Steam is still basically the only option AND they are actually helping Linux a lot with game compatibility. Altough, if I need games specifically on steam I’ll be buying the key from Greenmangaming (UK) or GamersGate (Sweden). If anybody has more alternatives feel free to let me know so I can add them to my list.
GOG sadly misses a majority of games atm so I just can’t replace steam with it yet.
I’m quite fond of Fanatical. They are based in the UK and also sometimes sell DRM free books/audiobooks
Ohh I’ve actually been on their website sometime. Good to know they’re UK based thanks!
Update:
What’s that?
My purchase on fanatical
Third party key market places are kinda iffy, and there have been numerous cases of the keys being offered on there having been bought with stolen credit cards, or otherwise generated in ways that aren’t quite above board.
I remember one interview with an indy dev in which they said they prefer people pirating, because chargebacks from stolen cards are actively costing them money.
For people who feel they need the entertainment games provide, but can’t afford current prices, I feel pirating games from conglomerates, and buying from smaller studios and indies is the most socially responsible way to do it, but I’m not your mum.
Edit: Huh, looks like greenmangaming gets their keys directly from the publishers. Didn’t know that was a thing. Guess I was a bit quick on the trigger there, should have checked first. Sorry about that.
G2A is probably the big example of Devs prefering you pirate instead of buying.
Only use G2A if you actively wish harm on the company making the game.
Don’t use G2A even if you wish harm on the company making the game, it’s still supporting scammers and thieves, just pirate the game.
See you already found the reason it is ok, but yeah what you are saying is completely right when talking about sites like G2A, Kinguin, etc where YOU can sell your keys as that opens the gates for illegal stuff
Hence I mentioned legit resellers (from the EU) that do support the publishers.
I don’t believe gog will ever have a full library. They require all their games to be DRM free. Until corporate gaming changes GOG won’t.
ive seen that gog is incredibly picky with what games are allowed on its platform too, which doesn’t help
iirc they refused Balatro, and initially even refused Undertale for being too low quality, before changing their minds when they saw the absolute phenomenon that game had become
(I got this from hearsay tho so don’t take it as a fact)
There ought to more indie outlets like itch.io, preferably non-American, and maybe if GOG had a similar site for just free or low cost indie games, that’d help bring upcoming indie artists in the door which eventually could make trustworthy titles worthy of their more premium store. Shame they have such odd vetting process, yet they don’t have a problem with over low quality stuff like the Postal series[1].
Thats a plus for me, and why when I buy its through gog. My steam library is large, but hasn’t grown in years.
Not all their games are DRM free though, they ‘sold out’ a long time ago.
No grey market key sellers, only legit.
Steam is still basically the only option
When cornered people finally admit that steam is a small monopoly
Steam isn’t a monopoly, there are other choices but they just suck. Epic games in terms of game availability already replaces a good 80% of my active library, itch, ubisoft, ea, etc also exist but are just so bad as well.
Steam is basically the only option… That cares about gamers and actually provides a good service.
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You don’t really have to rely on any company to play your games
You are still fucked then if Steam decides to take out a game you purchased. Again the whole “you’re not buying a product but a license for the product” debacle. Other than not giving Steam any money, this doesn’t change much? Could just pirate games instead.
I never said I cared about that in the first place. But even after games are removed from Steam they still allow you to download it whenever. Its only really an issue should Gabe choose a replacement for him that isn’t as pro gamers as he is.
This community is about buying european, not complaining about having DRM.
The name GamersGate sounds like it didn’t any issues at all /s
Yeahhh I don’t know who thought that was a good name hahaha
Don’t know if you’re serious but the store is way older than that similar-sounding thing
This is the oldest “gate” scandal I can think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal but generally adding -gate after something is used for a scandalous situation. Although it makes 0.0% sense, thats just how culture picked it up. Thats how the gamergate scandal became the name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign))
Wait what exactly is the purpose of buying a steam key from a third party? And how is that profitable and not tos breaking?
Keys can be cheaper when there isn’t any ongoing steam sales. Some website are shady and should be avoided but some are 100% legit. Any reseller listed on isthereanydeal is safe to use, they get their keys directly from publishers.
Good question! Real resellers (so NOT g2a, etc) get their keys from publishers directly (so they pay for them). The publishers get these keys from steam for free and by buying them from a reseller steam takes 0% of the money. So by using an EU reseller more money stays here.
