If valve laid off 1000 people, there wouldn’t be anyone left. The company has like 200 employees and gaben and maybe 3 other people make almost all the money. Gabens yatch fleet is worth a cool billion, or was before he added an other one a few months ago.
People simping for billionaires disgust me.
Gabens is worst than Tim. At least Epic developed Unreal Studio. Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own. Steam being nice to use doesn’t magic away the highway robbery, all games stores are shit (gog and itch not included).
People simp for gaben because unlike any modern game studio CEO, he isn’t a mindless cashgrab off for all the money in the world.
Valve actively invests into FOSS, which also helps with their public image. It’s thanks to Valve that gaming on linux thrives nowadays, after all.
At least Epic developed Unreal Studio.
And Valve had developed Source and Steam audio, as well as sponsored the development of proton, Fex (which they financially supported since its inception, according to the FEX maintainer).
Let’s also ignore the fact that Valve had pioneered the very concept of a modern game storefront such as Steam, pioneered indie publishing with its Steam Greenlight.
To this day Steam remains to be the most feature-complete service of that sort, while both not imposing on publishers, and retaining its pro-consumer stance. Basically, the perfect middle-ground.
Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own.
Valve has nothing to do with DRM inception or development, as well as they don’t enforce drm onto anyone publishing their game on steam. If you want to blame someone for drm in your game, blame the publishing studio.
Artificial prohibition of DRMs on a game storefront only leads to its avoidance by the majority of gamedevs and publishers, as well as promotes the development of pocket storefronts such as Battle.net, UPlay and Origin where publishers allow themselves to be as anti-consumer as they want. EGS is a great example of what would’ve been if Steam wasn’t sitting in its niche.
Steam being nice to use doesn’t magic away the highway robbery, all games stores are shit (gog and itch not included).
You sound full of shallow teenage maximalism, striving for a utopian version of reality without trying to understand how and why everything works as it currently does.
Let the old man have his yachts, he, unlike many, deserved them.
Also no, I hate the Epic fucker just as equally as I do the Valve fucker. Funny how Epic does the exact thing the other people did and somehow they’re derided for it, though.
Oh, I should’ve clarified. My bad. By the same shit I meant their launchers are pretty similar in their origin stories, purpose, and how they get there.
I condemn all mass layoffs no matter who does it. Admittedly I haven’t heard about any mass layoffs at Valve in recent history, so I’ll give them they’re better on that front (unless proven otherwise).
let’s just say my yacht park is drastically larger than it was yesterday:)
Jokes aside, Valve did allow lots of talented people to find and express themselves, be it via steam greenlight or steam workshop. And Valve still are the pioneers on linux gaming among other corpos. Gaben surely isn’t Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, but he certainly did some respect-worthy things, especially when you compare him to practically any other CEO.
Forking Wine and invoking XKCD #927 with Linux does not a hero create. Especially when said “”“hero”“” has fucked over game ownership and introduced the wider world to the original lootbox, the Mann Co. Crate that can only be opened with $4.99 keys. Funny how nobody mentions that, when it is even more useless and predatory than the Oblivion horse armor that people keep bringing up to this day (which I wouldn’t have forked over $2.5 but somehow even that low bar had more value to it). Gee whiz, no wonder we got The Crew’s shutdown and tons of in-game economies.
Stop simping for a fucking billionaire. Treat them all equally.
calling proton a “wine fork” is akin to calling a linux distro a “kernel fork”. Proton does a lot of things that are simply out of scope for wine. Referring to it as yet another unnecessary standard is quite unfair, considering the impact it made.
Especially when said “”“hero”“” has fucked over game ownership
First, I never called Valve, or Gaben in particular, heroes.
Second, Valve never “fucked over game ownership”, because it was fucked over long before them. Lawmakers struggled with such concepts as “intellectual property” since the inception of the term. It’s hard to sell something that can be infinitely copied, because the value of a good that is present in infinite abundance is zero. Licensing is an attempt to force IP behave same as material goods do.
introduced the wider world to the original lootbox, the Mann Co. Crate that can only be opened with $4.99 keys.
Yeah, not only that, they invented battle passes too. Does that mean that without Valve there’d be no crates? I highly doubt that.
