I love steam, but let’s get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
GabeN will not live forever. The vultures circle endlessly, and one day they will win. There is no good ending here (for now).
Consider building a tower, downloading everything youve purchased on steam, and keep it offline. Maybe have a 2nd set of hard drives as a backup. Put these priceless artifacts in your will.
Plan accordingly and enjoy the ride while it lasts.
I love steam, but let’s get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
Steam is an example where I’m not sure when it would happen.
It already comes with a hefty fee of 30% per sale on the platform. I don’t think they can raise that without serious backlash. And there also isn’t really a need, Steam prints money. It prints money because it’s where users are. Users are there because they like the features. Some good features are only there because of laws (e.g. refunding); Valve can’t remove these.
So how would you make the service even more profitable?
Enshittification happens because corporations want (more) money out of a service that built a userbase. These were often running at a loss. To turn a profit, they need to change.
Steam can sell you licenses to games you don’t own already. It’s up to each publisher. Valve doesn’t care, they just deliver.
Arrg matey!
I don’t play many AAA games but I’m forever gutted that the fight to make them able to be pirated is a losing battle. I want to pay for my indie games but on occasion I look online at the crack status of AAA games from oecen 2-3 years ago and they’re still not playable.
It creates a weird dichotomy where people who pirate or at least don’t buy expensive games don’t take part in the mainstream gaming conversation at all, which is totally different from the rest of pirated media.
Which AAA aren’t cracked?
The only two I can think of (that I’ve ever thought of playing but haven’t been able to pirate) are the newer Dragons Dogma and the recent Black Myth Wukong game but those arent from 2-3 years ago so I’m curious which ones you are thinking about.
The game I always think of checking out is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, just to find it hasn’t been cracked.
I know assassin’s creed is a bit of a crap franchise but I have a love / hate relationship with the game and think mirage looks made for me. Every few months since release I’ve looked up it’s crack status and not just has it not been cracked but generally the comments around it are that it’s from the new era of uncrackable games.
There is no such thing as an uncrackable game. It is “just” variable levels of hard-to-crack. And some peopl are not willing or able to put in so much work to do it.
I agree that no games are uncrackable in theory, but to my understanding (from about two years to two months ago at least), there were only two people able to crack new denuvo games due to how intensely complex the task is. One of those people only cracks football games and the other is EMPRESS, who from what I’ve seen glancing into the scene, is one crazy lady.
Although modern denuvo may technically be crackable, but while it’s so difficult that only a handful of people have the skill to do it and takes hundreds of hours of work per game, for all intents and purposes, it may as well be uncrackable.
That’s right. It’s a billion-bucks-industry against less than a handful people. Yet it’s still not uncrackable. There’s just nearly noone left to do it anymore so in the end they might win. And the legit customers loose even more, as we have to endure this ugly as fuck drm.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
Was valve ever good to begin with? Their main products is a useless proprietary software launcher and they make billions off abducting kids into gambling and selling their data.
I loathe their lootbox system but I’d say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I’d put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.
I don’t think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.
You don’t need a proprietary launcher to run software. A company who abduct kids into gambling to make more billions to me sound quite bad.
steam survey says 1.92% is on linux. So there’s about 736,651 linux users on steam?! neat
https://partner.steamgames.com/ says there are 132 million monthly active Steam users, so that’s more like 2.5 million Linux users on Steam.
so cocurrent means monthly active?
Many of those Steam Deck, I bet.
Bazzite on my desktop and a Steamdeck here!
huh, what dropped in 2020 that caused that big spike?
COVID-19. 😏
Gaben behind Covid-19 confirmed?
Damn, you reply quick. yep, I realized the instant i asked and felt stupid, eheh.
Don’t delete your comment for asking a legit question! Others might be ignorant as well and benefit from the Q&A.
All of them playing that KFC dating Sim
Cant believe this actually exist xd https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colonel_Sanders_A_Finger_Lickin_Good_Dating_Simulator/
Fuck this platform.
Fuck mandatory DRM.
Fuck the garbage runtime that takes minutes to start every time I wanna play a goddamn single player game.
Fuck mandatory updates every time I want to play a goddamn single player game.
Fuck popup advertisements for events that reappear year by year no matter how many times I’ve disabled them
This platform prevents you from owning anything…
I don’t know how anyone could support this garbage.
