If the dev doesn’t opt to implement steams drm, you can also just run the exe. Downloading it requires the client vs. GOG allowing you to dl the game from their website, but that’s about the only difference (GOG outright refusing any games with DRM is incredibly based though and a great reason to buy on GOG over steam)
And that can be quite helpful. Just yesterday I had a game that wouldn’t launch via steam, but for some reason worked fine if I just ran it as an executable via protontricks.
Steam also offers DRM, it’s just up to devs to use it. And steams DRM is relatively unintrusive.
I think steam should maybe be in the middle, and the other 2 far on the left.
Theyre more likely to keep the skin economy alive by making people enjoy the game. It’s not like they have no incentive.
But yea I very much agree gabe is not the problem. If every billionaire acted like gabe the world would probably be a whole lot better, even if they’d still waste a lot of ressources. Because at least he hasn’t sold his basic human decency for more money, he just spends his insane amounts of money on excessive luxury. And valve actually takes risks on new products, and is content with their store shitting money instead of trying to make it shit money faster like every publically traded company.
People do this with artists too. Especially the moment you offer anything in the way of free commissions for a specific community and such.
Many forums had gfx threads, where members who enjoy putting together banners and such would offer to make something for those who asked. A good friend of mine ran one in a certain game’s forum for a while and the absolute entitlement in which some of those people acted (in regards to speed and nitpicking about minor things) was disgusting. It was maybe 1 in 25 people but it soured the whole thing for her, understandably so. The moment you give people a little finger wrt their requests, one of those people will take the whole hand. The same likely applies to modding.
And I’m sure being a woman doing gaming stuff isn’t helping because there’s way too much sexism in gaming culture, even though there are also a lot of subcommunities that are super welcoming to everyone.
No, because the game does not support linux, so I never paid for it to work on linux. The fact that most games do anyway, usually out of the box and without any issues, is largely thanks to valve.