Also, unlike literally any other loot boxes in any other game, items for Valve games Always were primarily community-made. Each crate opened, each skin traded is a profit that is guaranteed to reach the original creator. The horse armor analogy is inadequate due to that, and the fact that oblivion is a single-player game.
Also, trading is still a thing, unlike in any other games. Back in the day i myself managed to get the cosmetics i liked without investing any money, purely by exchanging items with other players.
no wonder we got The Crew’s shutdown and tons of in-game economies.
Now that’s absurd. Both somehow accusing Valve in The Crew shutdown incident, and calling omnipreset in-game purchases “an economy”. The only games with economy systems i can think of are those of Valve, EVE online, and some MMORPGs. You can’t sell your Overwatch skins without selling the whole account, for instance. In other words, in most games, an in-game purchase is money forever lost.
You want to blame someone for the shit we’re in right now? Blame mindless consumers that to this day mindlessly pre-order games based on how shiny they look in the trailer. Blame our modern culture for endorsing the anti-piracy agenda. Blame yourself for not lecturing your fellow neighbor why consumerism should be conscious. As long as people won’t learn, there always will be bad actors exploiting all of the above. Valve is one of the few rare exceptions that don’t try to exploit their consumers, that make pro-consumer decisions not based off peer pressure, but rather because it makes the world a slightly better place.
Stop simping for a fucking billionaire. Treat them all equally.
I do. I judge people based off their actions. If the man managed to become a billionaire while making or supporting the development of some legendary games, developing a platform that becomes a de-facto monopolist purely by the virtue of being that good, using all of that power to instill pro-consumer policies; then by allowing artists to profit off something they made for the games they love; by providing a huge platform for indie devs; by supporting fan-made works based off Valve’s IPs; by soloing the whole spectrum of problems regarding gaming on linux; by sponsoring and promoting FOSS… i’d rather let him keep the money, because my issue with most of the billionaires is not that they have more money than me, it’s that they stripped off their humanity, ripping other people off to become billionaires in the first place. Gabe, on the other hand, doesn’t fit the stereotype. If every corporate CEO was more like him, i think the world would be a better place.
Now try to turn on your head and oppose me without trying to demean anything i say in your head by calling me a simp, because newsflash, reality isn’t black and white, trying to treat it like it is — is the definition of bigotry.
Dude, get over it. Your precious company has enabled all the industry illnesses I mentioned and more, and all the pushback that the company gets for it is the owner being rewarded with seven yachts. If it were EA or dare I say Epic, I’d find you on the other side of the fence. Because that’s what this is. Blind simping. For your short novel of a post, I hope you are getting paid $0.01? Cause your hero doesn’t really care as much as you do, so you better be paid for it than be a fool and do it for free.
calling proton a “wine fork” is akin to calling a linux distro a “kernel fork”
It is a wine fork, and wouldn’t exist without the initial contributions that made wine, the actual hero of this story, in the first place. Next.
Second, Valve never “fucked over game ownership”,
Explain Steam to me then. Literally launched as a DRM built-in to hardcopies of Half-Life 2, using an account based activation scheme with a one-time use code. Literally the CD key people deride but now with a bloatware launcher and an internet connection requirement, for a single player game. After you use the code, the game is now bound to your account, and your hardcopy can’t be resold in a legally playable form. Oh and now in our current day, they literally can decide to delete your whole library of “subscriptions” as they call it. I’m sure you’ll find some way to blame literally any other party but Valve for things that Valve has done.
And because people like you kept throwing tons of money at them so other companies are compelled to copy them, along with their model of not owning anything… We get to the territory of…
accusing Valve in The Crew shutdown incident
And many countless other games that were shutdown or killed because of their DRM failing.
Does that mean that without Valve there’d be no crates? I highly doubt that.
It doesn’t matter. Point is they’re the first to popularize the concept and poison the entire industry with it. I don’t care what “nicities” they might have compared to other companies, the fucking idea itself is predatory and Valve even more so for spawning it.
