Comment by lazyfanatic42
3 months ago
Valve respects its customers. It is so insane that this isn't a norm; what a world we would be in if all companies did so.
3 months ago
Valve respects its customers. It is so insane that this isn't a norm; what a world we would be in if all companies did so.
Gabe is literally practising Noblesse Oblige, which is really funny but really shows that our billionare society is really just a reduction to old aristocracy. He's just the good Duke, whereas most Dukes are horrible, horrible people.
Noblesse oblige exists because of a moral economy. You can be a horrible Duke, because there's no real reward for being the good one.
This is not that - Steam has to compete on the free market, there is a reward for making the product everyone else refuses to make. In a post-Deck world, it's hard to believe that moral obligation plays a bigger role than the overall hatred of Windows for seamless gaming experiences.
Well the complements of steam are the OS and hardware. So commoditizing them increases sales.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
"A complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. And babysitters are a complement of dinner at fine restaurants."
> Noblesse oblige exists because
... the plebs know what is good for them. Horrible Dukes get horses wanting nails.
>He's just the good Duke
The Gaben house is building a secret army, using a technique unknown to us; a technique involving steam.
Gamers are a passionate bunch. Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won. And also because a lot of their competitors fucked up to pave the road for them (Think Sony's PS fiasco, Microsoft's X-Box clusterfuck from which they're yet to recover from, a decade later). Valve has gotten alot of billion dollar lessons in here that Valve got for free.
> Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won.
What universe do you live in?
- Broken games still pre-ordered
- marginal updates sold at full price
- double/triple-dipping with microtransactions and battle passes
- DRM still [predominant and still hurts performance
- every publisher with more than one game has their own launcher (usually shitty and brings no value)
- rootkit as anti-cheat
- offline game that require online connectivety
- online services get shutdown
- LAN multiplayer is a thing of a past
What did games exactly won?
- Paid skyrim mods? It's back.
- MS game sharing thing that rendered GameStop business model useless? IMO a mistake, MS was onto something there.
> every publisher with more than one game has their own launcher (usually shitty and brings no value)
I view this as a positive -- it's not feasible to maintain a build for every game and storefront's DRM/auth (unless you go DRM-free, which is the ideal but not something publishers and developers do on release). A launcher is the layer that sits between -- the games are written to auth against a launcher, and the launcher has builds for each storefront.
Otherwise you're just further entrenching Steam as the de facto monopoly on sales.
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> - Broken games still pre-ordered
Only because new population enters the market.
I pre-ordered a game once. F1 2010. Since then, I have *never* pre-ordered anything.
I also opted out from any game that required a rootkit to play.
LAN gameplay is still a thing in the simracing world.
Again, this only continues because of new players. Any burned player will not fall for the same trick twice.
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> . Screwing around with them is a losing game that no one has historically ever won
DRM is everywhere so gamers have clearly lost
The PlayStation seems pretty successful, not sure what "PS fiasco" you're referring to. The stock price is doing fine, at any rate
Possibly the ps3? They did eventually recover but the early years were rough
We live in the live service microtransaction era. Gamers have proven as resolute as wet tissue.
Don't sugarcoat it. Valve has to make sure this is advertised as a PC to keep the licensing good on the games you've bought and that they are allowed to sell. Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony have closed ecosystems with their consoles. Well, Microsoft seems to be throwing in the towel on consoles.
> keep the licensing good
That’s an imaginary issue.
Didn't Xbox pivot to be an entertainment system a couple generations ago and flop compared to PlayStation?
It probably didn't help that they removed all of those features over time.
You mean compared to the PS3, one of the strong points of which was also having a Blu-Ray drive ?
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> Well, Microsoft seems to be throwing in the towel on consoles.
Can you expand on this? I'm not a massive gamer, I thought xbox was doing well?
>I thought xbox was doing well?
Microsoft lost the console wars. Their new generation (Series S & X) sold almost 1/4 of what PS5 did because they basically don't have any exclusive game that you can only play in their hardware. Microsoft invested heavily in their Gamepass subscription (that has more than 35 million users) and they believe that the future is on PC. The newest xbox hardware, a handheld made by Asus, is a PC running windows. The next generation of xbox hardware that will compete with the PS6 will also very likely be a PC. The xbox console is dead.
