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Steam is a ticking time bomb

⁨130⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨corbin@infosec.pub⁩ to ⁨technology@beehaw.org⁩

https://www.spacebar.news/steam-time-bomb/

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  • randy@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.

    Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode… Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

    Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

    I don’t disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author’s key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn’t investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn’t too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve’s attention. So who is being “anti-consumer” in this example, Valve or Apple?

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    • DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Agreed. This is a superficial history lesson masquerading as an article. While nothing lasts forever and Steam has its issues, the examples being cited are not supporting the not outrageous prediction that Steam might get worse in the future. It’s just not very insightful.

      Anyone who, unlike the author, actually had to deal with early versions of Steam can attest to the fact that in most ways, the platform has dramatically improved.

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    • Farias@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      To be clear there’s only been a single generation (2006) of x86 based Macs that weren’t 64bit. They’ve been telling everyone since 2007 (well actually earlier even, the final PPC generation was 64bit), that the 32bit was going to go away.

      I hate to defend Apple arbitrarily but all us developers had plenty of notice, and had to specifically reconfigure the default settings on their projects to only be 32bit. If developers ignore deprecation notices for over a decade, then is it really the fault of the other side?

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      • IronTwo@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I am not a developer and honestly curious about this. What’s Apple’s reason for ditching 32 bit programs? Isn’t backwards compatibility a net positive for both developers and consumers?

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    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I wouldn’t say Apple disregards backwards compatibility, but they certainly don’t prioritize it to the degree Microsoft does, or that the general open-source community does. For Microsoft, backwards compatibility is their bread and butter. Enterprise customers have all sorts of unsupported legacy shit, and it dictates purchasing decisions and upgrade schedules.

      Apple gave devs and users a ton of lead time before dropping 32-bit support. The last 32-bit Mac hardware was in 2006 (the first gen of Intel Macs); it wasn’t until Catalina’s release in 2019 that 32-bit apps stopped running, and Apple continued releasing security updates for older OSes that could run 32-bit apps for a couple years after that. So that was basically 15 years of notice for devs to release 64-bit apps.

      That was much more time than they gave Classic Mac apps under OS X, or PowerPC apps on Intel. I was much more annoyed when PowerPC support was axed. Only a matter of time until Intel apps stop running on Apple Silicon, too. That’s gonna be the end of the world for Steam games. Ironically, it’s already easier to run legacy Windows and Linux games on Mac than it is to run legacy Mac games.

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    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yeah, totally agree that we shouldn’t go all in on trusting valve, but apple is definitely the anti-consumer one here. I don’t think valve would support DX if they could get away with it. Apple deprecating everything but metal without making it an open spec basically said, “we don’t want anyone gaming on our platform”.

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    • corbin@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. Apple very obviously doesn’t want the Mac gaming ecosystem to exist in the same capacity as Windows and Linux, but Valve also has an obligation to its customers using Macs to keep the service running well.

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      • YaBoyMax@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        macOS 10.14 has been EOL for more than 2 years now and basically every Mac released since 2012 is compatible with 10.15. Valve also didn’t just flip a switch and turn off support; they’re just no longer providing updates. I don’t think Valve shoulders any blame in this specific case - it’s unreasonable to expect any company to indefinitely support platforms that are effectively obsolete.

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      • verdare@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Yeah, Valve has put a lot of effort into bridging the compatibility gap for Linux. Most of that work could also be ported to macOS, but they just don’t care.

        It’s a shame, because getting 32-bit to 64-bit compatibility working would help Linux as well. I don’t know how much longer distros want to keep supporting 32-but libraries, and some distros have already dropped them.

        That said, macOS compatibility seems like a non-sequitur for an article calling Steam a “time bomb.” DRM is definitely the bigger issue here.

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  • mox@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I have my criticisms of Steam, but I see no sign of it marching toward some kind of big anti-customer explosion as suggested in this article. Unlike most others, it’s a privately owned company, so it doesn’t have investors pressuring toward enshittification. We can see the result by looking back at the past decade or so: Steam has been operating more or less the same.

    Meanwhile, the author offers for contrast Epic Games, a major source of platform exclusives and surveillance software (file-snooping store app, client-side anti-cheat, Epic Online Services “telemetry”), all of which are very much anti-customer.