Valve is one of the few rare exceptions that don’t try to exploit their consumers
Yeah, same Valve that sells in-game diamond rings for $100 and lootbox keys for $5. Same Valve that created the “trading card” system just to profit off of thin air by milking their userbase. Same Valve that spent years opposing refunds until Australia forced them to offer them. Totally not exploitative.
developing a platform that becomes a de-facto monopolist purely by the virtue of being that good
Propaganda. It is monopolist because it is. Their APIs deliberately lock in devs to their own ecosystem, such that it becomes harder to integrate into other ecosystems, therefore adding an artificial barrier to their competitors as they have to develop their own solutions and devs must also weigh whether they want to even bother with all this stuff. The recent lawsuits as well show they actually threaten devs when they have different prices in other locations. Plenty of reasons for their monopoly, and this rose-tinted “they’re just that good” is nonsense.
by sponsoring and promoting FOSS
Microsoft contributes to FOSS too. Tell me about how Bill Gates or Satya Nadella are cool people then.
If every corporate CEO was more like him, i think the world would be a better place.
Oh I’d be terrified of this world alright. The world where CEOs do all sorts of bad stuff and they get praised for it even as we lose ownership rights or more.
Now try to turn on your head and oppose me without trying to demean anything i say in your head by calling me a simp
I’ve played the game by your own rules and I regret it already. You’re so deep into believing the bull you’re spewing, I don’t think anyone will pull you out of it.
You don’t become a billionaire by “”“offering good services”“”. The only way you can do that is by exploiting people and hoarding money - the methods to achieving that are all laid down above. All billionaires should not have this wealth while other people don’t even have a roof above them. End of.
FYI you have never owned a game. It’s always been a license. Even when it was physical. It’s the same for GoG too sep you get an installer for later. It’s still only a license.
Also Steam did not give us DRM. DRM has existed for decades before steam was made.
Yes, if we want to get technical, we don’t legally own those games, obviously. However, so long as they are DRM free, we can always install them on whatever hardware we choose, as long as its supported. Thats why people say DRM takes away a player’s ability to “own” their games.
if steam prohibited DRMs in the first place, we’d have a reality, where steam is either pretty small, or entirely dead, and its niche is separated between small anti-consumer marketplaces such as UPlay and battle.net, where the publishers can stuff anything up your ass, not only DRMs, to their greedy hearts’ content.
Piracy and independent game preservation initiatives still exist despite DRMs tho
The software licensing we know today for everything software related only started in like '82 or '83. What about games from the 70s? (Granted the person you responded to may still have never owned a game if they weren’t even alive in the 70s; I sure as hell wasn’t)
Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own.
THANK YOU for saying this. Their launcher based DRM scheme and its direct attack on ownership, physical and used games has been a scourge. Don’t forget their popularizing the F2P economy model and lootboxes, leading to more US-grown harm.
THANK YOU for saying this. Their launcher based DRM scheme and its direct attack on ownership
FYI Steam only applies a very weak DRM to stop people from copying games, but you can easily bypass it using Goldberg. Just copy/paste a few files into the game folder and you can play it outside of Steam.
I know it is weak, I have cracked the games I used to have there myself before just giving up the account. It doesn’t change the facts it harmed games forever, that it is the poster child of “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”
You say this like Steam created DRM… DRM already existed back in the day, and in way more intrusive ways. Having CD keys, games that would activate only once by connecting to the servers, etc…
Steam is the poster child of making digital games popular. That’s it. It’s not that deep.
Iirc, half life 2 was the first major game, having DRM and needing validation through steam, even with a hardcopy. After that, all the other companies jumped aboard with using DRM with steam.
I feel like people think cd keys are the bar and if you are slightly better (online activation) them you get flying marks. Same with comparing to Xbox and epic.
They all fail, including steam. It’s crazy to see people defending any of them but Gaben always gets defended. Steam deserves the critique as much as the rest.
Just because there was bad (CD keys), doesn’t mean we must settle for worse (phoning home to servers owned and run by a private company based in the fucking United States to play a fucking single player game). But if you’re happy owning nothing… Well, I’m not.
Ya, that’s why I said all stores. Xbox and Valve are the same coin, just a different face. Valve did popularize DRM though, before Xbox and the rest got in on it. Xbox is overall worst though.
Yeah he’s a billionaire. But he’s the least bad one . we can appreciate that. Valve is (basically) single handedly keeping all pc gaming from becoming instant shit. Imagine if ea bought valve. Scary thought. Instantly you’d have a 20 dollar a month subscription and a limit of 2 game installs/downloads a month. And your drivers license/id would be scanned.
Yes its a closed Eco system which isnt great but we still have gog. And steam games unless noted do not have DRM. They are playable without the steam client.