You are allowed to say Fuck on the Internet. Why are you following the self-censorship rules for Instagram and other social networks if you are making a joke about them?
Looks like it was baked into the image template they used
I realised that those who censor themselves on the Internet, grew up on the Internet when YouTube started demonitising profanities and thus picked up the habit.
We are getting old.
youtube was good before googol bought it, now it is crap.
Daily dose of getting old: that buyout was like 20 years ago
I just reposted it from elsewhere, no need to read too much about it
[ removed from lemmy ]
You are even allowed to say fuck on the radio and TV in some countries (like The Netherlands)
Costco is cool too! They have local products.
Most important of all they compensate their employees like they are actual humans.
And, they told the ignorant people to go fuck themselves in regards to stopping their DEI efforts.
Keep that DEI and I will keep shopping!
And their management bust unions like their lives depend on it.
Costco can be cool all they want once the federal government of the USA tells them to fuck over Canadians they will. It’s a very dangerous game to rely heavily on American companies in Canada right now. No matter how ethical they might be. The trade war has already begun and the USA will use any lever available when the time comes to annex.
The issue isn’t the federal government tells them to fuck over Canadians (or anyone else). It’s that they don’t tell them anything. They just make Canadian goods cost more in the US. They don’t have a choice. Most businesses would rather the cost stay the same, but we have a dumb ass president who’s fucking us all over for no good reason.
for no good reason
Well, the reason is to destabilize the west because Putin wants a new Soviet Union
It’s certainly not a good reason. But it’s not just “dumb trump pulling levers he doesn’t understand.” It’s “dumb Trump pulling the levers he’s told to. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing, but those planning the lever pulls do”
I sometimes feel an anxiety when pondering what will happen when daddy Gabe isn’t here to keep the wolves at bay.
gabe is a very smart person, if he doesnt have a post death plan for steam i would be immensely surprised.
That’s my fear too , whoever gets their hand on valve will decide the future of pc gaming kinda , I just hope it won’t get sold to ea , riot , tencent or whatever
Depends on who inherents his shares
Steam may be a very successful business, but they’re still the seed crystal for a whole ecosystem of gambling that preys on addicts and children with the whole CSGO loot box thing. Take a wild guess what forms of addiction have the highest suicide rates?
Fuck Valve. Fuck all Corps. No business has ever nor can ever, genuinely give a shit about anything other than increasing profit.
On the other hand, Valve wishing to seek an alternative to Microsoft’s poor decision[1] making has been a great boon to the Linux community. Valve was also there at the start of Vulkan[2]. But is “funny” that Gabe Newell started off as a Microsoft employee, in fact the one that led the team that ported Doom to Windows with Doom95 and in turn also helped launch Windows (95) as the gaming OS for decades to come.
As much as I distrust and hate corporations, Valve isn’t in it for the shareholders, you can’t buy Valve stocks and that means they at least have a bit more soul than a lot of other corporations - even though they are profit seeking.
What I don’t like about them is how they sell you a service, not an actual game. You technically buy a lifelong lease on each game, never ownership. Your shit can be gone in minutes with nothing to prove for it, except for bank statements saying Valve took your money.
Which is why I’ll always buy on GOG[3] if possible. DRM free and European.
Does everyone just keep glossing over the ‘they enable the abuse of addicts and children” part?
I’m not saying I disagree with your other points I’m just confused.
Linux is more important to them than child abuse.
😂
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Valve is a privately owned company.
Publicly owned companies want more prodit because well we want out interest and return on stocks and a stable pension etc as well right? That all pushes publicly owned companies to get more and more profit every year.
No business?
I work as a software developer for a small business and they do care about us and not just profits.
Recently we were all given a pay rise and a reduction in hours as they can afford to support that.
Correct, no business. That same business will lay you off in a heartbeat if they can. Businesses do not care about you.
Also, not true in my case.
They do care and have shown on numerous occasions my supporting me when I have needed it and instilling in us that we come first and the business is secondary.
Like the owners literally do the same work as us and are far more accommodating than they have to be for us.
How else would you get a pay rise and a reduction in hours, able to work from home when having car trouble, not having a good mental health day fine take it off, etc. We also don’t have any targets or KPIs and don’t actively seek new work as our clients are loyal.
