Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming

Honestly, the stuff in that rant don't baffle me. What baffles me is what the hell even created the "good guy" image of Valve in the first place? I do not remember anything related to that company that ever indicated, in any way, that they were the good guys. They made one great game at the start, and after that, they pretty much lived by exploiting the fame of said game or the work of others. I would almost say they are like what Bob Kane was in the comics world, except Valve at least made one great product to become famous and Kane stole even the one that made him famous with no actual, provable work tied to his name.

Well, what would happen if ppl now leave Valve and buy thewir games elsewhere? Valve closes shop and all our libraries are - GONE. So please keep supporting them, you have a pact with the devil and no other choice!

I agree

I stopped making purchases from Steam when they did the stupid update where you couldn't keep a game in your inventory to give away later. This just reinforces my decision to not buy from them. Thanks for posting the website link, I wouldn't have found it on my own.

Let me tell you about the mysterious yet more important than ever story of the "stooge syndrome":

In a healthy (psychologically, sociologically and socially) society, often following the common trauma of a crisis or a war, people have in their mind ingrained a clearvoyant suspicions of any public or private interest that goes against the general people's one, be it government, corporation or medias alike.

But little by little, as the shared trauma passes, new generation arrive, the recurring deliquescence of political structures, corrupted little by little by the ever more powerful private or foreign interests, as well as the general medias (be it content, information or culture) that serve as both the veil, the filter and spreader of these sliding agendas and interests, to manipulate the minds into accommodating them, comes a time when behind the highs of progress and technology society as reached on some levels, the corruption, deliquescence and manipulation is such, that people have been manipulated, controlled and framed enough to defend the interest of the powerful against their own general interests.

It's called the stooge syndrome, people so degenerate and manipulated in their unconsciousness that they will defend the politics that destroyed their society, the billionaire corporations and banks that is stealing the value of their earnings from work, and even applause and pay to consumer their own propaganda.

Steam is the worth digital pile of shit that existd. As a platform, that shouldn't just be compared to Uber, or even Facebook, but actually the first platforms that destroyed the modern western society which are the mercantilist travel platform which became the aristocratic monarchies in the late 15th, they are stealing more money than they from all publishers and developers while not creating shit, let alone even updating or enhancing their tools and platforms, it's still the same shitty 15 y.o. interface and functionalities like gifting, exchange or cards is becoming worse and worse.

With the pricing policy change they operated 3 years with the end of sales and aggressive digital pricing (remember that the cost of a digital copy is near zero, and in order to compete with piracy and physical game, games were release at full price for early adopters, but then month over month they were cut to reach lower and lower pocket, which was the best and fairest pricing for digital), they have created a new game speculative alongside publisher who adopted the same strategy.

The result, as you'll see in the short coming term, is that with price constantly rising even for 8, 15 sometimes 25 y.o. games even though people have less, less games will be sold overall even though they're sold at higher prices, which means that sales will be concentrated in fewer and fewer publishers hands, until people only have money for a few games or simply decide not to buy it and revert to piracy.

Also I'm not mentioning all the abuses going on Steam with bullshit payed "remaster", overpriced 10 to 20 y.o. games, games being removed with no refunds, incomplete SeasonPass/DLC galores (have you forgotten that we're all supposed to hate those DLC/micro-transaction shit?), constantly rising prices and shitier sales etc...Fortunately there are still bundle sites.

Some of the recent changes in steam are questionable yes, but do you know what really isn't healthy for gaming? The fact that every single new game costs more than 50 euro each and they all come with season passes that cost almost as much as the game. For a gamer like me who enjoys playing almost anything this means I have to spend thousands of euro to get my hands on these games. I have over 1k games in my library(60% of them are trading cards simulator yes) but still I have wishlist of around 2.5k games and I legitimately am interested in playing every single one of them.

The article is clearly a rant of unsatisfied customer. I like steam and valve. My only concern is that we don't own the games we buy, we only buy permanent access to them which can be terminated. If our purchases entitled us to actually owning them just like buying a physical copy...that would be really nice. Also think about how many people are working at valve and how much things they need to manage. They have to make piles of money if they want to keep this running.

