epic, EA, etc., but there’s a double standard with Valve because it’s the default experience. The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.
The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.
What specifically are you envisioning? If this is just a general kind of, "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" supposition, I don't think that really holds any water; it's just a platitude. If anything, Steam being so ubiquitous could more easily make it's eventual decline a catalyst for legislation to give software license ownership stronger consumer protections. The idea that we should either condemn it now or stop using it, before its decline, makes no sense to me. Is GOG better? Sure. Can it fully replace Steam? No. Is Steam better than Epic, Origin, UPlay? Absolutely. I'm just not sure what the real point of all this condemnation is when they're by far trying, by and large, to treat consumers well. It's just blaming Valve for not being totally and eternally immune to the effects of Capitalism.
the ‘one good company’
No one claims this. The only thing remotely close to that which people claim is that Valve is uniquely positioned to be one of the best digital games distribution platforms due to its private ownership insulating it against shareholder demands (which is by far the largest driver of enshittification), which is also true for GOG, but obviously Valve is still beating them out in capacity and capability currently.
there are plenty of examples to the contrary
Of course, it's a company. But it's still a billion times better than most of its competitors.
"Every person who isn't a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!"
I get your point, but this metaphor would be more applicable if historically every human on earth murdered someone during their lifetime. I think Steam/Valve will remain the same as long as their current leadership is in place. 999 times out of 1000, once the original founders are gone, any company begins the enshittification process, whether it's a major business like Valve or a local chain of grocery stores.
This is why beehaw needs downvotes. Crappy submissions like this article that don't make any sense
Edit: OP has been spamming his nonsense across multiple communities, and has hundreds of downvotes on each of them. Except here on beehaw...
Thank you.... I was reading and thinking "this makes no sense... Does the author know what a monopoly actually is??"
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.
Might be due to my instance, but I see downvotes. Not nearly enough as it should have after reading the article though.
fwiw, OP wrote the article himself and then spammed it to lots of different instances. Definitely worth blocking this spammer.
You forgot the Mac
Lol, fuck Mac. If Apple cared about gaming, they wouldn't have created Metal and collaborated on Vulkan. Fuck them. Valve went with Linux because they can change it to fit their needs. Can't do that with Apple.
Microsoft is only supported by Valve because it has large marketshare and can't be ignored, but it's clear that Valve is doing everything possible to get away from them: see Steam Deck.In general, I agree with Steam wielding too much power and if they abused it, I'd be out. I have my gaming hours and can live without gaming no problem. They wouldn't get any more money from me as soon as they enshittified.
What would get me away from steam is an opensource gaming store with games that have no DRM and are predominantly opensource. Or another gaming store that worked on Linux and allowed playing games with my other linux buddies.
Get us that and I'm out.Anti Commercial AI thingy
Have you considered gog? They may not be betting heavily on Linux or have as a big of a selection but their games are DRM free. You can even install gog Galaxy, a game manager similar to Steam.
Doesn't seem like GOG galaxy is for linux
GOG GALAXY 2.0 Open Beta is available for Windows and Mac. Please download the installer on your PC.
That's a disappointment, but Heroic Launcher is. I'll give it a shot and see if there are new games on there for me. The name "Good Old Games" gave me the impression it was for stuff like boomer shooters or side-scrollers and stuff.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
I 100% agree
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.
Steam is a ticking time bomb but mostly for the reason that you don't own the games you purchase there and you can't back them up (mostly) so when Steam decides to ban your account or just closes down, you lose all of your games forever.
More people should push for DRM-free games with offline installers, like GOG and Itch offer.
Idk, there's a backup system that I've put on a hard drive with a very easy to find GitHub steam drm remover. Haven't had any issues playing my games without a steam account -- sans online services for some, but most of the time I'm on trips or without Internet anyway. That said, if the idea is that in some 5-10-20 years this will happen, I feel like a lot of the online services won't be around... For as much as I love Helldivers 2, I don't really expect it to be around in 7 years. Online games from 2013 aren't all around either, and those that are aren't super populated.
On the other hand, a lot of these online services do rely on Steam, so if it went down a lot of them would need the same unofficial online servers.