I cede my point. I knew I was laid off for being a piece of shit, I just knew it.
Sorry, I’m not doing great these days.
I’m not saying you’re a piece of shit, just that there are a few good employers out there. I also realise I am lucky.
Nah you’re good sorry wasn’t implying that.
No that’s what Angelosaxton (American) companies are about.
Most privately owned companies don’t care about making as much profit as possible. They want a healthy company that can pay them their salary and save up money for their pension.
Depends if the business it publicly owned.
I think valve are mostly fair to consumers. The money they make from gamers is doing some good in the linux sphere.
I thought it was pretty well known Valve is privately owned.
They make money selling off of gamers by selling games. They take advantage of and enable systemic abuse of, I’ll say it again, addicts and children. I’m not saying they aren’t also fair to their customers in most of their dealings and that they aren’t doing good things for the Linux ecosystem. But we’re also talking way more money than I bet you’re thinking. Gabe’s uber rich person kink is super-yachts. Multiple, super-yachts. You can appear and behave with decency and still contribute to the detriment of society at the same time.
Get lawmakers to make a law about it and properly work it out. Valve is banning loot boxes even for people who are legally allowed to gamble.
The issue is that it is hard to legally define whaf a lootbox is and stop it without stopping things like TCG drafts and RGB loot from bosses or enemies on games.
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I agree with this, but you have to admit that if all corps were like steam it would be a lot better.
Hey both things can be true. I feel like at this point though the only reason they haven’t stopped the whole gambling thing is because it’s basically a money faucet and in a monetary economy who’d ever turn off a money faucet? But that’s the rub, greed is inherently incentivized.
I’m gonna add that the ceo is a bilionare who owns an entire fleet of mega yacths
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
The crates where fine in TF2 …. Before CSGO got made, but due to CSGO and other games it’s an issue.
But while you consider it gambling, most laws don’t. It’s currently only banned in NL and BE to open lootboxes on Steam and in NL we have legal online gambling for 18+, but Valve won’t gives you access to the lootboxes.
The point is that one laws need to be more clear about what is gambling and what isn’t without ruining anything that uses randomizers and/or loot and there needs to be a better way to validate people’s age without hurting their privacy.
GOG Galaxy isn’t bad to use. It has cloud saves, and update checking - which is useful for some people. And games installed using the offline installers still show up in galaxy (and can be updated etc.) In fact, you can download the offline installers from the Galaxy app itself if you want to.
@cupcakezealot wasn’t Itch also American?
yeah it wasn’t necessarily an alternative; i was just saying they’re better because they tend to support indie devs and/or are more drm free than steam. i didn’t know of a purely non american one that i use :(
@cupcakezealot I like that they support indie creators as well, but Valve also did wonders in regard to gaming on Linux in general. I personally support both, as long as they are not supportive in any way to the current Trump administration.
@cupcakezealot oh, I see
Apparently GOG is Polish. DRM free, too; the one time I used it it literally just gave me the raw game files, like back in the day.
i didn’t know they were polish but yup! for most games you can go into your account and download all the manuals and exes/pkgs for any game you own!
I never gamed, so…
- Fuck gambling
- Fuck walled gardens
- Fuck billionaires (nobody needs that much dough)
- Fuck Valve/Steam (it’s easy for me to say)
Steam isn’t perfect and I sure as shit won’t be the one defending a corporation, and this isn’t a good excuse at ALL, but if you’ve never gamed you wouldn’t believe how much worse it is on the other side (GOG being the only exception).
And as far as corpo rats go, at least Valve employees own 49% of the company.
i wont delete my steam account, but lord gaben wont get my money anymore, even if hes awesome. :( sorry gabe.
I’m still gonna use American stuff that’s good if they keep DEI. brb checking up on Steam.
Edit: it’s not looking good tbh I think I’ll switch to GOG / physical media as much as feasible.
I wont use it if it has an extreme form of DEI in it. Im somewhat in the middle with this DEI Stuff, idk so much about it yet to really form my opinion.
There are no extreme forms of DEI because DEI is just making sure that everyone is able to be included and to discourage discrimination.
An all black college for example is not DEI. It is trying to counter systemic racism by providing opportunities to those that have historically and currently been excluded, so the goals are the same but it isn’t DEI.
an all black college is discrimination of other people imo.