    AFAIK, only one of the other stores listed is actually better for customers in any significant way: GOG. (And for the record, I mostly like GOG.) But it was mentioned so briefly that it feels like the author only did so in hopes of influencing GOG fans.

    Overall, this post looks a lot like astroturfing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be sponsored by Epic or Microsoft.

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    • TwilightVulpine@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I get the risks of putting all eggs in one basket, but whenever people argue for competition using Epic as an example, a company that is demonstrably more anti-competitive and anti-consumer, it shows that they just think of the matter of theoretical ideals of evenness as opposed to benefits to the customers. I don't see any good coming from Epic having as much or more marketshare than Steam.

      Unlike GOG which only offers DRM-free games, a substantial advantage compared to any other store.

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      • stardust@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Makes me think of a Walmart opening up in a town and people arguing that the residents should buy from there because it’s competition. Company just existing doesn’t make it good.

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    • Corgana@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Well said, private companies are incentivized to make their customers happy. Corporations are incentivized to make their shareholders happy. Sometimes those goals align, but they are not the same.

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  • Kostyeah@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What a garbage article lol. The only two arguments I can pick out are 1. Old steam games haven’t been updated to work on macOS and 2. Some games require 3rd party launchers. I think the author was just angry that his mac dropped support for a 20 year old game.

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    • PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Agreed, shitty read. The 30% cut is crazy high though, and IMO the best point the article has. Steam DOES have a monopoly and that’s inherently bad

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      • Nath@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It isn’t a monopoly though. Even ignoring the Blizzards, Epics and GOGs of the web, any developer can host their game on their own Web site and market it completely independently of Steam and keep 100% of their takings.

        The monopoly on storefront argument holds water in mobile land where side-loading a game is not possible/easy. In the world of computers though, I don’t think the same standard applies.

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      • Kid_Thunder@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        A 30% cut for steam games sold on steam and a 0% cut for steam keys sold by the publisher wherever they want with the caveat that they must give steam users the same sales at around the same time. They get their games hosted on Steam's industry best CDN, a page with support for images and videos, an API with features users like, workshop API for mod hosting and delivery, and other SteamWorks API stuff for stuff like multiplayer, patch management without charging a fee for it, forum hosting to hit the highlights. Pretty much all of that drives engagement and is mostly turn-key though you do have to programmatically interact with their API when it makes sense.

        Steam provides a lot of benefit for a 30% cut of what is sold on their store front and a lot more benefit for getting all of the above for a 0% cut if they sell steam keys outside of steam.

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      • exanime@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Steam DOES have a monopoly and that’s inherently bad

        Being popular does not make steam a monopoly… My son plays 80% steam games but has Epic launcher installed and plays rocket League regularly

        There is nothing in Steam preventing or even making it hard for you to run PC games in any other way

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      • stardust@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Monopoly on a platform that they don’t own? That being Microsoft? Then seeing how epic isn’t even profitable on the launcher side and is a loss leader while their launcher is barebones it raises the question of what cut is actually realistic that allows a company to have a feature rich launcher and branch out into stuff like Linux, VR, and Steam Deck.

        Current state feels more like Walmart expanding into new territory and trying to lure people with low prices, but isn’t sustainable with the main goal just being expansion.

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      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Not like any other app store does take 30% except for some high volume games/publishers.
        Apple does the same. Hell they seem to have custom rules for each of the app devs (according to Linus and Luke from LTT: I believe this clip contains most of it.
        They recently talked about it again
        . Essentially they developed the app payment like Netflix. Apple said “No, that’s against our rules” and refused the submission of the update. Meanwhile Netflix supposedly still had the same communication for a long time.)

        Same goes with Google and probably a number of other external stores.
        Amazon seems to take up to 20% depending on the item (Source: sell.amazon.com/pricing.

        At least Steam does provide a forum, community features and the update framework and infrastructure.
        Personally I would be happy to take the offering over maybe needing to host and maintain the tech stack myself. Now mind you, maybe some other dev would rather do it themself and maybe wish to opt-out of the ecosystem. That is totally valid.

