I love steam, but let’s get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
GabeN will not live forever. The vultures circle endlessly, and one day they will win. There is no good ending here (for now).
Consider building a tower, downloading everything youve purchased on steam, and keep it offline. Maybe have a 2nd set of hard drives as a backup. Put these priceless artifacts in your will.
Plan accordingly and enjoy the ride while it lasts.
I love steam, but let’s get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
Steam is an example where I’m not sure when it would happen.
It already comes with a hefty fee of 30% per sale on the platform. I don’t think they can raise that without serious backlash. And there also isn’t really a need, Steam prints money. It prints money because it’s where users are. Users are there because they like the features. Some good features are only there because of laws (e.g. refunding); Valve can’t remove these.
So how would you make the service even more profitable?
Enshittification happens because corporations want (more) money out of a service that built a userbase. These were often running at a loss. To turn a profit, they need to change.
Steam can sell you licenses to games you don’t own already. It’s up to each publisher. Valve doesn’t care, they just deliver.
They could add a fee to re-download games, a subscription requirement to use friend invites, start throwing spam notifications on your screen/in your email inbox about “sponsored content”, upload your browser history for better ad targeting, etc. the list gets pretty long pretty quickly. Just look at what the Epic store does right now (hint, it’s almost all of those things already).
The Epic “Store” barely qualifies as such, no wonder they’re trying to get at least something out of it
Think of it more like Netflix. Netflix was great, then the market fractured and Netflix enshitified in response.
What it would take here is for a publisher to become a real distributor in the space, but competition is weak right now. Just like it really took Disney wading in to disrupt Netflix, it would take someone equally large, like Microsoft, to disrupt Steam. Sorry Ubisoft, but you don’t cut it.
Publishers already tried this (EA, Ubisoft, etc) and it didn’t really work. They came back to Steam.
because they didnt learn, in order to make more profit per sale on your platform, you either:
make a platform consumer friendly enough that people are willing to use it (the part that is most important)
or
make a game thats “good enough” that people will use your platform as a service (e.g Riot)
EA and Ubisoft (mostly) failed at both, with both hanging on a thread (Apex for EA, R6S for Ubisoft)
That’s why I think it has to be someone who owns a bunch of publishers, like Microsoft. Like how Disney is not just Disney, but also Pixar, Marvel, ABC, ESPN, etc… It’s why people shit on Paramount+. There’s just nothing there worth watching.
Gun to my head I can’t be bothered using a Microsoft store if they were to make one lol. Hell Im not even sure how I managed to escape their os, lol.
Arrg matey!
I don’t play many AAA games but I’m forever gutted that the fight to make them able to be pirated is a losing battle. I want to pay for my indie games but on occasion I look online at the crack status of AAA games from oecen 2-3 years ago and they’re still not playable.
It creates a weird dichotomy where people who pirate or at least don’t buy expensive games don’t take part in the mainstream gaming conversation at all, which is totally different from the rest of pirated media.
Which AAA aren’t cracked?
The only two I can think of (that I’ve ever thought of playing but haven’t been able to pirate) are the newer Dragons Dogma and the recent Black Myth Wukong game but those arent from 2-3 years ago so I’m curious which ones you are thinking about.
The game I always think of checking out is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, just to find it hasn’t been cracked.
I know assassin’s creed is a bit of a crap franchise but I have a love / hate relationship with the game and think mirage looks made for me. Every few months since release I’ve looked up it’s crack status and not just has it not been cracked but generally the comments around it are that it’s from the new era of uncrackable games.
There is no such thing as an uncrackable game. It is “just” variable levels of hard-to-crack. And some peopl are not willing or able to put in so much work to do it.
I agree that no games are uncrackable in theory, but to my understanding (from about two years to two months ago at least), there were only two people able to crack new denuvo games due to how intensely complex the task is. One of those people only cracks football games and the other is EMPRESS, who from what I’ve seen glancing into the scene, is one crazy lady.
Although modern denuvo may technically be crackable, but while it’s so difficult that only a handful of people have the skill to do it and takes hundreds of hours of work per game, for all intents and purposes, it may as well be uncrackable.
That’s right. It’s a billion-bucks-industry against less than a handful people. Yet it’s still not uncrackable. There’s just nearly noone left to do it anymore so in the end they might win. And the legit customers loose even more, as we have to endure this ugly as fuck drm.
They will never go public so enshittification rules don’t necessarily apply
Never say never, but I don’t think it’s going to happen while Gabe is in charge
I doubt gabe would choose a successor that would make steam public either, though.
Maybe, maybe not. As equity holders get older they may be looking to cash out so they can fuel their retirements.
