That has to be one of the dumbest articles I’ve read in a while.
While I personally use Steam very rarely (I prefer to use DRM-free versions of games), Steam has done very little to be considered on its way towards enshittification.
The macos situation is completely irrelevant because at this point its market share on steam is lower than linux and it makes no sense for them to invest only to be constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms. My guess is it will be dropped within the next 3-5 years.
The author points out the deprecation of Steam on older platforms, but fails to mention the fact that this wasn’t always their choice, for instance the recent drop of Windows 7 support was caused by the fact that there’s an embedded chromium browser in it and google dropped support for Windows 7 around that time. A similar situation happened for Windows XP, which was dropped in 2019, a full FIVE years after Microsoft dropped support for it, and at this time Steam on XP was only used for retrogaming, it made no sense to keep supporting it, there are better ways to get old games on XP.
There’s barely a mention of all the good things that Valve has done for Linux gaming, but the article complains about Steam being 32 bit (which is still a requirement for wine to run, at least until the new wow64 mode becomes stable, and steam comes with its steam runtime specifically to avoid distro compatibility issues); they could have made proton only work with steam, they could have made their dxvk and vkd3d forks proprietary like nvidia did, but instead it’s all open source and very easy to build on all platforms and I use my own fork every day to play games without steam. Heck, there are even competitors for the steam deck that run proton.
Also, can we mention the fact that Steam has not turned into yet another subscription service like some of its competitors?
If I had to point at something that Steam absolutely did wrong, I’d say it’s allowing third party DRMs on the store, it’s a consistent source of issues, especially for old games. I understand that when they made the choice we didn’t have cancer like kernel level anticheat and denuvo, but still, Steam launching a launcher launching another launcher that launches the game is a trashy gaming experience and adds points of failure as we’ve already seen several times when big titles launch and their DRM servers go down, or when games get old and the DRM servers are shut down permanently.
While I’m sure Steam will eventually become enshittified, I don’t see that happening any time soon, maybe after Gabe retires, and that’s why you should keep a collection of DRM free games on your drives and not rely solely on Steam and other stores.
Just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree.
I disagree because the biggest they did and continue to do is loot boxes. I argue that it was Valve that popularized that business model with CSGO and it is the most predatory shit that has ever entered the gaming sphere. It’s a complete cancer and Valves implementation is amongst the worst there is because of their market giving the items easily accessible real money value. This makes it not just like gambling in my extremely firm opinion, it makes it actual gambling. They’re also double dipping with the community market since it also takes a cut from aforementioned gambling. How Valve has escaped the vast majority of loot box hate is completely beyond me. And how they’ve managed to so far avoid a world wide crackdown on the unregulated gambling is also to me mind boggling. I despise Valve for this to the very core of my being because I know first hand how easily that shit can ruin lives and I know people that have got hooked and fucked up their life big time from CS skins. Left at the altar fucked up levels.
Ok, I had no idea they were the first to do that lootbox shite, I’m not into multiplayer games. That could be considered worse than allowing third party DRMs, since it pretty much introduced kids to gambling.
I am also always immensely confused how gamers don’t see valve taking 30% of pc sales and not recognize that as greedy shit bag behavior.
We all know when google or apple does it on their app store its bad, or when spotify pays artists pennies its bad, or when actors are striking because of its shady residuals payout from streaming its bad. But when king gaben does it, its fine perfectly ok. Even though game devs are some of the most overworked and underpaid workers in tech. And then people wonder why games suck lately.
I personally don’t have an issue with Google or Apple doing it. Even GOG does it. And given the state of other launchers it seems more expenses may be necessary than thought to make an ecosystem that is feature rich, pay their employees well, and branch out into other ventures that might not pan out for a long time.
And when it comes to places like Steam or Android it’s not in a locked ecosystems either like Apple, so people aren’t locked to one store like with the PS5 or Nintendo Switch. But, yeah it could be lower, but it just one part of a larger issue.
It’s about more than just taking a 30% cut of sales. Everyone agrees that it’s a high price. So what else might the potential competition do that make them stand out as worse than Valve?
Also, overworked and underpaid Devs are a different matter. You have look at their Publishers about that. I believe Valves Devs are quite well paid and far from overburdened.
