Can you imagine Battle.net beating Steam, then the primary online digital distribution platform ending up being owned by Activision?
I get the icks just thinking about it.
The worst part is it’s not that far fetched, we’re actually pretty lucky that valve isn’t massively predatory and we didn’t end up with bobby kotick instead of gaben
The reason Valve is not massively predatory is because they aren’t publicly traded and remain a private company.
This is true, but it’s not the only factor. Staying private allows a company to not be predatory, but it definitely does not guarantee it - it simply allows the executives to choose. It’s the combination of Valve being private and Gaben always staying true to his values despite his incredible wealth that gave us Steam in its current form.
I’ve known plenty of private companies that were as shitty as a public one, or more. Quality executives are vanishingly rare, particularly at this level of company value.
The entire gambling lootboxes were massively popularized by Valve, turning Team Fortress 2 from pay2play to predatory gambling.
… and they could put an end to the black market for skins and the gambling at anytime, but refuse to do so. This would get rid of the account stealing mostly too.
Not to mention that Valve had to be forced to follow consumer laws in some countries by expensive lawsuits.
It was also Valve who started the “you do not own your games” shite, by forcing the connection of licences to an account and a gaming client, which got rid of the ability to resell your games or to have at least the game’s installer offline available.
I’ll never get why Valve always gets a pass. Would it be worse if Steam was owned by Epic / Tencent / Activision …, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it great.
If someone want to give praise I would point to GOG. Not perfect but at least I own my licence to the point that I can install my games from an installer I have archived on my HDD (no deleting the game, no forced updates, no adding MTX at a later time, no taking away licenced music), I can go to earlier versions of Early Access games if they change it for the worse and more.
And valve tried to push the paid mods shit, too bad people forget too quickly. Not saying valve is straight up bad, but they aren’t your friends either
I guess because I never played TF2 back then my experience of games having predatory gambling mechanics was mobile games with the f2p and low costs pushing towards different ways to monetize. Seemed inevitable once mobile gaming exploded and makes up a larger portion of revenue than PC and console gaming making other companies want to copy it.
Battlenet brought some really clever innovations back in the day!
If it was 2010 and you had both running, battlenet was clearly superior.
Battlenet’s UI and presentation looked great. Automatic patches, lots of settings to where files should go, info about the game. They also had this sweet feature where you can play when it has the core files, and it continues to download in the background, which still doesn’t exist in non-battlenet games.
Really though, 2010 was also when Blizzard started to fall apart too. Constant churning of WoW expansions, deciding to split StarCraft 2 into three games, and making Diablo 3 look “prettier” was all bad signs.
Wow, we dodged a bullet there I guess
Blizzard was well liked before they joined Activision
And people would fanboy it just the same as Steam
Yup, it’s a good reminder that Steam can change direction at any point as well.
That can always happen, therefore I hate all locked in services, even if they are good at this moment. But so far it looks like steam is still interested in long-term goal, they didn’t go public yet after all.
Valve asked several companies to build something like Steam, was turned down every time and decided to do it themselves.
Thank god for that. There might be scummier companies than Blizzard out there, but I wholeheartedly believe the only reason that Blizzard aren’t on the same level of scum as Nestle and BP Oil is because they make games, and there are only limited opportunities to sell human lives to authoritarian regimes when you just make games.
I remember reading a very long (but fascinating) 11 part series of posts a couple of years ago on reddit about scummy stupid Blizzard. Here it is, if anyone still cares.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/
