Other people work at Valve other than Gabe. It’s entirely possible there’s others in the top management team.

Valve doesn’t have a management team.

Maybe they could transition to being a worker-owned collective when Gabe wants to retire. I’m not sure what else keeps Valve as we know it alive post Gabe.

Obviously other people work there, that doesn’t matter. What matters is who can make legal decisions about the company and I doubt that goes beyond Gabe. He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money. He’d make less in the long run if MS bought them out but that doesn’t mean the next person won’t take the payout.

We’ve needed real alternatives to valve for a long time for this exact reason. They’re already a monopoly. If they get bought out they’ll abuse their status even more than they already have.

He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money.

What makes you say this?

@TWeaK @rambaroo valve is currently fighting France for the right of consumers to share and resell games purchased on steam.

Not a surprising position for them to take, but yes that isn’t pro-consumer. I still don’t think that really backs up the statement “He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money.”

They’re already a monopoly

but they arent. there are plenty of other storefronts out there, albeit many being publisher owned. steam continues to succeed not because it has cornered the market like some monopolies, but because it is pro consumer and actually embraced by its target audience

What I don’t believe is that you know exactly what the situation is or the people involved and what their plans are.

But his son is now focused on his own business and it’s got nothing to do with gaming. Once Gabe is gone, I doubt Valve will remain privately owned and by the same people.

Ook

@WarmSoda @kadu it needs to be public domain or so that way anyone can get the rights to move forward with steam as the community demands it. An open source license will not go far enough.

You don’t either. So stop acting like you do.

When I act like I know you can say that to me.

Companies rise and die all the time. Let’s just hope when Valve dies, other (not shitty) company rises to replace it.

If Valve dies and I lose thousands of dollars in games, there won’t be another company for me, pure piracy until I die.

Its gonna happen.

Cause its already happened with other services, like Direct2Drive. Lost dozens of games from that being bought/sold/going under/rebranding whatever weird as fuck path its taken to be able to keep my money and not let me have any of the games I bought.

Digital Distribution is a plague, and most people refuse to look past the tip of their instant gratification to realize it.

I argue that digital is good as long as you make backups of your games.

I have an external drive full of steam games that steam can’t touch. So I’ll always have those games. Barring I lose the drive or don’t transfer the files before it becomes unreadable.

Another example where digital is good imo is the Switch. Those tiny game cards can suck my ass. If I drop one on my carpet it’ll be gone until next spring. Having multiple games saved on SD cards is the way to go.

Other than that, I agree.

You’re backups wont work if valve ceases to exist, since you need to be logged into a steam account, that owns the games, to restore the backups.

Same reason my D2D games ceased to work, cause D2D went away, along with their authentication servers.

That hasn’t been true for like ten years now.
Obviously anything that needs an internet connection will require steam. But pretty much almost all single player games do not need steam to run.

Oh we did look. Gabe’s promise was to give us warning and an unlock on all our games so it could run without steam. There might be a jam in the rush to download and backup everything.

I didn’t like digital distribution and have been burned by Stardock (for selling out to Gamestop) and then by Gamestop (for shutting down my account without cause or notice). But Steam is the least offensive of the DD offerings.

Then again I’ve never been wronged by Steam and others have. Others have, amd I understand Steam support can be ruthlessly cold.

I still have CD and DVD games I like with no DD alternative sources. (I’ll buy them from GOG when they’re on the cheap just for convenience.) Some of them have exceeded their official shelf lives, and would depend on finding a no-disc-check mod online.

In this age, we should be able to download a game from any archive and just keep our licenses. But our society and the game industry only gets more and more resentful of its customer base.

If Steam dies, I’ll likely just pirate relentlessly and only actually buy games whose dev teams I want to support. ( Terraria and DRG serve as good examples – games where lighting and mining are complex mechanics). And the industry will suffer every time a DD platforn enshittifies.

Valve did promise their customers will have a way to access their game if the company have to shutdown. But if the company got enshittified instead of dying, suck to the customers I guess.

I don’t know why people would trust Valve on that. They’ve blatantly lied a bunch of times yet for some reason people let them get away with it.

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