I don’t think that’s something Gabe is interested in, but we’re talking about what will happen when he dies.
Sure, but hopefully that’s a very long time away, and there’s always piracy. Hopefully Gabe lasts for another 20 years or longer. Hopefully he has a high-quality person as a successor.
Not gonna happen
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
Was valve ever good to begin with? Their main products is a useless proprietary software launcher and they make billions off abducting kids into gambling and selling their data.
I loathe their lootbox system but I’d say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I’d put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.
I don’t think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.
You don’t need a proprietary launcher to run software. A company who abduct kids into gambling to make more billions to me sound quite bad.
steam survey says 1.92% is on linux. So there’s about 736,651 linux users on steam?! neat
Many of those Steam Deck, I bet.
Bazzite on my desktop and a Steamdeck here!
https://partner.steamgames.com/ says there are 132 million monthly active Steam users, so that’s more like 2.5 million Linux users on Steam.
so cocurrent means monthly active?
Wild that the video game industry is so big, and this still isn’t even 1% of people on earth.
Also keep in mind this is peak concurrent players. I imagine the MAU is much higher, since most of the world doesn’t game at the same time.
This is just steam. It’s estimated that about 3 billion people regularly play video games.
Sure, but 38,000,000 x $60 = $2,280,000,000. And that’s if they all spend only $60/year, and only on Steam, and the average I’m sure is much higher.
Wei need to tech bro take over whatever industry actually gets to all 7 blnIt’s not counting yearly users either, it’s concurrent players
Yeah. That was just an example. If ~35 million users bought one game a year, you get that number. Of course the actual number is much larger.
huh, what dropped in 2020 that caused that big spike?
COVID-19. 😏
Damn, you reply quick. yep, I realized the instant i asked and felt stupid, eheh.
Don’t delete your comment for asking a legit question! Others might be ignorant as well and benefit from the Q&A.
basically yeah, covid-19 ontop of console shortage and people getting more free time/unemployment checks boosted the PC space a lot.
Gaben behind Covid-19 confirmed?
I remember when 9 million was a lot.
I remember when 1 million was a lot.
To think that we have lived so long.
It’s still crazy to me that this is the same program I used to browse CS zombie mod servers. There was no real store to speak of then.
All of them playing that KFC dating Sim
Cant believe this actually exist xd https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colonel_Sanders_A_Finger_Lickin_Good_Dating_Simulator/
Still wild to me how competition shoots themselves in the foot. It’s even worse than streaming services.
At this point, there’s nothing anybody can do to compete with Steam. GOG exists, and despite their awesome raison d’etre, their launcher UI is crap. Epic is probably the closest thing to a competitor, and even its nonstop free game offerings (mostly unheard of indies now) isn’t enough to get me to switch. Also, it’s UI is crap and the launcher itself is really unstable (constantly refreshes your library and sends you back to the top). The time to launch a competitor was in 2005, when Steam wasn’t that good yet.
I would say gog is probably closer than epic. Its actually managed to still be a thing despite steam being op as f in every way possible. And the last time i used it it was decently competent launcher compared to epic which was a travesty.
Believe in Gabe 👁️ 👃 👁️
I honestly thought the number of concurrent users was a lot higher a lot longer ago, but either way, it’s come a long way since ~2003?
38 million only? I thought there were way more gamers out there. Isn’t it a market bigger than TV and cinema combined? (maybe even sports included?)
These are concurrent users, i.e. the number of players all playing at one time. The total number of Steam users is WAY higher.
I wonder how many millions they need to be inspired to update their platform so it doesn’t need a regular outage every Tuesday.
Fuck this platform.
Fuck mandatory DRM.
Fuck the garbage runtime that takes minutes to start every time I wanna play a goddamn single player game.
Fuck mandatory updates every time I want to play a goddamn single player game.
Fuck popup advertisements for events that reappear year by year no matter how many times I’ve disabled them
This platform prevents you from owning anything…
I don’t know how anyone could support this garbage.
Steam forces games to have DRM?
I guess i didnt notice the DRM of the games installed from steam that i was able to play without steam installed
I assume it does force DRM. I can’t play Terraria, skyrim, elder ring, etc. without it. I have not encountered one release which I can play without the runtime.
Terraria in particular shouldn’t use it unless it was forced to do so based off the fact that they’re available on gog which mandates games be drm free.
I’m not even allowed to run that game without updating it if it’s out of date. I literally can’t play a modded game because it may be rendered unplayable at any moment by the publisher. Makes the whole workshop people talk up all but useless.