I think we have many, many more billionaires to worry about than attacking valves employees. As far as I know, valve employees aren’t donating to fascism and death camps, rigging elections, and promoting disinformation bots. Or denying healthcare.
Sure. But it makes more sense to direct the rage at the actual evil billionaires. I don’t really care if Joe that got rich off wood lag screws made a billion and fucked off to his own land never to be heard from again. I do care about the ones meddling in elections and raping children.
I’ve kept hearing these scare stories for years. Sorry, they’re shallow as shit. I’m not settling for Valve just because scawy EA is worse. To hell with them both. Anti-consuner is anti-consumer. A billionaire is a billionaire, and all of them are delicious.
Same people who wouldnt vote at all in the US Because “Biden might do a bad thing” well guess what, Drump rapes and kills children and kidnaps innocent people, while starting wars.
You know there’s more than two game companies, right? You know that unlike the presidency in the United States of Fascism, there can be more than one game distribution platform, and those can be run by multiple companies, yes? While you’re at it, buying games from Steam means your tax dollars go to the Trump Administration.
Oh ya i know. But no one actually uses anything but steam. Related, If you know normies, they only use Spotify (even though they support ICE and stolen llm slop audio). People dont buy CDs or records or use discogs or bandcamp etc. Same thing.
Not that odd. Valve doesn’t have mass layoffs because they don’t over-hire. Beyond that, it’s salt in the wound towards Sweeney’s inability to compete.
Valve runs such a lean ship that Gaben was able to buy a boat with a fully functional hospital aboard.
Every other company that greedily sucks away profit from their consumers to the point of creating billionaires is criticised but steam gets a pass because they don’t have any employees to lay off. Jfc.
They don’t hire at all because it’s a money making machine sucking wealth out of gamers and devs alike. It needs zero manpower, it literally just prints money.
If valve laid off 1000 people, there wouldn’t be anyone left. The company has like 200 employees and gaben and maybe 3 other people make almost all the money. Gabens yatch fleet is worth a cool billion, or was before he added an other one a few months ago.
People simping for billionaires disgust me.
Gabens is worst than Tim. At least Epic developed Unreal Studio. Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own. Steam being nice to use doesn’t magic away the highway robbery, all games stores are shit (gog and itch not included).
People simp for gaben because unlike any modern game studio CEO, he isn’t a mindless cashgrab off for all the money in the world.
Valve actively invests into FOSS, which also helps with their public image. It’s thanks to Valve that gaming on linux thrives nowadays, after all.
And Valve had developed Source and Steam audio, as well as sponsored the development of proton, Fex (which they financially supported since its inception, according to the FEX maintainer).
Let’s also ignore the fact that Valve had pioneered the very concept of a modern game storefront such as Steam, pioneered indie publishing with its Steam Greenlight.
To this day Steam remains to be the most feature-complete service of that sort, while both not imposing on publishers, and retaining its pro-consumer stance. Basically, the perfect middle-ground.
Valve has nothing to do with DRM inception or development, as well as they don’t enforce drm onto anyone publishing their game on steam. If you want to blame someone for drm in your game, blame the publishing studio.
Artificial prohibition of DRMs on a game storefront only leads to its avoidance by the majority of gamedevs and publishers, as well as promotes the development of pocket storefronts such as Battle.net, UPlay and Origin where publishers allow themselves to be as anti-consumer as they want. EGS is a great example of what would’ve been if Steam wasn’t sitting in its niche.
You sound full of shallow teenage maximalism, striving for a utopian version of reality without trying to understand how and why everything works as it currently does.
Let the old man have his yachts, he, unlike many, deserved them.
So how much did he pay you to simp him? Hope they raised their simping wages above $0.
I can play that game too.
How much did Tim pay you for asking people how much Gaben payed to simp him?
Having an opposing opinion is off course impossible and people. People who have a different opinion are only paid actors.
Removed by mod
Whut
Also no, I hate the Epic fucker just as equally as I do the Valve fucker. Funny how Epic does the exact thing the other people did and somehow they’re derided for it, though.
Valve did not lay off 1000 people. Other companies doing this get the same shit as Epic does. So what exactly do you mean with this statement?
Oh, I should’ve clarified. My bad. By the same shit I meant their launchers are pretty similar in their origin stories, purpose, and how they get there.
