givesomefucks@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
It’s really getting to the point Gabe needs to cash out and turn Steam into a non-profit…
I trust him while he’s alive, but some day he’ll die, and who knows what will happen to Steam.
We could wake up one morning and find out there’s a $10 monthly fee to access Steam’s “services” including every game you ever purchased.
We can’t just cost on the hopes nothing changes forever.
We could wake up one morning and find out there’s a $10 monthly fee to access Steam’s “services” including every game you ever purchased.
When did this ever happen on any game console, or service ever? Isn’t this some kind of “fear mongering”? Also wouldn’t this be illegal? Because we purchased the game and Valve would effectively take all access away for all games. I don’t think your argument what could happen is warranted.
I don’t think this has happened yet with video games, however it is in no way illegal for Valve to do this. There’s been plenty of examples of other media being ripped away from consumers, like “purchased” movies and music.
On Steam, you are purchasing a license to play a game, not the game itself. At any point and for any reason, Valve can legally revoke this license or restrict access to it.
Sony charges a monthly fee to play online…
That’s not the statement we are discussing as what he said.
I’ve been working on my Steam exit strategy for years. It’s nice feeling like I could bail at any time without too much pain.
I'm hopeful Valve, and by extension Steam, will be fine. The employees are like minded, I don't see it going public and derailing once Gabe has left.
Omg that’s a valid concern. This is exactly what xero are doing right now. Finding every little place they can charge and adding fees for developers left, right and centre. A megalomaniac leader has led xero to complete enshitification, and, with the wrong leader, steam could end up on the same place.
Xero is publicly traded. Generally it’s shareholders wanting endless return that pushes every company to enshittify. The specifics of the company matter less if they have public shareholders.
I can‘t find the specific video where he mentioned it, but I remember Chet Faliszek, who worked at Valve from 2005 to 2017, mentioning, that Gaben‘s death is something that has been planned for and won‘t be as much of an issue for Valve as people might think.
It‘s of course in no way guaranteed to work out in the end, I don‘t know the specifics of the plans or if everyone‘s going to go along with them. But seeing how well Valve is doing and also how little Gaben actually seems to steer the company, I‘m somewhat optimistic that it‘ll be fine after his passing. Not optimistic enough not to have my most beloved Steam games backed up somewhere, of course, but still somewhat optimistic.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
You can start shopping on another store, like GOG. But also, the add-ons thing feels like these folks have never shopped for video games anywhere else, because everyone does that.
michael@piefed.chrisco.me 11 hours ago
Steam has some upsides most take for granted.
The wor they do to get all the strange controller setups working (and let others make configurations) is a huge time saver when all you want to do is play your games.
Free cloud saves are a life saver when you go from device to device.
The Linux work they do is fantastic.
It goes on and on. But yeah the biggest deal is that if they ever go full corpo….we are in trouble.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I’m going to nitpick the controller stuff too, because they could have done it in a way that was store agnostic, but of course, they benefit if they don’t do it that way.
michael@piefed.chrisco.me 10 hours ago
Oh yeah totally. But it deals with proprietary drivers…so im not 100% sure what the restrictions are there. The mapping could be done open source if there was a need/want.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 11 hours ago
Is there any launcher that doesn’t offer free cloud saves these days?
(not neglecting that Stream normalized it, for the record)
Katana314@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
GOG offers them, but they’re inconsistent and only work with their launcher. While I have some GOG games on my Steam Deck, they don’t transfer saves over to my PC.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 8 hours ago
This is exactly why this shit constantly annoys me. Steam is not unique in how they handle their store. If you don’t want to pay Valve a fee as a dev, then don’t put your game on Steam. No one is forced to do that.
Now, you will lose many sales. But a service being popular does not make it a monopoly. Other stores exist, and are even discussed in the article. All of them have some similar method of getting add-ons. Steam’s happens to be very easy – again, that doesn’t make it anti-competitive.
Also: the fact that this is about “PC gaming monopoly” and “Microsoft” is not mentioned is just… wild. And sad.
justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io 10 hours ago
Personally this reeks of being a shadow lawsuit by Epic games.
With the end goal being to let people buy and play the games on Steam, but then buy the addons via EGS.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
If that happened, that would mean you’d be able to buy DLC for all of your free EGS games on Steam as well. Selling DLC for those games is probably just about the only money that store brings in outside of Fortnite.
Maestro@fedia.io 6 hours ago
Hah, not from me! It won't be the first time that I buy a game on Steam that I previously played for free on EGS, just so I can buy the DLC. I will never spend a cent on EGS.
DomeGuy@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
While I don’t buy a lot of PC games, I did pick up Stellaris on GOG.
The weird second-class status I get when it comes to betas and mods is enough for anyone to scream. Especially since if I wanted to move to steam, I’d have to re-buy every add-on I want to play.
Add-on lock-in really is a thing. Even if it may be as much a lazy publisher as it is a greedy storefront.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
It’s strange, because if I buy an expansion for a board game, I don’t have to shop at the same store that I bought the base game from.
hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
Unfortunately that doesn’t help with multiplayer games that rely on steam
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
An extremely similar API exists in GOG, for better and for worse, because it functionally is the only DRM in GOG. And of course Epic offers the same thing, too.
hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
How many devs actually take advantage of it though?