        (Warning/Disclaimer: I only heard about that. I do not have first hand experience!) Apple for example takes a percentage for processing a payment and offers an invoicing system. Some may like that. Others could maybe negotiate a better deal with another provider and maybe even offer tools that integrate better with their existing accounting and ERP software.

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    • Grimpen@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Can’t you use Proton on Mac? I’d think that would solve most compatibility problems.

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      • Railcar8095@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        The problem is that proton needs to translate direct X to Vulcan, but Apple doesn’t allow Vulcan, it has to be their own thing, Metal.

        So it’s a lot of work for valve and fully dependent on apple not screwing them.

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      • nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        That or Rosetta, the built-in, hardware-accelerated x86_64 compatibility layer.

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    • Zworf@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Well the third-party launchers is extremely annoying, I have to say. Buying a game on Steam and then it forcing you to install yet another launcher (I have like 8 on my gaming PC now) really pisses me off.

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  • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You forgot the Mac

    Lol, fuck Mac. If Apple cared about gaming, they wouldn’t have created Metal and collaborated on Vulkan. Fuck them. Valve went with Linux because they can change it to fit their needs. Can’t do that with Apple.
    Microsoft is only supported by Valve because it has large marketshare and can’t be ignored, but it’s clear that Valve is doing everything possible to get away from them: see Steam Deck.

    In general, I agree with Steam wielding too much power and if they abused it, I’d be out. I have my gaming hours and can live without gaming no problem. They wouldn’t get any more money from me as soon as they enshittified.

    What would get me away from steam is an opensource gaming store with games that have no DRM and are predominantly opensource. Or another gaming store that worked on Linux and allowed playing games with my other linux buddies.
    Get use that and I’m out.

    Anti Commercial AI thingy

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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    • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Have you considered gog? They may not be betting heavily on Linux or have as a big of a selection but their games are DRM free. You can even install gog Galaxy, a game manager similar to Steam.

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      • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Doesn’t seem like GOG galaxy is for linux

        GOG GALAXY 2.0 Open Beta is available for Windows and Mac. Please download the installer on your PC.

        That’s a disappointment, but Heroic Launcher is. I’ll give it a shot and see if there are new games on there for me. The name “Good Old Games” gave me the impression it was for stuff like boomer shooters or side-scrollers and stuff.

        Anti Commercial AI thingy

        CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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    • flora_explora@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I 100% agree

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  • wahming@monyet.cc ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This is why beehaw needs downvotes. Crappy submissions like this article that don’t make any sense

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    • exanime@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Thank you… I was reading and thinking “this makes no sense… Does the author know what a monopoly actually is??”

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    • Templa@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      No, Beehaw doesn’t need downvotes.

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      • derbis@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I think it’s fair to acknowledge that everything is a trade-off, and without downvotes, we have to accept the downsides.

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    • Railcar8095@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Might be due to my instance, but I see downvotes. Not nearly enough as it should have after reading the article though.

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    • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      fwiw, OP wrote the article himself and then spammed it to lots of different instances. Definitely worth blocking this spammer.

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  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism

    I’m glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn’t choose that, and they’re certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.

    It really feels like this author is just saying, “they’re resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo ‘timebomb’!”.

    “Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”

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    • BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      “Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”

      Never thought about it that way, welp, might as well get it over with.

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    • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The difference between Valve and almost every other company that suffers from “capitalism” is that Valve is a private company, they don’t have shareholders, investors and an outsider asshole CEO demanding enshittification in the name of exponential growth.

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    • corbin@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The issue is Steam and Valve being held up as the ‘one good company’, when there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Valve does many of the same practices as Epic, EA, etc., but there’s a double standard with Valve because it’s the default experience. The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.

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      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        The inevitable decline of Steam is going to be much worse after people spent a decade giving it a free pass on lesser issues.