Another nice thing would be instead of regions there should be individual managing of the prices for every country. My country is in Eu but the average income here is times lower than in Eu. If you check graphs about the actual average wages of people we are around the same level as Russia(if not lower) where all the games on the steam store are like 3-4 times cheaper. Not sure how could this happen here though since I'm not that familiar with the laws.

Ive always sawn steam-famboyism as dumb; There are levels and levels of ignorance- glancing over the facts distracted by the low prices and conveniences is easy to get, forgiveable. But damn some people go beyond defending the plataform blindly and treating alternatives like cancer is beyond me.

That said...
...let me play devils advocate a bit more:

Steam was and STILL IS the best that happened to pc gaming.
...that doesn't mean its the best for pc gaming or what should be- only that things were and still would be worse without it.

1) Coming from a low income country - steam turned me from pirate to paying consumer. Being tech savvy and avid gamer i started 7 years ago as one of the few doing that where i live (piracy here was really, really common place- the norm actually).
Nowadays?
Im still to meet a single gamer without steam purchases. The scenario changed and it changed fast.
Im speaking of Brazil only but theres plenty of countries i can bet the same happened or is still happening- consumer money that years ago would never go to devs pockets.

Its not only crazy sales- the localized price is a tremendous impact. It makes it fair - feasible- relative to our reality. Its something pretty much all of the big competition doesn't care to do- and the small ones that do can't afford these rates like steam's do.

2) One company 'single place for games' is bad; But one place for games is good.
My first digital purchases were pre-steam or when steam didn't caught on. Of those only a handfull i can still access or download. The most recent case was desura- and all the games i didn't had a steam key for ive lost as my backups went down with my old external drive.

We don't need to fear(much) about big names, but a competitive and varied market of small distributions paints a bad picture in this regard- even more so considering many drm practices that won't let go of downloading backups and whatnot.

Goes beyond that however: how traffic in the same ecosystem drives traffic and community and how community plays a abysmal role in the industry success and growth.
Consoles make it 'simple' - on my console theres only one place to go, one unified community, and it thrives at their corner. Steams growing monopoly created that for pc and this in turn revitalized pc gaming.

Without it we would have even less pc first, pc exclusives and pc ports.

Unless some idealized 'unified enviroment across publishers/plataforms' arise, only a replacement for steam could change that- and most of the alternatives would be worse then steam. Heck, if EA or Amazon got the power of steam then steams bullying would seem like love in comparison.

Gog is perhaps our only hope but that depends on the industry changing their mind over drm and many, many publishers allowing for importing steams titles to it. Both extremly unlikely (to put it midly), saddly.

...
The bad thing is for all of steams good now starts growing its cons, and its turning its ugly head for the devs and industry as well as customers.

The realistic solution(on my view) is whats already happening- alternatives providing steam keys as well; Im not sure of how financialy that occurs but we need ways to buy from devs with smaller cuts or investing in competitors with potential and those have better chances- or the only chance- of 'replacing or tying with steam' by providing keys for it as well, at least for now.

PS: some API that allowed to imediatly import and download from other platforms within steams client would help; Lots of people stick with steam for the simple and dumb convenience of opening just one shortcut/plataform. Importing non-steam games isn't quick so...

Valve isn't my friend, if it was I'd have HL3 and L4D3 in my library by now cries

hm...

I've never understood why so many people view Gabe Newell as some sort of hero (to put it mildly... his followers are like cult members). Sure, he was behind Half-Life but, aside from that, he's hurt PC gaming greatly with Steam (e.g. DRM, regional prices, pre-order exclusives, monetizing non-existent digital items, etc.) and the more it seems that he isn't really a gamer: he's just a businessman who happened to create Half-Life almost 20 years ago. A real gamer in his place, with that much influence and authority, would have revolutionized PC gaming.

Ooookay... I'll just slowly back away so the spittle doesn't hit and so the glare from the tin foil hat doesn't hurt my eyes.

