Comment by keyringlight
4 hours ago
An ongoing 'background noise' concern I've had for a while is how PC gaming seems to be centralizing around steam. There's reasons why that happened, but it'd be real nice if 'infrastructure' was able to decouple from their store. It feels like practically requiring steam for PC gaming on windows and certainly on linux isn't a mile away from requiring MS windows, is it much freedom to pick which Seattle based company you run software from?
I don't think there's NO reason to be concerned, but I think it's pretty different considering the decades of history of how Valve acts vs how M$FT acts. Also, many games available on Steam are DRM free or available from other sources and Proton itself is open source.
Valve is also not publicly traded and they have a succession plan of some sort in the event that gaben kicks it, I can only assume whatever he's come up with is sound, he's done a great job of running the place so far.
> There's reasons why that happened
Steam's near-monopoly was earned by simply being the best store. Other stores like Epic don't even include basic features like a shopping cart to buy multiple games at once.
I could go on and on about why Steam is so much better than any other store, but this isn't the place.
That said, I can understand being nervous. Steam is great because it's privately owned and GabeN is happy with the money he makes from it and doesn't feel the need to enshittify it in order to get more money. But eventually he will die or retire, and someone else will be given control. Supposedly, he's already vetted some people to take the job, but what's to say they weren't merely playing the part and will take it public as soon as they can?
The built in Steam DRM is very weak. Of course that can change at any time, but at least the current catalog of Steam DRM-only games are not really tied down to steam except via law/licensing.
There are plenty of competing stores, they just aren't good. I require a game to be on steam because I like the store and features, but many games are also sold elsewhere.