KillingTimeItself

no? Bezos is substantially worse than gabe

i guess technically they have a monopoly on the market place? But it’s not like they’re ruthlessly destroying the competition like GOG, and itch.io, and epic games. They literally just offer, a better service. The alternative being that you have to buy games from like 12 different platforms that all work differently, which i think most people, would rather not deal with.

to steal 30% of the profits from people that actually make games.

for which they offer services in return, because it’s not stealing, because that’s how money works.

30% is massive. Imagine you sold something on, let’s say, Ebay and they took 30% of that money. And devs could have other options of markets to sell their games if more people realised how predatory Steam is and stopped glazing Gabe like he’s the video game messiah.

i mean sure, in the context of ebay that may make sense, but ebay doesn’t handle shipping for you, do advertising, doesnt provide you any services to do photography of your product, any information about the product you’re using. It’s literally just an online marketplace that lets you list a product, and then ship it to somebody who buys it, via a third party customer, steam does literally ALL of the middle man work. You list your game on steam, and steam does EVERYTHING else for you, except for traditional marketing, but that’s a different story. Usually if your game is good people will play it, sometimes you just need some luck, but time usually helps with that.

And devs could have other options of markets to sell their games if more people realised how predatory Steam is and stopped glazing Gabe like he’s the video game messiah.

you can quite literally just do this, it won’t have the same market reach, but it hasn’t stopped viral games before. Many a viral sensation has come from itch.

There’s a difference between gatekeeping/allowing only AAA games, and just having 0 standards of what is allowed on the store.

steam has pretty significant standards, especially now that you can’t greelight games anymore, you have to actually pay money for it to get listed, sure a lot of the games on the platform are bad, but there are also a lot of really good games, and just because a game is bad doesn’t mean it should be delisted either. Sure things like asset flips really should.

Gabe newel is a billionsire capitalist and Valve runs like any other company. Profits first and foremost.

profits first and foremost, except for the fact that a lot of people really just don’t have a problem with steam, and steam manages to develop products that obviously arent intended to make money, like proton.

Why have standards to protect consumers when Gabe needs an 8th super yatch to add to his fleet.

also im pretty sure these are just normal yachts.

i’m just saying, i can think of a lot worse things a company can do. Amazon, notably. Most countries without substantial labor protection laws, probably also rank worse. Countries currently at war, or controlled by gang violence, probably also worse.

The prison industrial complex, that’s pretty bad. Spending money because you’re mentally incapable of processing how spending money in that fashion is bad, yeah probably possibly to be worse than that.

Have you watched cofeezilla? The industry already has armed mafia structures.

im sorry steam has a militia?

i mean, out of all things a company can do that are bad, underage gambling is probably one of the better ones, and the argument in favor of it is that it’s on games like csgo and cs2, where the age range is obviously higher than an actual child.

Realistically, i think you have to be kind of stupid to get caught in gambling, but it is also definitely predatory, and there’s a reason it’s a heavily regulated industry. There’s definitely a better solution than we currently have, but it’s not as bad as it could be either.

Remember steam started the business model of not actually owning your games.

GOG exists, go use GOG. Steam is popular because they don’t fuck over buyers, and they run a good business model, people are ok not “owning” things if the service is reasonably well put together.

Gabe has made billions by stealing profit from the workers that actually make games.

steam takes a 30% cut, which isn’t all that high, especially when you consider that they develop things like proton at zero cost to anybody, including developers. You’re also getting the single largest and most widely used publishing platform, period. It’s really hard to beat something of that caliber, so it’s definitely a tradeoff. There are also cases of devs making games that become so popular they pull in millions of dollars worth of revenue.

They host tons of malware and shovelware and outright scam games and even protect them from “”““review bombing””"

in defense of steam, if they specifically curated high quality games people like you would accuse them of gate keeping the platform. Scams are definitely a thing, malware, technically is. I’ve not seen malware ever in my personal experience, and i doubt most people have, and whenever it does happen, steam responds accordingly so i’m not sure its a fair statement.

They pushed “early access” into the mainstream.

there’s nothing necessarily wrong with early access, i actually think it’s a really productive way to provide tons of play testing and development potential for smaller dev teams. Does it also incentivize shovelware? Sure, but it’s a platform you can make money on, that’s not abnormal. And again, it’s usually very well known when games are abandonware.

And because of people like you that would literally suck Gabes dick for the meme, they get away with it.

surprised you didn’t mention gambling, that’s probably the most significant argument against steam right now, they effectively run what can be considered an online casino.