I will switch to GOG or any other store the second they officially support and fund Linux gaming.
How Newell’s latest yacht? They still allow gambling in CS? Cool cool, nothing to see here.
At least he had the underdog story having companies try to beat him down.
Still unsure if he came from generational wealth, but at least there’s a story there.
Getting children addicted to illegal gambling isn’t exactly inspiring.
Yeah i’m not looking for inspiring. Guy made a company, made some good games, came within an inch of getting trounced by big bro, turned into a publishing empire then made some bad decisions.
Then we got steamdeck pushing Linux.
If not for Steam, we’re just be sitting in Epic and Blizzard’s and Microsoft’s laps.
It would be really cool if someone did a non-profit publisher, but capitalism just fucking sucks and everytime we get something nice it has to turn to shit.
Billionaire worship is so cringe. People are acting like this guy is a god just because he sells them video games. This guy might be the most evil billionaire as he sells gambling to children and manchildren.
I think Steam might be the only private company in this.
Really says a lot.
Koch Industries and Purdue Pharma salute you in your service to attempted sanewashing of private corporations.
It does.
Private companies are - often - not driven by pure greed. The people work hard for their company to be successful and they are much less likely to fuck it all over with a stupid move.
Public companies, however, are controlled by a bunch of money motivated monkeys that couldn’t give a rats ass about a company’s future. They’ll bleed it all dry and go to the next company.
Very true, sometimes they are also motivated by their hatred of gay and trans people.
Ye every private business hates them gays and trans people and wants to see them dead.
Go outside, touch some grass you lunatic.
Dude, Steam is selling games you don’t own. How greedy is that?
Digital companies sell digital goods and services. Shocker :o
least socialist lemmy user
Like most game platforms do, except Valve actually looks after their customers.
argumentum ad populum, it’s a thing, look it up
The gambling problem and grey market they created with their marketplace and their Counter Strike crates is an issue.
I never understood how that is valves problem tbh. That’s like being mad at football players for sports gambling. The second you have a somewhat open market, some people will abuse it.
Also, what’s valve supposed to do? They bab the trade bots if they can find them, they have sued the operators of those portals in the past - so what do you realistically expect from them now? Completely close the market just so some people can’t gamble anymore?
What, like ebay and amazon selling stuff they don’t own? They all get a commission for marketing, not all of the money.
Fuck them too.
I sometimes feel an anxiety when pondering what will happen when daddy Gabe isn’t here to keep the wolves at bay.
gabe is a very smart person, if he doesnt have a post death plan for steam i would be immensely surprised.
The fact he is doing research on BCIs, I like to imagine his plan is digitizing himself so he can live forever on the net.
Basically what Cave Johnson did, indirectly.
All hail the immortal cyber-lord Gaben.
That’s my fear too , whoever gets their hand on valve will decide the future of pc gaming kinda , I just hope it won’t get sold to ea , riot , tencent or whatever
Honestly, I’ve been weaning myself off Steam for awhile now. It’s great what they did to make PC gaming more accessible, but I also feel like Steam itself is an unnecessary dependency for most video games.
There should be protocols that games can implement to integrate with launchers and organize playing online.
I love my Steam Deck and Proton, but it pisses me off how many Steam games are spyware / DRMware and won’t start without internet on this PORTABLE console, and especially that Valve allows this kind of toxic shit.
So, my Steam Deck stays blocked from the internet in my firewall and I buy from GOG when available or get them from other places.
Also, Gabe can STFU about piracy being a service problem until Steam bans DRM and spyware.
You can just not buy the games that have stuff like Denuvo etc. If you keep buying them, of course they’ll keep including the DRM etc.
Steam is the storefront, and they have plenty of games you can buy without that crap.
Steam also tells you beforehand, now
Fair point.
Correct, don’t buy them.
And there’s always torrenting. Denuvo doesn’t actually stop games from being cracked.
Why not just turn on offline mode on the steam deck? Its easier than blocking it from the internet…
Still need to connect to my local network to get stuff installed on the Deck.
me: steam is terrible; it’s just drm with a nice bow on top
steam: steam visual novel fest starts now
me: i love steam stuffs more items on my wishlist
(for real tho itch.io and gog are much better use them - and download the actual offline installers from gog don’t use galaxy)
Heck, I just cut out the middleman and go straight to torrenting.
Wish I had thought to do this sooner. I would’ve saved a lot of money that really just ended up in the hands of landlords.
itch.io and gog
would switch tbh but it would need to have steam style proton integration first
heroic games launcher integrates a pretty solid proton base. Lutris also works but i find it a bit too fiddly for me.
HGL works great though, also provides native integration with EGL and GOG, which is nice.
Lutris gives you that.
Man I love it when people glaze objectively bad companies just because it’s popular opinion to like them.
Remember steam started the business model of not actually owning your games.
Gabe has made billions by stealing profit from the workers that actually make games.
They had to be sued just to offer refunds.
