Steam will get the social media warrior upvote brigade on their side every time, despite being a single point of failure that at any moment can change it’s operations to restrict anything and everything they wish unless you pay up.

Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else. We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library to GOG I would.

There’s no good competitors because the money isn’t there to build one. Developers don’t want to maintain yet another platform and gamers don’t want another application to manage all their shit. Would take tens of billions of dollars today to get in there on top of having near feature parity.

I’ve been worried for a long time about what will happen when GabeN dies and someone else takes the reins. The only reason why the platform isn’t royal shit is because it’s his company and no grubby MBAs have managed to take it public. That can change on a whim.

Potential enshittifications:

• Subscriptions. MBAs love them!

• Advertisements. Think on-launch forced ads that play in steam before launching a game unless you pony up perhaps $15/mo in platform fees to bypass it. Maybe they’ll start with a much lower insignificant price to make it whatever for users to add a credit card and allow autobilling… for later price increases.

• Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)

Competition like GOG or itch isn’t “piss poor”, they offer exactly the features their customers expect.

Steam will get the social media warrior upvote brigade on their side every time, despite being a single point of failure that at any moment can change it’s operations to restrict anything and everything they wish unless you pay up.

Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else. We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library to GOG I would.

There’s no good competitors because the money isn’t there to build one. Developers don’t want to maintain yet another platform and gamers don’t want another application to manage all their shit. Would take tens of billions of dollars today to get in there on top of having near feature parity.

I’ve been worried for a long time about what will happen when GabeN dies and someone else takes the reins. The only reason why the platform isn’t royal shit is because it’s his company and no grubby MBAs have managed to take it public. That can change on a whim.

Potential enshittifications:

• Subscriptions. MBAs love them!

• Advertisements. Think on-launch forced ads that play in steam before launching a game unless you pony up perhaps $15/mo in platform fees to bypass it. Maybe they’ll start with a much lower insignificant price to make it whatever for users to add a credit card and allow autobilling… for later price increases.

• Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)

Given how anti capitalist Lenny is purported to be I’m surprised how vehemently valve gets defended. There’s no good billionaire

People like you can’t seem to differentiate wanting solid criticisms of Valve and Steam rather than just theory crafting all the worst things that can happen with them. The Steam hysteria makes no sense when its a storefront on open software platforms and the ones that are on closed software platforms aren’t doing what people are gearing Valve would do whenever Gabe dies or if Valve went public

At least put effort into explaining why Steam will become this terribly blood sucking store on PC where people can download from numerous options as compared to platforms like Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, iOS where you don’t have freedom to install anything you want. As a developer you can’t just distribute software and have them installable.

If people that wanted to make people concerned about Steam put more effort into their arguments, maybe people on Lemmy would give their concerns more credence. It’s surprising that on Lemmy, people who seem to value art and expression so much are so bad at expressing why people should be concerned about what they are concern about

Link to youtube video. Tracking removed.

I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.

Steam is 100% a monopoly, they just happen to be a benevolent monopoly… but like all, that can change.

2 ad rolls

I do a fair bit of modding, and actually almost never interact with steam workshop. Nexus mods, thunderstore and r2modman, or something game specific like Everest (Celeste) or Lumafly mod manager (Hollow Knight). Not to mention modding like ReShade or OptiScaler, or custom proton versions with extra features.

I tend to associate Steam Workshop with very simple mods, like skin swaps, or mods with dedicated game support, like Rivals of Aether characters. Most of the more serious game modifications are hosted elsewhere, at least in my experience, and I usually forget to even bother checking what steam has available.

That said, I agree that an easier download button for using those mods on other platforms would be a good feature.

Given how anti capitalist Lenny is purported to be I’m surprised how vehemently valve gets defended. There’s no good billionaire

Competition like GOG or itch isn’t “piss poor”, they offer exactly the features their customers expect.

What is a “steam game”?

Stop making excuses for every other company that has failed to compete with Valve. It has not been out of the price range for competition of other companies. Big publishers have been making storefronts for about 2 decades and proceeding to underfund and mismanage every attempt.

Steam was not the first digital storefront on PC. They were not a huge behemoth company by 2014. They were not bigger than Epic was by the time EGS launched. Not bigger than EA when Origin launched. Not bigger than Ubisoft when Uplay launched. Not bigger than Microsoft when GFWL launched. Not bigger than Amazon anytime these past 15 years of digital downloads from them. I doubt it took Valve tens of billions of dollars to make 2014 Steam right before SteamOS launched, 2014 because not a single storefront platform has reached feature parity with end of 2014 Steam.

Steam launched in 2003. A single ten billion dollars, I wouldn’t be surprised as about the accumulative revenue of Valve 2003-2014.

Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else.

What is the policy of any other store. Of you want a solution here go lobby the government you live under to mandate inheritance of digital goods

We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library

This is a game by game case as it’s up to what DRM is implemented if any. A ton of games you can just copy the folder around and click the executable. We’re you not around during the SecuRom and StarForce days. GFWL install limit days.

Call people what you are yourself, a social media warrior, but that doesn’t make you any less ignorant of PC gaming markets than whomever you’re crying about. You won’t be taken seriously when you’re making excuses for a bunch of companies historically and a number to this day larger than Valve was when building Steam up

Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)

Valve isn’t in a vacuum. iOS, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo. All closed software ecosystems unlike a Linux machine or currently a Windows machine. Still waiting for that 2 minute advertisement to begin download or download fees on actual closed platforms. Waiting for public companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, … to start charging download fees and pre-download advertisements on purchased games.

GFWL Gold subscription for online play is about 20 years old and failed spectacularly against a Steam that wasn’t even a tenth the userbase it has today. Now you’re losing hair over subscriptions to get advertisement free downloads of games you’ve purchased. Come back to reality of how the markets gone for PC gaming in the last 20 years

I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.

No good competitors because they don’t have money? Excuse me? Are you seriously trying to paint Epic Games as some poor small underdog company?

Yes, Steam will eventually go to shit. But it’s not shit right now, and the competition can’t even be bothered to have a shopping basket feature in their store, something every online store already had since the dawn of online stores 20 years ago.

I wouldn’t buy shit on Epic for so many fucking reasons. They’re not a realistic competitor in terms of their DD product. They make money on fortnite and their engine.

Their revenue for their games store for “3rd party titles” was $285 million in 2024, compared to Steam’s 10800 million overall revenue… only 37x higher, clearly epic is a strong competitor. Maybe you wanna claim something silly like valve’s first party sales were 10.5 billion or something.

And where are those millions going, pray tell? Because they’re sure as fuck not going into the development of a good storefront.

Epic has enough resources to make competition against Valve. They would rather cry about how they can’t get away with being cheap.