        What specifically are you envisioning? If this is just a general kind of, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall” supposition, I don’t think that really holds any water beyond being a platitude. If anything, Steam being so ubiquitous could more easily make it’s eventual decline a catalyst for legislation to give software license ownership stronger consumer protections. The idea that we should either condemn it now or stop using it, before its decline, makes no sense to me. Is GOG better? Sure. Can it fully replace Steam? No. Is Steam better than Epic, Origin, UPlay? Absolutely. I’m just not sure what the real point of all this condemnation is when they’re by far trying, by and large, to treat consumers well. It’s just blaming Valve for not being totally and eternally immune to the effects of Capitalism.

        the ‘one good company’

        No one claims this. The only thing remotely close to that which people claim is that Valve is uniquely positioned to be the best digital games distribution platform due to its private ownership insulating it against shareholder demands (which is by far the largest driver of enshittification).

        there are plenty of examples to the contrary

        Of course, it’s a company. But it’s still a billion times better than most of its competitors.

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      • Mohaim@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It’ll be fine until they go public (though maybe a few billion is enough for gaben and they won’t, but I’m not banking on it), then it’ll be an inevitable decline like all the others.

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    • ShepherdPie@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      “Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”

      I get your point, but this metaphor would be more applicable if historically every human on earth murdered someone during their lifetime. I think Steam/Valve will remain the same as long as their current leadership is in place. 999 times out of 1000, once the original founders are gone, any company begins the enshittification process, whether it’s a major business like Valve or a local chain of grocery stores.

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      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Sure, and when that happens we should (and many will) abandon the platform. But since, as you seem to be implying, all businesses under Capitalism will eventually enshittify, there’s no point abandoning it beforehand, because any alternative you move to will also eventually do so.

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  • dandi8@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Steam is a ticking time bomb but mostly for the reason that you don't own the games you purchase there and you can't back them up (mostly) so when Steam decides to ban your account or just closes down, you lose all of your games forever.

    More people should push for DRM-free games with offline installers, like GOG and Itch offer.

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    • averyminya@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Idk, there’s a backup system that I’ve put on a hard drive with a very easy to find GitHub steam drm remover. Haven’t had any issues playing my games without a steam account – sans online services for some, but most of the time I’m on trips or without Internet anyway. That said, if the idea is that in some 5-10-20 years this will happen, I feel like a lot of the online services won’t be around… For as much as I love Helldivers 2, I don’t really expect it to be around in 7 years. Online games from 2013 aren’t all around either, and those that are aren’t super populated.

      On the other hand, a lot of these online services do rely on Steam, so if it went down a lot of them would need the same unofficial online servers.

      I’d be more concerned if Steam were to have extreme DRM, but it’s so laughable that it’s literally worth paying for the game just to have the streaming/per game notes/cloud saves and for current games to not have to deal with updates and online services. But a Steam Library of mostly single player games? Anyone who is concerned can get a $50HDD and install/backup their games with Steam to and then apply the patch. Of the issues Steam has, I think this particular one is low on the list. And per the articles issue, I would actually blame the OS more than the storefront. I used to game on Mac’s from 2007-2013 and let me tell you, Steam was a freaking triumph. All the Mac game stores were truly short lived, had poor support while they were alive and had things like license activations per machine, so good luck past 5 computers (talk about 15 years). Back then Aspyer ports were really great too, always something to look forward to.

      Back then Steams issue was that it didn’t have refunds, Tuesday Maintenance, and sometimes it would just be buggy for a bit when trying to open (on OSX – never really had an issue on Windows). Since then they’ve only made it more service oriented, doing things they absolutely should, but didn’t have to, like refunds applying to everyone after the AUS lawsuit instead of just that region. Looking at Apple for this one.

      I would implore the author of this article to go back in time, get their games on the macgames store and other similar storefronts for OSX and I would wonder how they fare today.

      I have my accounts. I have no access to those games because licenses were activated too many times or because they no longer support the current OS. So I’m effectively limited to a previous version of OSX which cannot download the app because I need a new version of the OSX store. I don’t have the right terms but it was hours of hassle to find out that my OSX copy of Borderlands, Assassins Creed II and Brotherhood, and a couple others are just gone. To add insult to injury, I had to log into the account every year to keep my “platinum points” that you got for buying on that storefront, to use for discounts etc. I didn’t log in so byebye incentive!

      My point? I had about 250 SteamPlay games that I bought and used on OSX as a Mac gamer, which seamlessly downloaded on PC when I switched to Windows for my desktop computer. None of this is to say that Steam doesn’t or can’t have shortcomings, but rather that it is a substantially better service than than pretty much every alternative right now, save for GOG probably.