I condemn all mass layoffs no matter who does it. Admittedly I haven’t heard about any mass layoffs at Valve in recent history, so I’ll give them they’re better on that front (unless proven otherwise).
let’s just say my yacht park is drastically larger than it was yesterday:)
Jokes aside, Valve did allow lots of talented people to find and express themselves, be it via steam greenlight or steam workshop. And Valve still are the pioneers on linux gaming among other corpos. Gaben surely isn’t Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, but he certainly did some respect-worthy things, especially when you compare him to practically any other CEO.
Forking Wine and invoking XKCD #927 with Linux does not a hero create. Especially when said “”“hero”“” has fucked over game ownership and introduced the wider world to the original lootbox, the Mann Co. Crate that can only be opened with $4.99 keys. Funny how nobody mentions that, when it is even more useless and predatory than the Oblivion horse armor that people keep bringing up to this day (which I wouldn’t have forked over $2.5 but somehow even that low bar had more value to it). Gee whiz, no wonder we got The Crew’s shutdown and tons of in-game economies.
Stop simping for a fucking billionaire. Treat them all equally.
calling proton a “wine fork” is akin to calling a linux distro a “kernel fork”. Proton does a lot of things that are simply out of scope for wine. Referring to it as yet another unnecessary standard is quite unfair, considering the impact it made.
First, I never called Valve, or Gaben in particular, heroes.
Second, Valve never “fucked over game ownership”, because it was fucked over long before them. Lawmakers struggled with such concepts as “intellectual property” since the inception of the term. It’s hard to sell something that can be infinitely copied, because the value of a good that is present in infinite abundance is zero. Licensing is an attempt to force IP behave same as material goods do.
Yeah, not only that, they invented battle passes too. Does that mean that without Valve there’d be no crates? I highly doubt that.
Also, unlike literally any other loot boxes in any other game, items for Valve games Always were primarily community-made. Each crate opened, each skin traded is a profit that is guaranteed to reach the original creator. The horse armor analogy is inadequate due to that, and the fact that oblivion is a single-player game.
Also, trading is still a thing, unlike in any other games. Back in the day i myself managed to get the cosmetics i liked without investing any money, purely by exchanging items with other players.
Now that’s absurd. Both somehow accusing Valve in The Crew shutdown incident, and calling omnipreset in-game purchases “an economy”. The only games with economy systems i can think of are those of Valve, EVE online, and some MMORPGs. You can’t sell your Overwatch skins without selling the whole account, for instance. In other words, in most games, an in-game purchase is money forever lost.
You want to blame someone for the shit we’re in right now? Blame mindless consumers that to this day mindlessly pre-order games based on how shiny they look in the trailer. Blame our modern culture for endorsing the anti-piracy agenda. Blame yourself for not lecturing your fellow neighbor why consumerism should be conscious. As long as people won’t learn, there always will be bad actors exploiting all of the above. Valve is one of the few rare exceptions that don’t try to exploit their consumers, that make pro-consumer decisions not based off peer pressure, but rather because it makes the world a slightly better place.
I do. I judge people based off their actions. If the man managed to become a billionaire while making or supporting the development of some legendary games, developing a platform that becomes a de-facto monopolist purely by the virtue of being that good, using all of that power to instill pro-consumer policies; then by allowing artists to profit off something they made for the games they love; by providing a huge platform for indie devs; by supporting fan-made works based off Valve’s IPs; by soloing the whole spectrum of problems regarding gaming on linux; by sponsoring and promoting FOSS… i’d rather let him keep the money, because my issue with most of the billionaires is not that they have more money than me, it’s that they stripped off their humanity, ripping other people off to become billionaires in the first place. Gabe, on the other hand, doesn’t fit the stereotype. If every corporate CEO was more like him, i think the world would be a better place.
Now try to turn on your head and oppose me without trying to demean anything i say in your head by calling me a simp, because newsflash, reality isn’t black and white, trying to treat it like it is — is the definition of bigotry.
Dude, get over it. Your precious company has enabled all the industry illnesses I mentioned and more, and all the pushback that the company gets for it is the owner being rewarded with seven yachts. If it were EA or dare I say Epic, I’d find you on the other side of the fence. Because that’s what this is. Blind simping. For your short novel of a post, I hope you are getting paid $0.01? Cause your hero doesn’t really care as much as you do, so you better be paid for it than be a fool and do it for free.
