You can say the same thing about Amazon and Airbnb. None of them are bad products and they are all convenient, but they are having a negative impact. You don’t directly feel it but the workers do and in the end, it does mean less quality and overall games for us.
I’m not calling for a boycott here but the minimum would be calling them out on it.
Starski@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Nah, Amazon and airbndn do not remotely have comparable service to steam, I’ve personally had shitty experiences with both and no many others who have as well. I have many personal gripes with numerous of their business models, and those have deserved hate to them. I’ve never personally had any negative experience with steam, nor has any singular person I know or have met and talked to steam about. I use the service daily, along with all of my friends, and its has been nothing but amazing, and has provided stellar service to me and all my friends for over a decade. The second a better service comes along, I’d be willing to switch, but as it stands every single other online gaming service is straight shit compared to steam, even Gog is going down the drain. I owe the ability to even play a third of the games I own to the work steam has done with proton. Everything I know and have seen about their work flow is also incredibly respectable, it seems to be an incredibly healthy Democratic work environment that promotes innovation and quality of content over pumping out bullshit. So far, the only reasoning I’ve seen you give as to why steam is bad is that they’re a monopoly, which not only is false, but the accusations have only come on because of how massively successful they are due to having an objectively better service than anything else out there.
Grimy@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Okay, you seem to be missing the point.
It isn’t about the effect on you but the effect on the industry as a whole. That’s why they are similar.
Amazon and Airbnb both dominate the market. They both have a better product than their competitors. Exactly like steam, they abuse their position and have a long term negative impact on their respective scenes.
The article above is literally about how hard the gaming industry is having it. You would have a good product in any case, because the lion’s share of the money being made isn’t going to making steam better but going to filthy rich people like Gaben.
They have like 100 employees (the financial Times estimates they made about 11 million per employee in 2021), steam probably only needs to charge around 1% to cover it’s current expenses and salaries. All that money is being taken from devs (less games for us, more bankrupt studios) and being given to the top dogs (Gaben to buy boats).
I don’t think there’s much more to say. You seem to be really enthusiastic about supporting a billionaires money extraction machine and can’t understand that the affects of a company go further than your enjoyment of their product. You are defending the boot because it’s fluffy and soft.
archive.ph/dmHDP (FT article)