i think personally Steam’s/Valve’s dominance is really good here’s why:

• Improving Linux gaming,improving Wine and DXVK for gaming,so you dont rely on Microsoft for your OS.
• Great client(i like the: inbuilt Chromium based browser,Community features)
• Not so awful and maybe simple DRM methods(eg, needing the Steam client doesnt tank the performance that much,compared to something like denuvo which i think makes modding impossible,needs consistent internet connection,and tanks the game’s fps alot )
• I can buy with cash giftcard to buy games(I wish GOG had that)
• Workshop for modding on supported games.(ik some games have workshop and dont let you mod everything)
• Makes/has good games(Half-life 2 is the best game i ever played)

but the bad things:

• Steam Client is still 32 bit and Steam doesnt target ARM(E,G. For like M1+ macs,those need rosetta )
• third party clients arent a option
• You dont own anything you buy on Steam.
• Having the Steam client open at all times(ik not all games have this, but i assume CEF based Steam will lower the performance like slightly)
• TF2 neglect
• lootboxes/battle pass in some games(i am aware Valve was the first company to have a battle pass and fortnite popularized it)
  alright thats what i think of the Good and bad of Valve/Steam

Edit: Fixed Paragraph break.

i kinda agree:
but its still possible to pirate some Steam games without the Steam Client,
and some still require it.

Steam does more than launch games, you realize this, right? They want gog to have a launcher on Linux that will manage their library for them, not just launch their game.

Hold on, IT DOES?

While Steam is more or less the best big solution we have, it does leave a lot to be desired. The only reason they are the best is because they clawed their way to the top early, kept themselves “good enough” compared to the competition, and haven’t yet sold out their entire customer base.

At this point, they completely dominate. It’s insanely difficult to compete with them. So long as they make half of an effort to improve things and continue to be somewhat benevolent they’ll likely keep their crown.

However, Valve is not ideal. They are still looking out for themselves, primarily. Many of Valves improvements have just been reactions to competitors and other threats not an inherent desire to deliver the best product possible or do the right thing. It’s just the fact that most competitors are more obviously greedy and immoral that makes Valve look like the heroes.

Without Epic and others throwing cash on the fire trying to compete I doubt we’d have seen even the slow upgrades to the Steam experience we’ve seen in recent years.

Without the Australian lawsuit, we’d have no return policy.

Without the clever abuse of arbitration by a group of lawyers, Valve would still have forced arbitration in the agreements.

Steam OS was only a thing, and Proton only got backed by Valve, when Microsoft first started positioning itself to eat Valve’s lunch by exerting control over Windows and pushing for things like UWP and the MS/Windows/XBOX storefronts on PC.

The vast majority of Valve’s storefront improvements are algorithms and crowd sourcing solutions. They want to be as hands off as possible because being hands on is hard and comes with liability. The whole skins market and gambling fiasco kind of shows that they’d much rather just not get involved if possible - same risk/reward cost/benefit analysis used by every greedy company. If that means lying about how aware they are of it that’s what they’ll do.

Don’t get me wrong. The least worst is, unfortunately, the best we’ve got. I love gaming and use Steam a lot. It’s just that the other big players are just so terrible that I think Valve gets a free pass. Hell, much of the tech industry is swallowing tactical nukes hoping that the radiation will somehow mutate them into a good business. In the meantime they are using the illusion of “expansion” from the resulting explosions to make themselves look bigger for investors. I support anyone not doing that.

That’s far to generous to other companies, they were far more like the WiiU.

Honestly 20 different companies would probably suck for the consumer. That’s 20 different storefronts to compare, 20 different libraries to manage, potentially 20 different sets of logins, 20 sources of data breaches. It’s unlikely they would adopt an open standard to allow a shared library. Maybe you have a 21st company that makes a product like heroic launcher. You’d likely run into regionality issues where a particular store is unavailable, so you may not be able to play purchased games. You would have all sorts of odd exclusive dlc and pre order bonuses so a cosmetic item you like could be locked to a store you haven’t used. Multiplayer likely wouldn’t be global cross play between all companies, you likely get some set of 20 companies working together for multiplayer. Some games may develop a good scene available to a single store, requiring a game to be repurchased. Exclusives or timed exclusives would be annoying to track, as each store would likely have different catalogs.

they’re still sold everywhere…just nobody buys em cause why the fuck would you when you can buy em online?

step aside jesus, we have a new savior and his name is gaben

I remember CD keys but that’s about it

Benevolent dictators are great, but like pet goldfish, they eventually die, and the next fish might be an asshole you have to flush down the toilet.

This is intentionally word salad.

No, that’s pretty wrong. There absolutely were exclusive store releases, or temporary releases where one store would get a certain game a whole month early.

If I’m going to need to install several different clients/launcher on my computer just to keep up with where games get published, I’ll just resort to piracy.

Being forced to install some shitty client to run a specific game has been a deal breaker for me in the past. And there is no guarantee that other “competing” platforms will bother making Linux versions of their clients.

I think you switched to cons without saying.

I admit I haven’t tried very many, but I think you can launch any steam app “normally” without steam running. If you can find the executable or startup script, you can just point a shortcut to it. Some games will need Steam Services to run, but it’s not blocked or anything.

If they’re not doing anything wrong what’s the problem

They did for me, then my cost of living went up along with the cost of games. Now I’ll only buy games that I intend to play multiplayer

Maybe there isn’t one.

This is what I’m talking about: people think monopoly = bad, so if I say Valve has a monopoly, I must want them burned to the ground. Nah. They’re mostly fine. Having only one good option is precarious, but it is still a good option. For now.

But they’re still a monopoly. We should say so, because it’s true, and important. It shapes the entire PC gaming market.

There’s a ‘but the bad things’ buried in the middle, desperately wanting a line break.

I did the same thing initially and tried re-reading it as sass. Especially if “TF2 neglect” was considered positive.

I think this amount of competition could be good if individual competitors were allowed to fail. All the parts that build vendor lock-in would need to be removed, and more things would need to be interoperable, but it could be quite good and even specialised.

Each storefront could live or die independent of each library and each game service. If one company tried to squeeze money from users, they could just take their elsewhere, without worrying about losing access to games or connections to friends.

Of course no company would create such a system voluntarily, most depend on monopolistic practices to survive. It would take monopoly busting-policy or a foss group to even begin such a thing.

I was thinking more along the lines of being proud of shit features that consumers despise, to the point it becomes an ad for your main competitor, like the PS4 “how to share a game with a friend” video