Steam forces games to have DRM?
I guess i didnt notice the DRM of the games installed from steam that i was able to play without steam installed
If like you say Steam is only garbage, make a list of good alternative.
-
Epic Game (worst)
- Launcher -> horrible and worst than Steam. Actually you can use heroic games launcher (less problems)
- Store -> really bad
- DRM
- Need update to play game
- Only Windows / Mac (i don’t care about mobile for the small amount of game)
- Not version for Linux and Tim Sweeney not like Linux and say a big amount of stupidity.
- Doesn’t have all the tools and feature for dev like Steam
- No Workshop alternative
-
Gog (need more game and feature)
- Gog galaxy (latest test in 2022) -> good launcher but no Linux version
- Games for Windows, Linux, Mac
- Not all game can be found here because it’s only DRM free game
- Doesn’t have all the tools and feature for dev like Steam
- No Workshop alternative
From what i can see, Steam is not perfect but it’s better than Epic for sure, and have more feature and game than Gog. I don’t include itch because for me it’s not a gaming store.
If anyone have another store, or want to correct anything.
What about… Physical media? Like, ordering a dvd from amazon with your game on it that you then play on a machine that’s not even connected to the Internet?
I see some problem with physical media :
- Storage: ~100Go (Blu-ray), ~5Go on DVD
- For all the non opti game who take more than 100Go of space ? Multiple DVD/Blu-ray ?
- Update: actually if a game need a update how to do this ?
- Download a zip file to apply the patch ? Possibility to directly write the patch on the DVD/Blu-ray for future install ?
If we use DVD/Blu-ray we need a player to install the game (I really prefer to have one on my computer/laptop than nothing, but it’s not how things work now 😭).
I totally prefer the physical media, but it’s not perfect. To have something easy for consumer, the game industry need to do some change like : opti the game size, find a good method to update the game, and no DRM on the physical media.
For all the non opti game who take more than 100Go of space ? Multiple DVD/Blu-ray ?
Yes. That’s how it was done before, no reason to not do this now. Wing Commander 4 came on 6 CDs. As you progressed through the game, you kept advancing through them.
Update: actually if a game need a update how to do this ? Download a zip file to apply the patch ? Possibility to directly write the patch on the DVD/Blu-ray for future install ?
As Blu Rays are read only, you obviously can’t apply the patch there. The patches were always downloaded and applied to the game parts you had on your hard drive. What was wrong with that?
If we use DVD/Blu-ray we need a player to install the game
You need a device to read physical media to actually read physical media, yes.
it’s not how things work now
It’s not how things work because games that came on physical media had literally no advantage anymore at some point. With physical media just being used to speed up the first install in your always-online environment and bandwidth being no longer an issue, they just became obsolete. If I could have played half life 2 without steam using my disc, it would have been worth keeping. With the box being essentially just a bulky envelope for a product key, it turned out to be just a hassle.
At some point, steam will enshittify or shut down. That’s when we will realize that online only distribution might not have been such a great idea.
As Blu Rays are read only, you obviously can’t apply the patch there. The patches were always downloaded and applied to the game parts you had on your hard drive. What was wrong with that?
You need a “launcher” just to download update, and it’s not the most ideal for me. I prefer to have nothing between the button play (or click on the executable), and the game launch.
At some point, steam will enshittify or shut down. That’s when we will realize that online only distribution might not have been such a great idea.
I agree with you, only online is totally stupid because the moment the service shutdown you lose everything. This is why GOG is good, because after buying a game, I can create backup on external disk. The only biggest problem for me is they don’t have a good Linux integration for GOG Galaxy 2.
This is not perfect, but it’s a better start than nothing. And it’s difficult to do this because of DRM on other store.
- Storage: ~100Go (Blu-ray), ~5Go on DVD
-
I honestly thought the number of concurrent users was a lot higher a lot longer ago, but either way, it’s come a long way since ~2003?
38 million only? I thought there were way more gamers out there. Isn’t it a market bigger than TV and cinema combined? (maybe even sports included?)
These are concurrent users, i.e. the number of players all playing at one time. The total number of Steam users is WAY higher.
I wonder how many millions they need to be inspired to update their platform so it doesn’t need a regular outage every Tuesday.