If you generalize enough, everything is a ticking time bomb. Some may have a low amount ticks left (lifespan or a hamster) and some quite big (lifespan of the Sun).
Entropy is non negotiable.
1980 console rom games should last as long as we have silicon technology.
Anything on steam is probably not going to make it to 2050.
The article in no way describes any actions taken by Valve that leads me to believe there is any impending enshittification. They simply have made decisions, a lot of which they have stuck with for many years.
Enshittification has to do with bait and switch, effectively. It’s luring customers into a false sense of loyalty and then abusing that to their financial gain (see: Reddit and Spez from 2023).
The article basically says “there are some decisions by Valve I like, and some I don’t.” That in no way provides any path toward some bomb going off. Perhaps time will prove the author right, of course, because any company can easily decide to screw over their customers, but the article is click-bait and completely speculative as to what may happen.
And due to all of the above, I think the bomb is about to go off where elephants will fly out of my refrigerator and steal my soda.
I don’t know why the article doesn’t bring up Valve being the company to bring loot boxes and that business model to gaming as the prime example. Valve earns extreme money from the skins market and gambling in CSGO / CS2 since they sell the keys and take a cut of trades as well. They’re far more concerned with money than actually caring for the people involved. Gambling ruins lives and Valve is the gambling company that faces by far the least vitriol in that horrendous crowd.
Probably because Valve doesn’t make games anymore. Not on any serious level anyway.
Most of their games are old as hell, and most of them where in the “proof of concept” relm. They only really made games to push the technology they were working with.
It’d be a poor argument to bring up their old catalog of games from 20 years ago as something that made them a worse company today.
Lemmy has gotten to the point everything is getting classed as enshittification or whatever
It’s actually getting crappy being here
Like the whole section about macos. Apple constantly screws developers, and somehow, the author has seemed to blame Valve lol. There’s a lot of reason lots of people don’t develop for Mac, and they’re mostly valid rather than political
Or GitHub. In the real world, developers don’t have any issues. Only in Lemmy, where people are even focusing on stupid things, so a barely visible unobtrusive sentence on a table mentions copilot lol
Lol at the last section of the article. Valve is actually bad guys! Just trust me!
Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.
Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full ‘enshittification’ of Steam will commence.
You forgot the Mac
Lol, fuck Mac. If Apple cared about gaming, they wouldn’t have created Metal and collaborated on Vulkan. Fuck them. Valve went with Linux because they can change it to fit their needs. Can’t do that with Apple.
Microsoft is only supported by Valve because it has large marketshare and can’t be ignored, but it’s clear that Valve is doing everything possible to get away from them: see Steam Deck.
In general, I agree with Steam wielding too much power and if they abused it, I’d be out. I have my gaming hours and can live without gaming no problem. They wouldn’t get any more money from me as soon as they enshittified.
What would get me away from steam is an opensource gaming store with games that have no DRM and are predominantly opensource. Or another gaming store that worked on Linux and allowed playing games with my other linux buddies.
Get us that and I’m out.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Have you considered gog? They may not be betting heavily on Linux or have as a big of a selection but their games are DRM free. You can even install gog Galaxy, a game manager similar to Steam.
Doesn’t seem like GOG galaxy is for linux
GOG GALAXY 2.0 Open Beta is available for Windows and Mac. Please download the installer on your PC.
That’s a disappointment, but Heroic Launcher is. I’ll give it a shot and see if there are new games on there for me. The name “Good Old Games” gave me the impression it was for stuff like boomer shooters or side-scrollers and stuff.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
Heroic works really well. I’ve just installed it myself recently, motivated mostly by a desire to finally play the free games I got off Epic. I’ve only installed two EGS games so far - Civ 6 and Guardians of the Galaxy - but they’re working perfectly, running via proton.
The experience is so good I was actually inspired to buy my first game outside of steam in years, namely Wartales which I just bought yesterday on GOG. Installation is a breeze, it runs under proton, and as far as I can tell it is running perfectly.
I sort of prefer Heroic to Steam in fact, because it starts almost immediately - no waiting around for 30 seconds while it tries to connect to the Steam network etc
