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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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Steam
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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.
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.
They could add a fee to re-download games, a subscription requirement to use friend invites, start throwing spam notifications on your screen/in your email inbox about “sponsored content”, upload your browser history for better ad targeting, etc. the list gets pretty long pretty quickly. Just look at what the Epic store does right now (hint, it’s almost all of those things already).
The Epic "Store" barely qualifies as such, no wonder they're trying to get at least something out of it
Think of it more like Netflix. Netflix was great, then the market fractured and Netflix enshitified in response.
What it would take here is for a publisher to become a real distributor in the space, but competition is weak right now. Just like it really took Disney wading in to disrupt Netflix, it would take someone equally large, like Microsoft, to disrupt Steam. Sorry Ubisoft, but you don't cut it.
Publishers already tried this (EA, Ubisoft, etc) and it didn't really work. They came back to Steam.
That's why I think it has to be someone who owns a bunch of publishers, like Microsoft. Like how Disney is not just Disney, but also Pixar, Marvel, ABC, ESPN, etc... It's why people shit on Paramount+. There's just nothing there worth watching.
Gun to my head I can't be bothered using a Microsoft store if they were to make one lol. Hell Im not even sure how I managed to escape their os, lol.
because they didnt learn, in order to make more profit per sale on your platform, you either:
make a platform consumer friendly enough that people are willing to use it (the part that is most important)
or
make a game thats "good enough" that people will use your platform as a service (e.g Riot)
EA and Ubisoft (mostly) failed at both.
They will never go public so enshittification rules don't necessarily apply
Never say never, but I don't think it's going to happen while Gabe is in charge
I doubt gabe would choose a successor that would make steam public either, though.
Maybe, maybe not. As equity holders get older they may be looking to cash out so they can fuel their retirements.
I don't think that's something Gabe is interested in, but we're talking about what will happen when he dies.
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.
Sure, but hopefully that's a very long time away, and there's always piracy. Hopefully Gabe lasts for another 20 years or longer. Hopefully he has a high-quality person as a successor.
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.