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      • Grimpen@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        On the topic of games with an online component, wouldn’t it be great if they could run indefinitely?

        www.stopkillinggames.com

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  • Auzy@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Lemmy has gotten to the point everything is getting classed as enahittification or whatever

    It’s actually getting crappy being here

    Like the whole section about macos. Apple constantly screws developers, and somehow, the author has seemed to blame valve lol. There’s a lot of reason lots of people don’t develop for Mac, and they’re mostly valid rather than political

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    • muhyb@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Apparently people at beehaw don’t have downvote button, kinda explains this situation. The very same article on lemmy.ml is at -56 votes (at least that’s what seems to me).

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    • Sho@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It’s like people are posting that BS content to bring the mood down here on purpose.

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    • graff@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Lemmy has gotten to the point everything is getting classed as enahittification or whatever

      You could say that the discourse around enshittification has become enshittified

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  • muhyb@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Hahaha, this article mainly sucks.

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  • Nia_The_Cat@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    [deleted]
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    • Butterbee@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I do this too. If it’s on Gog I buy it there. I hope gog manages to stay around but even if it doesn’t I can grab the offline installers for the games I have purchased and back them up elsewhere.

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      • luciole@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Does anyone actually use offline installers on a regular basis? I tried a few times and I had problems. Dunno if just bad luck. Never managed to install Pillars on eternity with it because it errored out every time. Another game’s offline installer (can’t remember which) would stall for hours then crash. I suspect a lot of users would be in for a surprise if they actually tried them.

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    • warm@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      There's a lot of DRM-free games on Steam too. It's up to developers to use their DRM, it's not a requirement by Valve.

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  • ulkesh@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The article in no way describes any actions taken by Valve that leads me to believe there is any impending enshittification. They simply have made decisions, a lot of which they have stuck with for many years.

    Enshittification has to do with bait and switch, effectively. It’s luring customers into a false sense of loyalty and then abusing that to their financial gain (see: Reddit and Spez from 2023).

    The article basically says “there are some decisions by Valve I like, and some I don’t.” That in no way provides any path toward some bomb going off. Perhaps time will prove the author right, of course, because any company can easily decide to screw over their customers, but the article is click-bait and completely speculative as to what may happen.

    And due to all of the above, I think the bomb is about to go off where elephants will fly out of my refrigerator and steal my soda.

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    • ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I don’t know why the article doesn’t bring up Valve being the company to bring loot boxes and that business model to gaming as the prime example. Valve earns extreme money from the skins market and gambling in CSGO / CS2 since they sell the keys and take a cut of trades as well. They’re far more concerned with money than actually caring for the people involved. Gambling ruins lives and Valve is the gambling company that faces by far the least vitriol in that horrendous crowd.

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      • Faydaikin@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Probably because Valve doesn’t make games anymore. Not on any serious level anyway.

        Most of their games are old as hell, and most of them where in the “proof of concept” relm. They only really made games to push the technology they were working with.

        It’d be a poor argument to bring up their old catalog of games from 20 years ago as something that made them a worse company today.

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  • gnuplusmatt@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    TLDR - Steam is shit because it’s still 32bit?

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    • Xatolos@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      More like it’s because it doesn’t support Mac as much as they want them to.

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    • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      More like, if the Steam app ever goes 64bit, watch out. A non-shittified app like so should never require 4gb+ of RAM or anything more complicated than a 32bit instruction set.

      not correcting you on the contents of the article or anything, just that 32bit is nothing close to a mark against the Steam app.

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      • Zangoose@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Isn’t supporting 32-bit apps on a 64-bit OS a security concern though? I thought that’s why some linux distros were disabling 32-bit repositories by default on their 64-bit versions

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  • stardust@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    This reads like an epic ad that expects people to buy from epic for just existing. Like arguing people should buy from the new Walmart that opened up in their town because it’s competition.

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  • pythonoob@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Lol at the last section of the article. Valve is actually bad guys! Just trust me!

    Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.

    Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full ‘enshittification’ of Steam will commence.

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  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s amazing that a company who’s primary product is a DRM system managed to make so many people think they’re the “good guys”

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    • warm@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      There's a lot of DRM-free games on Steam. It's up to developers to use their DRM, it's not a requirement by Valve.