As far as i know, terraria has DRM because it uses steam features(for multiplayer)
Celeste and stardew valley dont have DRM so its not forced
Terraria does not rely on steam features in order to engage with its core functionality. Perhaps you are trying to imply that the error is in the developers having integrated their publishers features into their release in such a way that a hard dependency on the runtime is formed when it shouldn’t be.
This is not a valid argument because whatever calls terraria is making to the runtime should have a fallback in place for when the runtime is not being used. That fallback should be implemented by a small dummy runtime or something. It shouldn’t be on the devs to ensure their single player game works when the publisher’s adware bloated garbage runtime stops working.
I am not saying that its the fault of the developers for implementing multiplayer, i am just saying that, from my experience, the DRM is related to games using steam for multiplayer
I also agree that the game should still be able to be played if you dont use he multiplayer
I am saying that steam doesnt force games to use DRM
afaik, steam drm is optional and its the devs decision to use it or not. thats why there is actually a list of games that are hosted on steam without DRM.
So you ranted without knowing shit.
Steam has it’s downsides,but none of your points are valid once you take a closer look.
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Steam does not force it’s DRM on developers (and there are various publishers that use a different or no DRM)
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I have no idea what your problem is with your runtime,but at least for me/my household there is literally no loading times for steam anymore. Have you considered that this might be a problem your device is creating,e.g. due to a slow drive?
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Updating is indeed a pain in the arse (but can be circumvented)
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I don’t know what you do to your client that you get the popups - I disabled them once and never got them again.
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You never own a game unless you buy the holder of the IP. Read your TOS. You buy a licence to use a software and to obtain the necessary data to use it. Nothing more. Even when you buy a hardcopy in a shop you don’t own the software.
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GOG has no requirement of games to be DRM free and there absolutely are games that are DRM protected on GOG - and publishers can choose which DRM to use when so it’s their decision anyway.
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You can downgrade games in the setting as long as the publisher (!) allows/support it. It is done by a lot of games.
Don’t get me wrong,there are a lot of things wrong with Steam. The monopoly it created, it’s child protection issues, it’s pricing towards developers(especially small ones), the fact that while at least in the EU you can now legally sell the account as such it still prohibits selling singlular usage licences, the fact that it is does harbour extremists and on the other hand willing censors itself to reach some markets are all major issues.
But the ones you mentioned aren’t and it waters down the actual problems.
You never own a game unless you buy the holder of the IP. Read your TOS. You buy a licence to use a software and to obtain the necessary data to use it. Nothing more. Even when you buy a hardcopy in a shop you don’t own the software.
If you own a physical cartridge/disk on an old console, you own permanently playable physical copies of the games. No publisher is able to stop you from playing it. It is a permanently usable piece of tangible property which you legally own. This is what people talk about when they say they “own” games. IDGAF if the GoG ToS says I don’t “own” a game if they have no ability to revoke my ability to play it once I’ve downloaded it. It’s as playable as any physical game, for as long as I keep my hard disks intact. This is what it means to “own” a non -service based game, by any sensible definition of the word.
No one here claimed you become, or deserve to become the IP holder of the software. This is just a strawman that you made up because the idea of someone not making the same idiotic purchasing decisions as you personally offends you.
You can downgrade games in the setting as long as the publisher (!) allows/support it. It is done by a lot of games.
Publishers should not be able to deny you the right to modify the software you downloaded after you downloaded it. If they have a different opinion on the matter then I won’t be a consumer of their services.
It’s all just Stockholm syndrome and copium for you. Maybe one day in your 40s steam will decide to bleed you dry for everything you think your library is worth. They’ll force you to pay a subscription fee just to access single player games purchased many years ago.
And you’ll be able to do nothing about it, because you never own a game unless you buy the holder of the IP. Read your TOS. You buy a licence to use a software and to obtain the necessary data to use it. Nothing more.
Keep defending your abuser though I guess.
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If like you say Steam is only garbage, make a list of good alternative.
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Epic Game (worst)
- Launcher -> horrible and worst than Steam. Actually you can use heroic games launcher (less problems)
- Store -> really bad
- DRM
- Need update to play game
- Only Windows / Mac (i don’t care about mobile for the small amount of game)
- Not version for Linux and Tim Sweeney not like Linux and say a big amount of stupidity.
- Doesn’t have all the tools and feature for dev like Steam
- No Workshop alternative
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Gog (need more game and feature)
- Gog galaxy (latest test in 2022) -> good launcher but no Linux version
- Games for Windows, Linux, Mac
- Not all game can be found here because it’s only DRM free game
- Doesn’t have all the tools and feature for dev like Steam
- No Workshop alternative
From what i can see, Steam is not perfect but it’s better than Epic for sure, and have more feature and game than Gog. I don’t include itch because for me it’s not a gaming store.
