Okay, by your own account Valve’s good standing is “imaginary honest,old school merchant”. So can you point out at least some malicious acts they performed?
I am not just blindly defending them, I have no benefit in doing so. But in reality, especially compared to other publishers, they are really benign. I can’t remember when was the last time Valve screwed over their customers. Sure they disappointed some people with bad game releases, but all those people got their money back. Compare that to what Blizzard, EA or Bethesda do. It’s night and day.
Valve fought against pressure from regulators to have a returns policy tooth and nail. Memory holed.
The first major platform to establish one of those was actually EA’s Origin. Valve only agreed eventually when the rest of the competition started making that a standard and it seemed easier to just go with regulator requests at that point. Memory holed.
I’ll say this for your argument: Valve is much more likely to screw over devs than end users, as a matter of both strategy and corporate culture. Most of my issues with them historically go in that direction.
But still, there are plenty of examples of Steam getting weird about these things. You just acknowledged them using their position to enforce DRM minutes ago, and that’s already down the memory hole.
I actually agree that Valve is pretty solid operationally when it comes to customer service, at least for their size. They have a good view of short versus long term gain. But there’s a big, big gap between being good at community management and customer service and being “night and day” against the “malicious” competition. That narrative is nuts.
Okay, by your own account Valve’s good standing is “imaginary honest,old school merchant”. So can you point out at least some malicious acts they performed?
I am not just blindly defending them, I have no benefit in doing so. But in reality, especially compared to other publishers, they are really benign. I can’t remember when was the last time Valve screwed over their customers. Sure they disappointed some people with bad game releases, but all those people got their money back. Compare that to what Blizzard, EA or Bethesda do. It’s night and day.
Again the memory hole.
Valve fought against pressure from regulators to have a returns policy tooth and nail. Memory holed.
The first major platform to establish one of those was actually EA’s Origin. Valve only agreed eventually when the rest of the competition started making that a standard and it seemed easier to just go with regulator requests at that point. Memory holed.
I’ll say this for your argument: Valve is much more likely to screw over devs than end users, as a matter of both strategy and corporate culture. Most of my issues with them historically go in that direction.
But still, there are plenty of examples of Steam getting weird about these things. You just acknowledged them using their position to enforce DRM minutes ago, and that’s already down the memory hole.
I actually agree that Valve is pretty solid operationally when it comes to customer service, at least for their size. They have a good view of short versus long term gain. But there’s a big, big gap between being good at community management and customer service and being “night and day” against the “malicious” competition. That narrative is nuts.