All black colleges exist because blacks were excluded from existing colleges. Not because there were all white colleges, but because they were excluded from the vast majority of colleges.
They have remain because of ongoing racism at other colleges. A group that is discriminated against by society as a whole limiting who can join their spaces is not discrimination.
im euro and i dont discriminate against any people. i dont care what colour you have as long as you arent criminal or bad to me and others. bad people are everywhere. there are many white or asian people that dont want or are to untalented for college. i would only let people pass classes in college if they pass with a pass grade. shoving anyone trough because of colour is not good.
Grades have not depended on race in mainstream or HBCUs. Admissions however have not ever been equal, and DEI initiatives were created with the idea of counterbalancing that - or in lieu of reparations, which would be a real attempt to correct the inherent issue.
Europeans pretending they don’t know about discrimination is always so funny.
No, it’s not. And even if you want to call that a discrimination, it’s a positive one.
There are no extreme forms of DEI because DEI is just making sure that everyone is able to be included and to discourage discrimination.
An all black college for example is not DEI. It is trying to counter systemic racism by providing opportunities to those that have historically and currently been excluded, so the goals are the same but it isn’t DEI.
So, there’s no countries of majority black people on Earth? Don’t you mean a majority black college in the USA? But wouldn’t that majority by definition exclude other minorities like east asians, south asians, native americans, Hispanics et al? And what is a white person? A person from the south of Spain is indistinguishable from a person from North Africa, yet both originate from completely different backgrounds and neither would be white passing in the US. What about poor white people, do JayZ’s children deserve a pass because they are black but the children of a Ukrainian migrant do not because they are technically white even if they are from a refugee family with little financial means?
What you said is myopic, nonsensical and a perfect example of an oxymoron, I’m going to go on a limb and guess you’re US american. Congrats, it’s regardation like the one you spouted that got Trump elected.
What the fuck is context anyway?
I disagree, there are definitely extreme forms of DEI, namely when we’re talking about forced equal representation. Pools of potential employees are rarely perfect representations of society, for many different reasons. So if a company forcefully tries to have a perfect representation of society, that means they will discriminate against certain groups and hire less capable workers on average.
That opinion assumes the people who weren’t being hired due to discrimination are less capable. Which is the kind of thing people use to justify discrimination.
Let me explain it with a theoretical example: you are a company and the field you’re hiring in consists of 90 women and 10 men. You need 10 people for the job and want the most capable. Statistically that would mean hiring 9 women and 1 man on average, giving you the 10% most capable employees. But since you want equality you want it 50/50, so you hire 5 women and 5 men. That means that for the women you hired the 5,6% most capable employees, but for the men you hire the 50% most capable employees. So you get less capable employees this way, assuming both groups are equally likely to be capable.
Are all of the people qualified? Then everything past that is likely to be subjective as to what ‘more capable means’.
If so, odds are pretty high that what the hiring person thinks are more capable are just people that fut their preconceived notions of who is likely to be more qualified. Generally that is tall, white men.
Not to mention there is a lot more to being effective workers, like communication and collaboration. A more diverse workforce tends to increase communication and collaboration when being diverse and inclusive are goals.
Not to mention people can grow as they get experience. So even if they aren’t the most capable at the time of hiring, they might be in a few years. And if people don’t get any experience, they will always have a disadvantage against even less capable people who have more experience. It is a feedback loop that makes even a small amount of discrimination have a mush larger effect.
Let me stop you here: You seem to lack the pre-requisite knowledge of laws, and the understanding of what HR departments and DEI departments do.
What you’re describing is absolutely, totally, illegal and has been since the 1970s. This was decided in Griggs v Duke Power Co. The phrase you can look up is “Disparate impact” and in particular the “adverse impact” and tests.
DEI has big problems, but most of them stem from businesses just slapping in a 60 minute micro aggression course from a third party service and calling it done
https://hbr.org/2022/12/the-failure-of-the-dei-industrial-complex
What DEI is supposed to do is stuff like:
For example, a purposeless unconscious bias training required for all employees is almost certainly less effective than an unconscious bias training deployed specifically for decision-makers like hiring managers or supervisors, to increase their familiarity with newly implemented bias-interrupting practices like hiring panels and scoring rubrics after an audit found evidence of bias in hiring and promotion processes.