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      • t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        The person you’re responding to is one of those people that thinks Steam is the DRM, because 1) it checks games against your account the first time you run them, and 2) they don’t provide offline installers like GOG.

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    • beepnoise@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Truth be told, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

      PC Gaming has had tons of DRM examples - from SecuROM (anyone remember those times?) to modern day Denuvo DRM.

      So there are a few unpopular DRMs out there:

      • Disc checking based DRM (if the disc was cooked, that's your paid game down the drain)
      • CD Key based DRM (if you lost the CD Key, that's your paid game down the drain)
      • Online activation (you registered the same game on two different PCs? Try that again one more time and you're done for. For added bonus, sometimes the activation software would register the same PC as different hardware because someone had the audacity to upgrade their hardware!)
      • Always online - need I say more?
      • Cloud gaming - now with the added joy of not owning the ones and zeros you paid for!!

      Steam has managed to use account based DRM while avoiding the trappings of pretty much all of the above (for some games you can enter a CD key, and that game is permanently attached to your account, which is great if you lose the disc, but sucks if you want to sell the physical game on afterwards), while the competition used any of the above (some used multiple layers of DRM, which is eurgh).

      Then on top of that, hats off to Valve - they do tend to listen to their customers and give them what they want, even if the whole point is to keep them tied to using Steam and strangle out the competition:

      • cloud saving
      • Steam Workshops
      • Game streaming via local network
      • Sharing the game library with family
      • Controller support with button remapping for legacy games with poor support
      • In store game reviews
      • Store algoritm suggestions based on the game categories you buy and what you friends buy
      • Discussion forums (even if they can be thoroughly toxic at times)
      • Guides (the formatting is awful)
      • Fairly deep and independent social integration
      • Built in audio streaming via Steam
      • Those card things that you can sell for a bit of money or craft

      Compare that to Origin, Epic Store, GOG etc. They just cannot compete with what Valve offers in terms of features on top of features.

      What bothers me about Valve is that

      • They have such a chokehold on PC gaming that everything else feels inferior, and no other company can really compete in terms of features
      • They have fought refunds in the past (as mentioned in the article)
      • The whole paid modding fiasco because Valve really wanted to financially exploit a community known to give stuff away for free
      • How they often abandon their own products due to lack of customer attention and their limited size due to wanting to remain a limited company
        • I'm looking at Valve Index, and apart from Half Life: Alyx, I don't see much in the way of new games. Even worse is that I watched someone on YouTube basically explain that there are still glitches and weird stuff that occurs in the Valve Index - aa product that costs £919 here in the UK.
        • I'm also looking at the Steam Controller, which has been very, very neglected with no talk of a sequel (given how successful the Steam Deck has been, I'm shocked at the lack of a "companion controller")
        • I'm also looking at the infamous Steam PCs that completely flopped
      • How TF2 started the trend (at least on Steam) of microtransactions in games, and how CS:GO has carried that flag (and started a gambling community which has probably done untold damage to young children as they grow into adults and are confronted with the world of gambling)
      • How Valve, as a company that started off making games, has absolutely no desire whatsoever to make games anymore because of how wildly successful they are.

      And this is the stuff I can think of at the top of my head. I was going to say it also concerns me they don't have a bug bounty program, but it turns out now they do.

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  • philpo@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Steam is a major problem for a lot of reasons,but basically none of the reasons the author gave are the main problem - It sounds more like a whining of a Mac/Apple user. Once again…

    There are hundreds of more important problems with Steam.

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  • PenguinTD@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I wish that in the future developer can just host their own game with very minimum cost/overhead unless they really need some platform’s backend feature. (multiplayer game mostly.)

    For single player game I really don’t see why it is so difficulty to host (even torrent it) would be a hard thing to do. During the shareware/pre-steam days where you may have downloaded the full game with a soft lock, I’ve played a whole game and then try find way to send my money as well. (was not living in NA at that time and there was no guarantee that a game will be imported with official vendor.)

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  • Vodulas@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Just weird aside, but the meme they use as an example implies that you have to pay to add friends on steam, and that is just a weird example to use.

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