Steam is a ticking time bomb.

The piece about Mac makes no sense. That's purely a result of Apple's decision to drop support. In general, if you are interested in older games, MacOS is not a viable platform.

Most the article makes no sense, but the Mac stuff is really weird. This 18 year old YouTube video is still accurate about the Mac part. https://youtu.be/2B-ekl_cEWk
Macs also lack GPUs suitable for gaming. The modern ones are remarkably efficient, partly because they didn't jam a 4060's worth of graphic silicon into them. Why would they? Macs are for web browsing, media creation, productivity if you're in the C-suite and making other people think you're cool if you're in a coffee shop. Their users do not expect to run AAA games at 4k60fps.
It's the opposite tbh. If you want to play emulators or old (as in 2015) PC games via Wine/VM, mac has you covered. It's newer games that are tougher because 80% of them don't get ports and Wine/VM will have to turn down the graphics to run well.

Even so, I can still run most modern games at medium settings with a low-tier, 2 generations old mac. Small price to pay for avoiding windows' godawful UX, ads, tracking, ai spam, onedrive spam, monthly subscription for solitaire, etc.
- Can you provide one real world example? An older Windows game that works better on Mac than on Windows?
  
  I will also add that 2015 is a random number. Win10 easily handles anything after 2005 or so. It's the pre 2005 games that often require some deal of research.

This is by a Apple fanboy who is disgruntled that Valve broke up with Macs (Steam is still available but updates like the HL1 remaster aren't any longer). Yeah, send thoughts an prayers for a cult who buy overpriced computers with weak iGPUs that only recently learned to do some raytracing but understand no Vulkan or somewhat modern OpenGL.

Apple has decided that gaming on Macs is about iPhone games on bigger screens and not about supporting cross-platform APIs and frameworks. Don't blame any but Apple that your beloved platform is shit for gaming.

We had a discussion thread on this article here back when it was new, and the same criticisms of the article remain.

back when it was new

So a year later the time bomb still did not go off.
- To be fair to the author, I knew the AAA game publishers were ticking time bombs too, and it took like 6-8 years longer than I thought for them to start seeing major declines in their increasingly homogeneous offerings.

Steam's 30% cut on each purchase has been criticized over the years, especially with Steam's market share being too large for many developers to ignore.

With all what they offer, 30% IMO is fair. It gets lower when you reach a certain amount too

Steam's position in the market is a functional monopoly, but there have been challengers. The greatest example is the Epic Games Store, which started as just the launcher for Fortnite, then became a full-blown store in 2019 for third-party games. The Epic Games Store was light on features at first, and still doesn't have many of the community-centric features in Steam, but it has a Steamworks-like multiplayer framework and other core functionality. Epic also doesn't take as much money from game developers as Steam's 30% cut.

Epic a challenger? LMAO "The greatest example is the Epic Games Store" yeah sure, they have nothing, quite literally.

With all what they offer, 30% IMO is fair.

It's not like the games are cheaper on other stores with lower cuts. Why would customers care if the lower cut just results in publishers pocketing higher profits.
- Good point
- True. Not praising steam as the god digital store on PC because it has its own problems but it saved me from 🏴‍☠️ and now I do it for devs that deserve it (Looking at you Sony and PSN requirement) or as demo damn I wish more games had a demo
Maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture, doesn't steam host the game data? Push updates? Promote? Host Workshops if applicable? Use their bandwidth? Sync saves when applicable? Provide a community forum for the game? Allow players to connect easier?

Sounds like that 30% goes a long way.

Is that cut too much to cover all those things?
- I don't get if it's a negative comment or not (apologies) but for what you listed, I think 30% is fair
Little known fact Steam refunds the money you paid to get the game on the platform if you pass a certain % in sales
- True! Like the 30% is lower after a certain % is passed
Epic is the latest example that's trying. EA gave up that fight years ago, and probably had better shot than Epic ever will.
- The problem is: Epic is shit and does nothing. What does it has more than steam? Free games? Eh can get them for free anyway without a launcher sooo without the games, what does it has?
Dang I have more games in my epic library than I do my steam library.
- OK? I wonder how many of them you played and how many are there ¯_(ツ)_/¯ eh don't care

That blog is just the worst. I haven't seen any decent article since it appeared on lemmy ~~a few months back~~. Nvm is the same 1yo article.

lol is that you Epic games.

Get this clown the fuck out of here

I can think of very few companies or services that I approve of more than Valve and Steam. Being private and free of shareholder greed is huge. They’ve never once screwed me over.

Only moment of worry will be when the company changes hands, but I’m sure Gabe has already thought about a worthy successor who won’t destroy the soul of the company.

I've even wanted to bring up Valve in some recent political discussions on corporate governance. With the blatant exception of CSGO child-focused gambling, it is otherwise the "shining ideal" of a good company: They invented a product that people like and enjoy, maintain it well to please their customers, and pay their employees well without growing excessively or finding ways to cheat customers out of their money.

This coming from game journalism, which has just turned into a mouthpiece and constantly been used to lie about how good games are.

Funny how the date of this article comes out around the time that Amazon is failing, Epic is failing, Ubisoft is failing, and they're failing because they hate the people that they sell their products to, and they refuse to be user-friendly and user-focused.

Steam isn't perfect, but the reason why they're a monopoly is they actually give a shit about gamers, unlike all of their competition.

Gamers aren't a product, they're a user, and Steam understands that offering the voice to those people makes their product what it is. The more users they have, the more money they make. They don't need to nickel and dime and squeeze.

This is something that every single competitor they have had has just blatantly ignored.

Cross posted from: https://lemmy.world/comment/15611343

The likeliest explanation is that games press lie about how good games are and not that they just have a different opinion than you? Also, this isn't even a major outlet. It's just some guy's blog, not even exclusively about games.
- It's definitely happened before, though I couldn't say to what extent. The reason has been that if they rate games from major developers too poorly they stop getting access to their new games before release.
  
  I care very little about critics these days though, and it's mostly for the reason you suggest, differing opinions. If they don't like the same types of games I like, what good is their rating to me? I'm not taking the time to try to find a critic that has similar tastes as me.

What a weaksauce article, spends most of the time arguing against itself, and the problem is most of the strawman arguments it sets up to argue against actually win in my opinion. Most of its arguments follow this kind of format:

I think that 2 + 2 = 5, now I know you might hear that 2 + 2 = 4, but the only thing that says that is thousands of years of math, and we can't assume that's going to continue into the future because Valve made a mistake doing math once.

Finally ends with some vague hypothetical about how even though they admit Valve is pretty good today, but still it will become evil someday because grr capitalism bad.

Steam is fantastic, they've made mistakes yes (Australia's gaming laws are well known to be crazy for example so that's not completely Valve's responsibility) but on the whole they are doing great things and making money while doing it, which is great because a successful and profitable Steam is able to continue to do great things. Making money is not a sin if they do it fairly and ethically, and they do. 30% is a bargain for what they're providing, especially the devoted audience which they have attracted (completely legitimately), and if you don't agree it's worth that 30% you're welcome to distribute your game literally anywhere else.