I’ll bite. What’s a company with extreme DEI?
idk, must be a little one that isnt yet big enough to be in the news or whose product is not good enough so i didnt yet use or buy it. these small firms are often extreme-non-DEI/extreme-DEI. but as i have written, idk too much about this stuff. its not in the news in europa.
Okeh. Slightly weird to have an opinion with no examples. Propaganda, much?
proud boys is a weird thing, afaik they are extreme-non-DEI so i dont like them.
a bit DEI or anti-DEI is alright.
EDIT: explain the downvotes. am i to moderate for both farleft and farright??
explain the downvotes
Based on the way you’re talking I don’t think you understand what DEI actually is, and yet, you remain committed to saying how much of it you want. Having a center opinion isn’t a virtue; if you don’t know enough about the subject, you should have no opinion, not advocate for a central one by default. Didn’t downvote but I see why people are.
I don’t see the equivalency as valid though. I am white, but that’s not something I’d ever be proud of in itself because it’s literally just pigmentation alone. I’m so ethnically mixed and Americanised that I can’t really claim the English, Croat, or Scottish heritage I have got - despite being a British citizen living in England who eats haggis with enough frequency to disturb my family. I very much appreciate my heritage but it has no hold on me as an in-group identity. They don’t claim me, nobody needs to.
If I was to take the stance of being “anti-DEI”, which lets face it, it’s just white supremacism with updated buzzwords, I’d be taking the stance that my literal mere pigmentation is an equally valid source of pride as a black woman’s history of oppression, or a trans man’s struggle to be treated as their true self.
I’ve struggled, but I haven’t struggled from being white or cisgender. I’ve walked alone at night wherever I liked ever since I was barely a teen with hardly so much as a glance over my shoulder. Gone to other countries where I barely speak fifty words in the local tongue with nary a care. I’ve spent my whole life being given credit as the person I present as. I’ve been unafraid to take risks, and it gives me hell to know others haven’t been able to enjoy those things in life. It’s not even a huge amount of empathy we’re talking about here.
So that’s my story. Anyone who reads this and thinks I’m a self hating white is probably in need of a smack. I’m fine with myself. I want others to have a taste of being okay once in a while like I have, is all.
As for the downvotes I don’t know I’m just talking here. I can’t speak for them. In America, this issue is often played to ‘both sides’ in bad faith, and far right ideas are given more than equal time in ways that have normalised fascist tendencies for decades, leading to the current situation (more or less a coup in progress). It’s a difficult needle you’re trying to thread at the best of times, and right now an “even handed” stance feels a lot like cities trying to solve traffic by adding “just one more lane” to their already massive highways.
As ever, this is just me talking.
And what exactly does extreme DEI look like?
Just buy future games from GOG. No need to delete Steam or already made purchases.
yes that i will do. if its not available then there this particular other way…
Not really on the table, my kid would kill me in my sleep. Just going to move forward towards other things.
Your kid would kill you, if you bought a game on GOG? 😅
If I deleted steam
Presuming you can’t get a game on GoG (which is European), check if the game is still from Europe.
Bit of a compromise, but this is for the people who can’t give up on Steam.
I wouldn’t have started even dual booting Linux if it wasn’t for Steam after being pleasantly surprised with my Steam Deck played most of my Steam library. It’s the primary why I intend to get AMD gpu next time around for the better driver support, but that won’t be for a few years.
Yep, if you want a reason why Valve are “less evil” than other companies, one big thing to point to is the huge investment they’ve made into the Linux ecosystem. Even though it’s in their own interests (Microsoft locking out steam would cripple their income), we can see with Epic suing Google/Apple that there are other, shittier ways that they could have attempted the same thing. The investment they’ve made into Linux, Proton, KDE etc benefit everyone and can’t be taken away on a whim.
Man I love it when people glaze objectively bad companies just because it’s popular opinion to like them.
Remember steam started the business model of not actually owning your games.
Gabe has made billions by stealing profit from the workers that actually make games.
They had to be sued just to offer refunds.
They host tons of malware and shovelware and outright scam games and even protect them from “”““review bombing””"
They pushed “early access” into the mainstream.
And because of people like you that would literally suck Gabes dick for the meme, they get away with it.
Remember steam started the business model of not actually owning your games.
