Also anticompetitive practices and lying about anticompetitive practices. Neglecting the entire system for extensive periods of time and rarely being proactive about anything that requires they change anything or do actual work. Their servers often break on Tuesdays with no warning or notice or consistent timing. They had forced arbitration for quite a while and only dropped it because some clever lawyers made it extremely expensive for them to keep using it.
In my eyes, they are a bunch of semi-douchy gamer folks who stumbled into being the most successful digital storefront on PC and have dominated by default for literal decades. They are gamers as such and have had a few decent ideas. They also aren’t obsessed with the next quarter and don’t eagerly sacrifice long term for short term gains. I have no problem giving them credit for that. They also occasionally take actions/stances that, whether or not it is their primary motivation, feel pro consumer to their customers. They are mostly just lazy and hesitant to change anything until forced to - they are absolutely fucking rolling in money and don’t want to mess with a good thing.
If there was a well-funded competitor that wasn’t lead by money hungry asshats, I think everyone would feel differently about Valve.
GOG has its own issues, but honestly I’m just happy they both exist, even with their flaws. In this capitalist hellscape full of businesses eager to harvest every cent possible from customers with no regard for anything but their next quarterly profit… I’ll take heavily flawed.
ddplf@szmer.info 1 day ago
You forgot about promoting gambling among children, but I get it, it’s a pretty minor thing as compared to what you listed
Mwa@thelemmy.club 1 day ago
oh right forgot about that