It is a wine fork, and wouldn’t exist without the initial contributions that made wine, the actual hero of this story, in the first place. Next.
Explain Steam to me then. Literally launched as a DRM built-in to hardcopies of Half-Life 2, using an account based activation scheme with a one-time use code. Literally the CD key people deride but now with a bloatware launcher and an internet connection requirement, for a single player game. After you use the code, the game is now bound to your account, and your hardcopy can’t be resold in a legally playable form. Oh and now in our current day, they literally can decide to delete your whole library of “subscriptions” as they call it. I’m sure you’ll find some way to blame literally any other party but Valve for things that Valve has done.
And because people like you kept throwing tons of money at them so other companies are compelled to copy them, along with their model of not owning anything… We get to the territory of…
And many countless other games that were shutdown or killed because of their DRM failing.
It doesn’t matter. Point is they’re the first to popularize the concept and poison the entire industry with it. I don’t care what “nicities” they might have compared to other companies, the fucking idea itself is predatory and Valve even more so for spawning it.
Yeah, same Valve that sells in-game diamond rings for $100 and lootbox keys for $5. Same Valve that created the “trading card” system just to profit off of thin air by milking their userbase. Same Valve that spent years opposing refunds until Australia forced them to offer them. Totally not exploitative.
Propaganda. It is monopolist because it is. Their APIs deliberately lock in devs to their own ecosystem, such that it becomes harder to integrate into other ecosystems, therefore adding an artificial barrier to their competitors as they have to develop their own solutions and devs must also weigh whether they want to even bother with all this stuff. The recent lawsuits as well show they actually threaten devs when they have different prices in other locations. Plenty of reasons for their monopoly, and this rose-tinted “they’re just that good” is nonsense.
Microsoft contributes to FOSS too. Tell me about how Bill Gates or Satya Nadella are cool people then.
Oh I’d be terrified of this world alright. The world where CEOs do all sorts of bad stuff and they get praised for it even as we lose ownership rights or more.
I’ve played the game by your own rules and I regret it already. You’re so deep into believing the bull you’re spewing, I don’t think anyone will pull you out of it.
You don’t become a billionaire by “”“offering good services”“”. The only way you can do that is by exploiting people and hoarding money - the methods to achieving that are all laid down above. All billionaires should not have this wealth while other people don’t even have a roof above them. End of.
FYI you have never owned a game. It’s always been a license. Even when it was physical. It’s the same for GoG too sep you get an installer for later. It’s still only a license.
Also Steam did not give us DRM. DRM has existed for decades before steam was made.
Hahaha.
Oh, I’ve owned a game.
I own many games.
I can give them to whoever I want.
… you just have to be clever.
Yes, if we want to get technical, we don’t legally own those games, obviously. However, so long as they are DRM free, we can always install them on whatever hardware we choose, as long as its supported. Thats why people say DRM takes away a player’s ability to “own” their games.
if steam prohibited DRMs in the first place, we’d have a reality, where steam is either pretty small, or entirely dead, and its niche is separated between small anti-consumer marketplaces such as UPlay and battle.net, where the publishers can stuff anything up your ass, not only DRMs, to their greedy hearts’ content.
Piracy and independent game preservation initiatives still exist despite DRMs tho
The software licensing we know today for everything software related only started in like '82 or '83. What about games from the 70s? (Granted the person you responded to may still have never owned a game if they weren’t even alive in the 70s; I sure as hell wasn’t)
THANK YOU for saying this. Their launcher based DRM scheme and its direct attack on ownership, physical and used games has been a scourge. Don’t forget their popularizing the F2P economy model and lootboxes, leading to more US-grown harm.
FYI Steam only applies a very weak DRM to stop people from copying games, but you can easily bypass it using Goldberg. Just copy/paste a few files into the game folder and you can play it outside of Steam.
I know it is weak, I have cracked the games I used to have there myself before just giving up the account. It doesn’t change the facts it harmed games forever, that it is the poster child of “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”
You say this like Steam created DRM… DRM already existed back in the day, and in way more intrusive ways. Having CD keys, games that would activate only once by connecting to the servers, etc…
Steam is the poster child of making digital games popular. That’s it. It’s not that deep.