GOG exists, go use GOG. Steam is popular because they don’t fuck over buyers, and they run a good business model, people are ok not “owning” things if the service is reasonably well put together.
Gabe has made billions by stealing profit from the workers that actually make games.
steam takes a 30% cut, which isn’t all that high, especially when you consider that they develop things like proton at zero cost to anybody, including developers. You’re also getting the single largest and most widely used publishing platform, period. It’s really hard to beat something of that caliber, so it’s definitely a tradeoff. There are also cases of devs making games that become so popular they pull in millions of dollars worth of revenue.
They host tons of malware and shovelware and outright scam games and even protect them from “”““review bombing””"
in defense of steam, if they specifically curated high quality games people like you would accuse them of gate keeping the platform. Scams are definitely a thing, malware, technically is. I’ve not seen malware ever in my personal experience, and i doubt most people have, and whenever it does happen, steam responds accordingly so i’m not sure its a fair statement.
They pushed “early access” into the mainstream.
there’s nothing necessarily wrong with early access, i actually think it’s a really productive way to provide tons of play testing and development potential for smaller dev teams. Does it also incentivize shovelware? Sure, but it’s a platform you can make money on, that’s not abnormal. And again, it’s usually very well known when games are abandonware.
And because of people like you that would literally suck Gabes dick for the meme, they get away with it.
surprised you didn’t mention gambling, that’s probably the most significant argument against steam right now, they effectively run what can be considered an online casino.
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That’s a lot of effort to put in to trying to excuse blatantly predatory practices of a company with an almost defacto monopoly on PC games and uses said almost-monopoloy to steal 30% of the profits from people that actually make games.
GOG existing does not excuse Steam.
30% is massive. Imagine you sold something on, let’s say, Ebay and they took 30% of that money. And devs could have other options of markets to sell their games if more people realised how predatory Steam is and stopped glazing Gabe like he’s the video game messiah.
There’s a difference between gatekeeping/allowing only AAA games, and just having 0 standards of what is allowed on the store.
Yes early access could be a good thing. But it isn’t, they allow all the blatant shovelware and asset flips because, ya know, money. Again, if they just had some fairly basic standards of what they allow on their store to stop their users being ripped off, it wouldn’t be a problem, but that wouldn’t make them as much money, so they don’t do it.
Gabe newel is a billionsire capitalist and Valve runs like any other company. Profits first and foremost.
Why have standards to protect consumers when Gabe needs an 8th super yatch to add to his fleet.
i guess technically they have a monopoly on the market place? But it’s not like they’re ruthlessly destroying the competition like GOG, and itch.io, and epic games. They literally just offer, a better service. The alternative being that you have to buy games from like 12 different platforms that all work differently, which i think most people, would rather not deal with.
to steal 30% of the profits from people that actually make games.
for which they offer services in return, because it’s not stealing, because that’s how money works.
30% is massive. Imagine you sold something on, let’s say, Ebay and they took 30% of that money. And devs could have other options of markets to sell their games if more people realised how predatory Steam is and stopped glazing Gabe like he’s the video game messiah.
i mean sure, in the context of ebay that may make sense, but ebay doesn’t handle shipping for you, do advertising, doesnt provide you any services to do photography of your product, any information about the product you’re using. It’s literally just an online marketplace that lets you list a product, and then ship it to somebody who buys it, via a third party customer, steam does literally ALL of the middle man work. You list your game on steam, and steam does EVERYTHING else for you, except for traditional marketing, but that’s a different story. Usually if your game is good people will play it, sometimes you just need some luck, but time usually helps with that.
And devs could have other options of markets to sell their games if more people realised how predatory Steam is and stopped glazing Gabe like he’s the video game messiah.
you can quite literally just do this, it won’t have the same market reach, but it hasn’t stopped viral games before. Many a viral sensation has come from itch.
There’s a difference between gatekeeping/allowing only AAA games, and just having 0 standards of what is allowed on the store.
steam has pretty significant standards, especially now that you can’t greelight games anymore, you have to actually pay money for it to get listed, sure a lot of the games on the platform are bad, but there are also a lot of really good games, and just because a game is bad doesn’t mean it should be delisted either. Sure things like asset flips really should.