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Also they state that the console will remain the centerpiece, they want to make Xbox a "platform" to reuse their own term. It becomes an ecosystem rather than a hardware product. They idea is that as long as you have a gamepass, you can play on whatever you want - except macOS and Linux...
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Halo was announced for PS5 recently
> I thought xbox was doing well?
It very much isn’t.
If only they had a game company like Bethesda or Actision. /S
This could be restated as: open systems mean you don't need a tangled web of partnerships to provide content, and Valve is taking advantage of this.
But it is also a PC, so I don't see the issue even if this were true. It's just a box running an Arch Linux flavour.
>> Valve respects its customers.
That's the same Valve that doesn't let me play the games I paid it for unless they are running on its platform? That's how it "respects" me?
To be fair there are a lot of games on Steam that don't have DRM, which means you can just drag them out of the steamapps folder to a computer that doesn't have Steam and they work fine. The decision to add DRM comes from the developer/publisher, not Valve.
Name a game distribution platform that doesn't do this. It will be a toy example like a zip file purchased off of itch.io or something.
GOG is hardly a toy and is the platform I look to purchase tons of games on instead of Steam (which I really like) and definitely over Epic (which I've never even installed)
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I think that's the point. The GP post basically said, "Gamers can't be messed with." A child post gave a ton of examples of how gamers are messed with, and this comment helps cement that. It does beg the question as to why Steam isn't as evil as it could be but does choose to be as evil as they are. To me (a very casual gamer) they do seem like the least evil.
Also don't knock those zip files purchased off of itch.io. Sometimes it's good to visit a cottage industry to see what's passing under the radar of the big guys.
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>> Name a game distribution platform that doesn't do this.
Why? If another platform also disrespects me, does that mean Steam doesn't disrespect me?
https://www.gog.com/ Is the largest one
Humble Bundle
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I think that's more a situation where publishers demand some form of DRM so steam is trying to provide a default solution that most publishers are happy with.
DRM is optional on Steam and up to the game developer.
> That's the same Valve that doesn't let me play the games I paid it for unless they are running on its platform?
What exactly does that mean, for you?
It's just something to whine about, more than anything.
Were you not aware of that before you purchased the game? How has this negatively impacted you?
Because they're not owned by private equity/publicly traded. If that ever happens the "let's squeeze this for every dime it's worth" will happen.
That's really the saddest thing about capitalism, if everything around us wasn't getting enshittified in the exact same way at least the future would be more alluring.
It is nice to see people bucking the trend getting rewarded, I see a bright future for an open ecosystem for gaming (even ignoring the Steam announcements).
DRM is the publishers choice, worth noting.
Except that you don't own the things you buy on steam
That is true for all media purchases since the invention of copyright in 1662.
You think you own the Silmarillion because you have a paper copy? Hah! No, you have a transferrable license to read it.
Every hard copy movie you have starts with a big green FBI warning reminding you that having that disc does not means you own the movie, it means you have a transferrable license to play it for yourself and small groups on small screens.
Digital media with DRM allow content distributors to remove the "transferrable" part of the license if they want, which often allows them to sell for cheaper since they know that each sale represents only one person recieving the experience. The license comes with less rights (no transferrance), so it can be priced lower.
This is true. But it doesn't matter to me.
Most media for me is a one and done. A book, a movie, a computer game. Granted a computer games version of "done" might mean "played on and off for a year".
There are exceptions to this - books I read again, shows I'd watch again, but games seem to age poorly by comparison. Original Syndicate or Deus Ex - while playable - is not what I remember it to be and I'd rather keep the nostalgic memories than shatter them with a replay.
This rarity of exceptions means that I wouldn't lose much if my Steam account disappeared - mainly just "whatever I'm playing now". Create a new account and go again, or buy off GOG or something.
However in return for using Steam I get a lot of convenience - updates, propogated save files, easy chat and "Right click -> Join Game" with friends. That "Right click -> Join Game" is almost worth it on it's own for ease of social gaming.
Most people consume like this, but some like the warm fuzzies that hoarding gives them.
I would like to see change there for sure. That said, DRM is optional for publishers on Steam. Once you've downloaded a game without DRM (steam's or otherwise) you can back it up and play it without Steam.
This is true for all digital purchases, video games or otherwise.
There is no such thing as "owning" a game unless you're the company that developed the game (or bought the company that did).