- GameStop is hoping somebody will buy its Canadian and French operations.
- This amounts to over 500 physical stores across both nations.
- The company’s CEO decried “Liberalism, Socialism, Progressivism, Wokeness and DEI” within his firm while shopping for a buyer.
Counterpoint: Steam
I’m thinking it’s more that public companies have a legal obligation to provide increasing value to their shareholders, so stay private, don’t be a dick. Grow at a reasonable pace. Avoid enshitification.
Counter-Counter-Point: Valve literally is the developer that made lootboxes ubiquitous in gaming. The good things they do have and have done still do not outweigh the bad, nor should this fact ever be ignored. They make a good product because it gets them customers. They also were one of the first devs I read about to have hired psychologists to scientifically addict you to games. They are only your friend so far as they understand you can get more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Steam is partially funded by underage gambling. They know about this. They could literally shut it down within hours.
They’re better than most, but that is a major moral failure they don’t get nearly enough flak for.
Sure it would be nice if measures were put in place to stop underage gambling but basically everything with not guranteed rewards and rng is underage gambling. Claw machines. Coin operated ball dispensers. Pokemon cards. Literal gambling kids can do irl. Lootboxes in other games. Mojang running literal real money casinos in minecraft. As an underage I just sold valve “evil lootboxes” and used it to buy games I could’t have otherwise.
I’m truly failing to think of any major game publisher not making money from children gambling. Nintendo does it, so do Sony and Microsoft. Unless it’s an indie publisher with a small handful of games, basically every single company is guilty of this.
A lot of game publishers have micro transaction gambling, most don’t have a mult-million dollar real money casino’s built on their infrastructure and a business model based on teenagers watching CSGO gambling streams.
Obligatory Coffeezilla video
I don’t know where gamers’ hard-on for Valve comes from. They’re a monopolist software developer whose biggest product is a middle-man DRM platform masquerading as a game library utility. Their whole schtick is increasing the cost of your games, and limiting your right to access those games how, when, and where you want. Yet somehow, they’re the darling of the gaming scene.
It’s fucking bizarre.
Compared to ubisoft, ea, amazon, basically every big developer the ultra evil crimes against humanity valve is doing are minor. Thanks to valve “mandatory, evil forced upon lootboxes” I’ve been able to buy a few free full priced games just by playing cs and tf2 and not opening any of them. Its not valves fault other companies do it worse and there are very few games with lootboxes that are not yearly rerelease scams. Sure valve takes a big cut out of developers but as a developer it is the cost of doing business. They provide a lot of opportunities and take off a lot of the headache as well. They also single handedly screwed over MS by making linux viable for the regular gamer, popularized vr only for zuck to kill it, have cloud saves, are pioneering less wasteful, less power consuming arm devices for gamers, are advocating for right to repair with all their hardware. They are almost european.
It’s really not bizarre at all. You wanna know why game enthusiasts like valve? Take the list the other guy gave you and find a store that has close to half of the features steam offers. Add in great hardware support (my controller and my deck are some of the best experiences I’ve had), and a healthy dose of actually making Linux gaming viable for the average person, and it’s obvious AF why game enthusiasts like valve.
Even if they can’t count to 3.
They’re a monopoly because they’re the best in town and it isn’t close. Steam has a(n easily circumventable and long, long-beaten) DRM available, but it’s hardly the selling point of the platform nor a requirement. Steam provides automatic game updates, social and community help features, a built-in mod uploader/downloader, image hosting and a screenshot button, cloud saves, excellent network implementation (holy shit I do not miss the days of trying to get Gamespy and GFWL to let me connect to my friends), the Community Market and cross-game trading, built-in control remapping support, Twitch-style drops and giveaways from livestreams, recommendation features like Discovery Queue to find new and interesting titles, a community reviews and tags system that while imperfect is definitely the best I’ve seen thus far, an in-game overlay that has semi-recently gained some excellent features like game recording and the ability to pin a clock or notepad on top of the game, and one of the most recent updates reworked family sharing so that any five accounts can basically just merge their libraries and all play each other’s games at the same time, an extremely convenient feature that far and away beats out consoles’ digital sharing or traditional “pass the disc” borrowing.
Additionally, huge proponents of non-Windows gaming. Initially trying to do Mac ports, but moving onto perpetually pushing Linux as Apple continued to not care about gaming at all until like five minutes ago when they started paying Capcom and Ubisoft for ports.
Compared to other platforms, they have a lot of good features and generally act in the public interest.
In regards to their DRM system, honestly some people are going to add DRM to their games no matter what. I’d much rather they use Valve’s system than some insecure third party spyware.
People have also mentioned their 30% cut which honestly seems pretty normal for an online storefront. It’s especially fair when you consider the fact that they provide marketing, hosting and payment processing for you. Not to mention things like achievements, matchmaking and workshop support if you want it.
There’s also the fact that a lot of the anti-monopoly folks tend to be Linux and/or foss advocates, and Valve has been pumping a lot of resources into open source projects.
Honestly, in the Linux space, the only reason Valve has a monopoly is because the other players just aren’t making any effort to compete.
Tl;dr Valve uses their market position for good (in general) and Steam is a good product.
Steam not only profits wildly from underage gambling, but by being close to a monopoly. They take 30% from every game sold, which is more than they need. They can take that much due to their de-facto storefront existance.
Steam delivers amazing services, pcgaming would not be where it is without valve, but even with their radical work policies and good wages for their workers they still have quite a bit of problems.
I agree there are problems that could be fixed and need more publicity but they are far from evil.