Comment by tombert
2 days ago
Oh I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in which to do so isn’t inherently bad.
That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.
Valve's DRM is trivially bypassed. It's just there so that the checkbox 'has DRM' is ticked.
You can also publish games on Steam without DRM, as in, you can then just copy the game files and run them anywhere. Most don't because it's extra work and because it's hard to explain to your boss why you should untick that checkbox, while consumers who care mostly go to GOG anyway.
That kind of logic is exactly how morals get eroded and all bad practices get excused with "it's just business".
Blame the bosses for wanting DRM rather than Valve for making it a default. Blame lawmakers for not regulating DRM out of existence. Valve's playing the game while still being the most consumer friendly option on most fronts, and a solid second place in everything else. Credit where credit's due.
If Steam didn't have nominal DRM, I'd imagine they wouldn't have been able to grow to the point they're at now, and we'd instead have many stores each with their own exclusives, but most of them have worse terms than Steam. That world is worse than the one we have now.
And if you really care, there's always GOG, or the skull and crossbones.