Gabe newel is a billionsire capitalist and Valve runs like any other company. Profits first and foremost.
profits first and foremost, except for the fact that a lot of people really just don’t have a problem with steam, and steam manages to develop products that obviously arent intended to make money, like proton.
Why have standards to protect consumers when Gabe needs an 8th super yatch to add to his fleet.
also im pretty sure these are just normal yachts.
Are you also a glazer for Amazon and Bezos? Because most of these arguments can apply to them too?
no? Bezos is substantially worse than gabe
While I think capitalism encourages unethical business practices, keep in mind that Valve actively supports the development and popularization of the kernel as well as other projects like Wine from their profits.
And Bill Gates is trying to eradicate malaria. So should we all be glazers for Microsoft and use Windows?
G*mers have been too Stockholmed by Steam’s monopoly to recognise that everything they complain about with EA or Ubisoft all started with Valve.
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You can just not buy the games that have stuff like Denuvo etc. If you keep buying them, of course they’ll keep including the DRM etc.
Steam is the storefront, and they have plenty of games you can buy without that crap.
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Steam also tells you beforehand, now
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Why not just turn on offline mode on the steam deck? Its easier than blocking it from the internet…
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I’m just happy to see a meme template from Half Baked.
Chappelle’s old stuff is fire
Have you ever looked at memes on weed?
The man who delivered that line is now my generation’s Walter Cronkite
How Newell’s latest yacht? They still allow gambling in CS? Cool cool, nothing to see here.
At least he had the underdog story having companies try to beat him down.
Still unsure if he came from generational wealth, but at least there’s a story there.
Getting children addicted to illegal gambling isn’t exactly inspiring.
Yeah i’m not looking for inspiring. Guy made a company, made some good games, came within an inch of getting trounced by big bro, turned into a publishing empire then made some bad decisions.
Then we got steamdeck pushing Linux.
If not for Steam, we’re just be sitting in Epic and Blizzard’s and Microsoft’s laps.
It would be really cool if someone did a non-profit publisher, but capitalism just fucking sucks and everytime we get something nice it has to turn to shit.
Doesn’t every budding company face competition when they grow? I don’t know what an underdog story has to do with his exploitative business practices and his billionaire lifestyle.
I barely use Steam to be honest. Gosh, I need to get off Windows…
TBH operating systems are like tools, and if windows isn’t too intrusive and neutered, it can be OK.
I use Windows for gaming/media, for performance reasons, and (CachyOS) Linux for GPU compute stuff, dev work, office, pretty much anything else.
Well, yeah, I get that… Still, there’s quite a bit about Windows that annoys me, and there’s really nothing I do on Windows that Linux can’t handle. I’ve already looked it up, and the little gaming I do does work pretty well on Linux too, reportedly.
So I find myself thinking… Why am I on Windows? I could be on Linux and ditch Microsoft. It’s just some anxiety, fear that things’ll break. At the end of the day, I have more confidence that, if something goes wrong, I can fix it in Windows, but may not be able to fix it in Linux. Hope I’m making sense here.
Again, you can always dual boot, just in case.
What I do is dual boot and “share” a partition between them, so if windows or Linux breaks I can just swap to the other, no problemo.
Fair. I’ll try that :D
As somebody who really recently migrated to linux, shit will ‘break’ and part of the fun is scouring wikis and random forums to get things working and the absolute rush that comes when you figure something out
Look, I enjoy fun with computers as much as the next guy, but if I need to get something done I don’t want to go scouring… If I need to get in a meeting and the audio is fucked or the bluetooth broke or something, that’s a big problem…
lol, ya that’s totally fair, bluetooth for me so far has been total fuckery, this is my personal pc not my work one.
steam is just so based.
I dont think a single more based company has ever existed. It rivals the greats like linux, with a touch of gambling.
I dont think a single more based company has ever existed.
Hyperbole much? I like Steam as much as the next guy but lets not pretend the guy that owns 6 yachts is a good person just because he’s better than the next worst. Steam DRMs the shit out of games sold on their platform and if you’re an indie dev that wants to sell your game Steam is THE place to do it.
Steam made $10bn last year, they have about 100 employees (their parent company Valve has about 400). I used to be a bigger fan of GabeN but more recently really started considering him and looking into it and realized he’s just another unethical billionaire. This video by Coffeezilla is a good jumping off point. regarding the intentional targeting of youth with addictive gambling mechanics in loot crates and circumventing gambling laws. It’s all very purposeful and continues to this day.