Iirc, half life 2 was the first major game, having DRM and needing validation through steam, even with a hardcopy. After that, all the other companies jumped aboard with using DRM with steam.
I feel like people think cd keys are the bar and if you are slightly better (online activation) them you get flying marks. Same with comparing to Xbox and epic.
They all fail, including steam. It’s crazy to see people defending any of them but Gaben always gets defended. Steam deserves the critique as much as the rest.
Just because there was bad (CD keys), doesn’t mean we must settle for worse (phoning home to servers owned and run by a private company based in the fucking United States to play a fucking single player game). But if you’re happy owning nothing… Well, I’m not.
Xbox with online needed is just the same as DRM; Since you can’t play unless you have a connection to their server.
Ya, that’s why I said all stores. Xbox and Valve are the same coin, just a different face. Valve did popularize DRM though, before Xbox and the rest got in on it. Xbox is overall worst though.
Yeah he’s a billionaire. But he’s the least bad one . we can appreciate that. Valve is (basically) single handedly keeping all pc gaming from becoming instant shit. Imagine if ea bought valve. Scary thought. Instantly you’d have a 20 dollar a month subscription and a limit of 2 game installs/downloads a month. And your drivers license/id would be scanned.
Yes its a closed Eco system which isnt great but we still have gog. And steam games unless noted do not have DRM. They are playable without the steam client.
No such thing as a good billionaire. Least bad doesn’t cut it.
I think we have many, many more billionaires to worry about than attacking valves employees. As far as I know, valve employees aren’t donating to fascism and death camps, rigging elections, and promoting disinformation bots. Or denying healthcare.
Gabens isn’t the employee, he is the owner. When I talk shit about Amazon and Bezos, I’m not attacking the employees.
Sure. But it makes more sense to direct the rage at the actual evil billionaires. I don’t really care if Joe that got rich off wood lag screws made a billion and fucked off to his own land never to be heard from again. I do care about the ones meddling in elections and raping children.
Its like the incel Nintendo rage. No one cares.
Ah yes, the second paragon of virtue: Nintendo. This is the bootlicking I’m talking about.
I’ve kept hearing these scare stories for years. Sorry, they’re shallow as shit. I’m not settling for Valve just because scawy EA is worse. To hell with them both. Anti-consuner is anti-consumer. A billionaire is a billionaire, and all of them are delicious.
Very lemming of you.
“Perfect is the enemy of good”.
Same people who wouldnt vote at all in the US Because “Biden might do a bad thing” well guess what, Drump rapes and kills children and kidnaps innocent people, while starting wars.
You know there’s more than two game companies, right? You know that unlike the presidency in the United States of Fascism, there can be more than one game distribution platform, and those can be run by multiple companies, yes? While you’re at it, buying games from Steam means your tax dollars go to the Trump Administration.
Oh ya i know. But no one actually uses anything but steam. Related, If you know normies, they only use Spotify (even though they support ICE and stolen llm slop audio). People dont buy CDs or records or use discogs or bandcamp etc. Same thing.
Lemmings are .000001% of the population.
If Valve fired 1000 people, that means they somehow managed to fire like 700 people from a different company. Gabe is that powerful. 🤣
I mean, imagine all the AI slop game companies that would go out of business cause they couldn’t sell on Steam anymore…
Steam is like if you had to open the Walmart app to use some shit you bought there.
Yeah, glasses houses and such it’s odd for Valve to comment on this.
Not that odd. Valve doesn’t have mass layoffs because they don’t over-hire. Beyond that, it’s salt in the wound towards Sweeney’s inability to compete.
Valve runs such a lean ship that Gaben was able to buy a boat with a fully functional hospital aboard.
Every other company that greedily sucks away profit from their consumers to the point of creating billionaires is criticised but steam gets a pass because they don’t have any employees to lay off. Jfc.
They don’t hire at all because it’s a money making machine sucking wealth out of gamers and devs alike. It needs zero manpower, it literally just prints money.
And yet they still push innovation, both in software and hardware.
Theyre certainly not angels, but they’re far closer than just about anyone else at their level.
Probably because Valve didn’t, some guy who used to work for Valve did.
Nothing odd about wanting to put Tim’s nose in his shit. The man is beyond oblivious.