I'd be more concerned if Steam were to have extreme DRM, but it's so laughable that it's literally worth paying for the game just to have the streaming/per game notes/cloud saves and for current games to not have to deal with updates and online services. But a Steam Library of mostly single player games? Anyone who is concerned can get a $50HDD and install/backup their games with Steam to and then apply the patch. Of the issues Steam has, I think this particular one is low on the list. And per the articles issue, I would actually blame the OS more than the storefront. I used to game on Mac's from 2007-2013 and let me tell you, Steam was a freaking triumph. All the Mac game stores were truly short lived, had poor support while they were alive and had things like license activations per machine, so good luck past 5 computers (talk about 15 years). Back then Aspyer ports were really great too, always something to look forward to.
Back then Steams issue was that it didn't have refunds, Tuesday Maintenance, and sometimes it would just be buggy for a bit when trying to open (on OSX -- never really had an issue on Windows). Since then they've only made it more service oriented, doing things they absolutely should, but didn't have to, like refunds applying to everyone after the AUS lawsuit instead of just that region. Looking at Apple for this one.
I would implore the author of this article to go back in time, get their games on the macgames store and other similar storefronts for OSX and I would wonder how they fare today.
I have my accounts. I have no access to those games because licenses were activated too many times or because they no longer support the current OS. So I'm effectively limited to a previous version of OSX which cannot download the app because I need a new version of the OSX store. I don't have the right terms but it was hours of hassle to find out that my OSX copy of Borderlands, Assassins Creed II and Brotherhood, and a couple others are just gone. To add insult to injury, I had to log into the account every year to keep my "platinum points" that you got for buying on that storefront, to use for discounts etc. I didn't log in so byebye incentive!
My point? I had about 250 SteamPlay games that I bought and used on OSX as a Mac gamer, which seamlessly downloaded on PC when I switched to Windows for my desktop computer. None of this is to say that Steam doesn't or can't have shortcomings, but rather that it is a substantially better service than than pretty much every alternative right now, save for GOG probably.
On the topic of games with an online component, wouldn't it be great if they could run indefinitely?
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.
Lemmy has gotten to the point everything is getting classed as enshittification or whatever
It's actually getting crappy being here
Like the whole section about macos. Apple constantly screws developers, and somehow, the author has seemed to blame Valve lol. There's a lot of reason lots of people don't develop for Mac, and they're mostly valid rather than political
Or GitHub. In the real world, developers don't have any issues. Only in Lemmy, where people are even focusing on stupid things, so a barely visible unobtrusive sentence on a table mentions copilot lol
Apparently people at beehaw don't have downvote button, kinda explains this situation. The very same article on lemmy.ml is at -56 votes (at least that's what seems to me).
It's like people are posting that BS content to bring the mood down here on purpose.
Lemmy has gotten to the point everything is getting classed as enahittification or whatever
You could say that the discourse around enshittification has become enshittified
Hahaha, this article mainly sucks.
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 expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.
Exactly my thought. And backing up games and stripping Steam DRM from the games that use it (very easy to do, or so I hear.)
If Valve announces Steam is shutting down (or enshittifies), then everyone who can (and cares) will just backup their games, and everyone else will just download the DRM-stripped versions using their favourite piracy platform.
Right now, it's easier to buy a game on Steam than fuff about with piracy. Even at minimum wage, it's usually cheaper in the opportunity cost of time to just buy games (if you're a patient gamer, at any rate; higher income levels needed for full box price).
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.
TLDR - Steam is shit because it's still 32bit?
More like it's because it doesn't support Mac as much as they want them to.
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.
This reads like an epic ad that expects people to buy from epic for just existing. Like arguing people should buy from the new Walmart that opened up in their town because it's competition.
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.
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 exploitative 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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
You mean the trivially easy DRM that is a single patch found on GitHub?
Shitty DRM is still DRM.
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.
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
Yeah, but at the same time, people are "NOT" going to pay for it won't pay for it anyway. You might as well establish your player/fan base. Like even if you give me say, Suicide Squad for free I still won't add it to my library.
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.
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.