Valve is neither good nor evil. It's a company, and it's in the business of making money. Steam is a store, so it makes that money off selling stuff that others make. Valve tries to do a decent job for everyone, both customers and developers, which is close to impossible to do, given the different desires of different people, in particular that devs want to make money while players want to spend as little as possible. Valve also tries to do it with minimal effort, which often hurts the end results.

I don't see why Steam isn't good for gaming. For every other store, I can see where Steam is better in some respects. I can also see where it's worse in some respects compared to some stores. Also, a lot of it is inevitable. If Steam wasn't there to help games go digital, another store would have done it, and I see no reason to believe it would have ended any better, and do have some reasons to imagine that it could have ended worse.

after nearly 1800 games it is too late for me

escape while you can!

in other word the sky is blue

Steam made games accessible for me. So It's just a platform that i play games nothing more. But i know how much money PS games are in our country so Steam is a really good option. Because i know if any other company would bring the games they will price the same with them. I would be still pirating games.

I've been adding my wishlist from Steam on GOG and Humble Bundle since Steam's latest un-gifting update. Wish there's an easier way to sync my wishlists so I don't have to do it manually, but that's how it is. Where before I gave no second thought if I find a game on sale on Steam, I'd probably check on other platforms first to see if they can match the price, especially this coming Summer Sale.

A completely off-topic question, but I don't think you'd mind the bump :-)

Is the Russian FAQ (which you wrote as far as I know) the same as English FAQ, or does it cover any additional areas? I'm asking because I'm collecting questions for an alternative FAQ (in English).

Holy crap, what a read. Finished main story and am now caught up reading most of the interlinked and off-branching storys.... 2 hrs and still going. How bored can one get :_:

Do you know what amazes me most in Valves story so far?

Why did Steam get this monopoly? How stupid was Microsoft not to be where Steam is today?
they had everything to become Valve... but made so many plunders and completely wasted their chance to inegrate their form of "Steam" into Windows...

People keep saying "Go to GOG." Right, because it's THAT easy to abandon my 3100+ games Steam account.

Bump! Thank you so much for drawing the community's attention to this vital issue.

This makes me really happy about GOG launching it's Connect programm. If one day the bubble around steam pops, that will be the place to go :)

Nobody said it would be easy...

View attached image.

I'd just like to point out that while the point is valid that Valve is not our friend (any multimillion/billion company can't afford to be) that only improves their platform when competition forces the issue, Polygon itself isn't exactly a good outlet itself. The opening paragraphs are a stupid mis-characterization of pc gaming/gamers, silcon valley and the supposed laissez-faire capitalism of both. There's some sort of agenda here they're pushing.

Even if Valve is not on friendly terms with us, they don't need to be. They provide product and people willingly pay for it. We the consumers are not forced to pay it or put up with it. Not when there is competition not only from other outlets but entire mediums such as books, films etc. (Not to mention piracy but that's a topic unto itself) While I've disagreed with many of their decisions in the past I can't think of a single instance besides paid mods for Skyrim that Valve actually engaged in screwing over their customers/business partners. And even then they valued customer satisfaction enough to revert the program, and it was an idea pushed by Bethesda/Zenimax who are an outright scummy company.

Comparing to the console side of the industry, Valve is the good guy. The total control Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo exorcise over their platforms chokes and stifles them. Pre-order culture, DLC, subscriptions for basic services, microtransactions in full releases, etc. started as console practices first. What innovation that does happen there typically occurs because PC gaming forced the issue. As big as they are Valve is not the central pillar of the PC platform. Our fate isn't tied to them. They can (and have) blundered before but the PC as a gaming platform kept on chugging. Same can't be said for Atari or Sega, for instance.

Valve is not our friend. But they aren't our enemy either. They have done more good than bad for gaming as a whole, which I honestly don't believe is true for Microsoft, Sony, Activision/Blizzard, EA, Nintendo or Ubisoft. People have made their relationship with Valve personal, which is idiotic. I'd like to see /r/pcmr stop choking on Valve's dingus. But to call Steam 'unhealthy' is bullshit. It would be unhealthy if Valve actively went out of their way to block competition, but they don't. They're not a monopoly.