Steam’s DRM is completely optional and is among the least intrusive DRMs available for developers to use. Many games are sold 100% DRM-free on Steam.
I don’t know of a single game on/from Steam that doesn’t require Steam to run. Thats DRM.
It is entirely up to the developer if they want to use it though. It is not mandatory for a developer to use Steam DRM even if publishing on Steam.
Kerbal Space Program 1, at least used to not require steam running at all. I havent tried in a while, but it was supposed to stay that way.
It looks like they miss out on the Steamworks features “(e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.)” if they opt not to use their DRM, so I can understand why the vast majority of devs would want to use it.
You can actually pick and choose which parts of the steamworks api to implement, so you can have trading cards, multiplayer etc without the drm side.
from memory, i think you do need to use the drm to use family sharing, we had issue with that when we chose not to use the drm, but everything else we could implement fine without it.
Ah I didn’t realise that, thanks. The overview page made it seem like the DRM was required for any of that to work.
Oh wow that is interesting. So the vast majority of devs just choose to lock it to the steam.exe?
yep yep, exactly this. For whatever reason suits them, be it drm or others, pretty much everyone who publishes on steam does choose to do so
Stardew Valley, Terraria, and Starbound, to name a few I’m pretty sure are DRM free (Starbound I’m certain of). Probably plenty of others, but I haven’t tested. To see if a game requires steam, literally just install the game on Steam, copy the game folder out of the Steam install path, close steam, and launch the game.
I will always have some admiration for a person that sets up shop in Microsoft’s back yard and bases the system on Linux. I hate the DRM aspect and couldn’t care less about what promoting whatever with children because quite frankly that’s just not going to be solved by anything other than parents taking better care of their kids. The same can be said about exposure to any kind of media, including not letting children watch commercials on Saturday morning because gee whiz, that stuff is exploitative.
To me complaints about exposing kids to gambling is just finding something to be pissed off about and reinforces my feeling that the Left has picked up the kinds of puritanism that used to be associated with the Right.
But yeah. DRM software is a serious thing to worry about. Selling people vapor is kind of a shitty thing to do.
Yeh plus they let neonazi groups usw their forums for recruiting and hate speech, because they don’t want to pay any mods.
While I wasn’t a mod for Steam proper, I was a mod for a popular game that routinely had its share of hate groups and 8ch mobs try to take over. The flagging system worked pretty well for keeping the worst of this stuff out. Plus, the publisher is permitted to make moderators for its own Steam forum. So if you are seeing shit get out of hand on a particular title, blame the publisher, not Steam.
Paying someone to do that kind of work is the opposite of Valve’s ideal, if I understand them correctly.
They prefer systems working well enough with as little human assistance as possible—see: review system with reactions and surge detection; user-defined game tags; front page recommendations completely based on trends; the market; and so on.
That’s not to say these are bad, but they could often be improved, if only Valve was willing to pay the human cost. But part of the reason Valve remains small is they try to automate as much as they can (and if it can’t be automated, it might never get done, specially considering their corporate structure).
N.B. I still prefer them over majority of companies in this space, but let’s not ignore their issues, e.g. gambling. As an aside, I also appreciate GOG’s “no DRM” stance, but I use Linux and sadly native support isn’t there. Kudos also to Itch.io.
I like Steam as much as the next guy but lets not pretend the guy that owns 6 yachts is a good person just because he’s better than the next worst.
Blimey. Owning a fleet of superyachts, some of which have been converted into support vessels, is Bond villain territory.
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it might be hyperbole, a little bit, but it’s certainly better than being mad at everything.
I like Steam as much as the next guy but lets not pretend the guy that owns 6 yachts is a good person just because he’s better than the next worst.
i mean, what else are you supposed to do with that much money? I would probably do something much sillier with it.
Steam DRMs the shit out of games sold on their platform and if you’re an indie dev that wants to sell your game Steam is THE place to do it.
and yet, you can just, release a non DRM version of the game also, I.E. factorio, mindustry, etc. It’s really not that difficult, steam just has great reach.
Linux isn’t a company.
no but it is really based.
You could also argue that very few companies operate as video game publishers, but that would be rather silly wouldnt it.