If anyone have another store, or want to correct anything.
What about… Physical media? Like, ordering a dvd from amazon with your game on it that you then play on a machine that’s not even connected to the Internet?
I see some problem with physical media :
- Storage: ~100Go (Blu-ray), ~5Go on DVD
- For all the non opti game who take more than 100Go of space ? Multiple DVD/Blu-ray ?
- Update: actually if a game need a update how to do this ?
- Download a zip file to apply the patch ? Possibility to directly write the patch on the DVD/Blu-ray for future install ?
If we use DVD/Blu-ray we need a player to install the game (I really prefer to have one on my computer/laptop than nothing, but it’s not how things work now 😭).
I totally prefer the physical media, but it’s not perfect. To have something easy for consumer, the game industry need to do some change like : opti the game size, find a good method to update the game, and no DRM on the physical media.
For all the non opti game who take more than 100Go of space ? Multiple DVD/Blu-ray ?
Yes. That’s how it was done before, no reason to not do this now. Wing Commander 4 came on 6 CDs. As you progressed through the game, you kept advancing through them.
Update: actually if a game need a update how to do this ? Download a zip file to apply the patch ? Possibility to directly write the patch on the DVD/Blu-ray for future install ?
As Blu Rays are read only, you obviously can’t apply the patch there. The patches were always downloaded and applied to the game parts you had on your hard drive. What was wrong with that?
If we use DVD/Blu-ray we need a player to install the game
You need a device to read physical media to actually read physical media, yes.
it’s not how things work now
It’s not how things work because games that came on physical media had literally no advantage anymore at some point. With physical media just being used to speed up the first install in your always-online environment and bandwidth being no longer an issue, they just became obsolete. If I could have played half life 2 without steam using my disc, it would have been worth keeping. With the box being essentially just a bulky envelope for a product key, it turned out to be just a hassle.
At some point, steam will enshittify or shut down. That’s when we will realize that online only distribution might not have been such a great idea.
As Blu Rays are read only, you obviously can’t apply the patch there. The patches were always downloaded and applied to the game parts you had on your hard drive. What was wrong with that?
You need a “launcher” just to download update, and it’s not the most ideal for me. I prefer to have nothing between the button play (or click on the executable), and the game launch.
At some point, steam will enshittify or shut down. That’s when we will realize that online only distribution might not have been such a great idea.
I agree with you, only online is totally stupid because the moment the service shutdown you lose everything. This is why GOG is good, because after buying a game, I can create backup on external disk. The only biggest problem for me is they don’t have a good Linux integration for GOG Galaxy 2.
This is not perfect, but it’s a better start than nothing. And it’s difficult to do this because of DRM on other store.
You need a “launcher” just to download update, and it’s not the most ideal for me. I prefer to have nothing between the button play (or click on the executable), and the game launch.
What’s wrong with just downloading a patch and pointing it to the directory the game was installed in?
What’s wrong with just downloading a patch and pointing it to the directory the game was installed in?
Nothing, but you can be sure that’s not how it’s going to work. A simple example with Steam and certain games: you have one launcher with Steam, but you have another launcher between the game and Steam, and I don’t see why that’s necessary.
But the way you want to do it requires a bit more work, but nothing too complicated, and more and more people want something simple and easy to use, which is not the case with your proposal because they have to do more steps to be able to play.
But you actually can backup your steam games on a external drive.
Yes, but you can’t launch the game without Steam (I think some game can be start without Steam but I’m not sure). And i prefer to own my game, and the possibility to change how i launch the game (with or without the launcher).
- Storage: ~100Go (Blu-ray), ~5Go on DVD
I remember the physical media PC game days. At the end, the games had horrible copy protection/DRM. I remember not having an internet connection for a while and I went to buy a game that I could play. All the games on the shelf had a notice on the box that said “internet connection required”. Single player games needed to be activated, and if you ran out of activations you either had to contact the company to reset it or you were shit outta luck. I far prefer the combination of Steam and GoG.
I remember the physical media PC game days before those days when CDs had a copy protection that barely worked and nothing else. I got a game, headed home, installed it and played the whole afternoon without being online once.
That’s true, but those days are long behind us. Now, games are released in an unfinished state and require, at the very least, a day-one patch for any hope of a non-buggy experience. It’s sad affairs everywhere in all aspects of the industry.
Gog could use more games but if it’s between using a platform that forces you to use a runtime and nothing at all, I’d much rather play nothing at all.
I don’t want Gog to change in order to have more games in its store. In fact, I have a lot of games on Steam because of the simplicity on Linux and I don’t want Gog to become like Steam, I want a DRM-free alternative.
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Found Tim Sweeney.