They host tons of malware and shovelware and outright scam games and even protect them from “”““review bombing””"
They pushed “early access” into the mainstream.
And because of people like you that would literally suck Gabes dick for the meme, they get away with it.
While I think capitalism encourages unethical business practices, keep in mind that Valve actively supports the development and popularization of the kernel as well as other projects like Wine from their profits.
And Bill Gates is trying to eradicate malaria. So should we all be glazers for Microsoft and use Windows?
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.
That’s a lot of effort to put in to trying to excuse blatantly predatory practices of a company with an almost defacto monopoly on PC games and uses said almost-monopoloy to steal 30% of the profits from people that actually make games.
GOG existing does not excuse Steam.
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.
There’s a difference between gatekeeping/allowing only AAA games, and just having 0 standards of what is allowed on the store.
Yes early access could be a good thing. But it isn’t, they allow all the blatant shovelware and asset flips because, ya know, money. Again, if they just had some fairly basic standards of what they allow on their store to stop their users being ripped off, it wouldn’t be a problem, but that wouldn’t make them as much money, so they don’t do it.
Gabe newel is a billionsire capitalist and Valve runs like any other company. Profits first and foremost.
Why have standards to protect consumers when Gabe needs an 8th super yatch to add to his fleet.
deleted by creator
G*mers have been too Stockholmed by Steam’s monopoly to recognise that everything they complain about with EA or Ubisoft all started with Valve.
Ok then fund linux gaming
That’s one of the greatest thing Valve is doing. They’re breathing life into Linux gaming.
Steam is still basically the only option AND they are actually helping Linux a lot with game compatibility. Altough, if I need games specifically on steam I’ll be buying the key from Greenmangaming (UK) or GamersGate (Sweden). If anybody has more alternatives feel free to let me know so I can add them to my list.
GOG sadly misses a majority of games atm so I just can’t replace steam with it yet.
I’m quite fond of Fanatical. They are based in the UK and also sometimes sell DRM free books/audiobooks
Ohh I’ve actually been on their website sometime. Good to know they’re UK based thanks!
Update:
What’s that?
My purchase on fanatical
Third party key market places are kinda iffy, and there have been numerous cases of the keys being offered on there having been bought with stolen credit cards, or otherwise generated in ways that aren’t quite above board.
I remember one interview with an indy dev in which they said they prefer people pirating, because chargebacks from stolen cards are actively costing them money.
For people who feel they need the entertainment games provide, but can’t afford current prices, I feel pirating games from conglomerates, and buying from smaller studios and indies is the most socially responsible way to do it, but I’m not your mum.
Edit: Huh, looks like greenmangaming gets their keys directly from the publishers. Didn’t know that was a thing. Guess I was a bit quick on the trigger there, should have checked first. Sorry about that.
G2A is probably the big example of Devs prefering you pirate instead of buying.
Only use G2A if you actively wish harm on the company making the game.
Don’t use G2A even if you wish harm on the company making the game, it’s still supporting scammers and thieves, just pirate the game.
The name GamersGate sounds like it didn’t any issues at all /s
Yeahhh I don’t know who thought that was a good name hahaha
Don’t know if you’re serious but the store is way older than that similar-sounding thing
This is the oldest “gate” scandal I can think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal but generally adding -gate after something is used for a scandalous situation. Although it makes 0.0% sense, thats just how culture picked it up. Thats how the gamergate scandal became the name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign))
Wait what exactly is the purpose of buying a steam key from a third party? And how is that profitable and not tos breaking?
Good question! Real resellers (so NOT g2a, etc) get their keys from publishers directly (so they pay for them). The publishers get these keys from steam for free and by buying them from a reseller steam takes 0% of the money. So by using an EU reseller more money stays here.
Huge plus that they aren’t publicly traded and forced to chase profits above all. Plus their employees are far and wide the best paid in the industry, and they never do mass lay offs.
This is a somewhat naive view when you consider Gabe’s multiple super-yachts. And ofc all the gambling.
The guy could be more charitable, but aside from that, what do you want him to do? If he lowers the cost of steams cut per purchase he’ll get in trouble for monopolizing the industry. Yeah, he’s too rich, but he got there without exploiting or hurting anyone. Even after he passes away, the company is already employee owned.
You’re missing the part where they make the vast majority of their money from the gambling, not from the cut they take from sales. They don’t have to run the gambling service. But they do because it’s a money faucet.
Two things: First, they very likely don’t make most of their money off of their loot box sales from the few games they own that have them. (CS, Dota 2, TF2).
Secondly, you’re just full of shit and making up that “fact”. As a private company, none of their stuff is completely public record, but using various trackers and estimates and sales numbers from game studios, Steam sells north of 700,000,000 games a year and makes a $billion or so from cs and tf2 stuff.
Since the average game sale amount is around $15; $15 X 700,000,000 = 10,500,000,000 ÷ valves cut of 30% = $3,150,000,000
Now not all studios pay that 30%. Some have lower deals based on volume and notoriety, but it’s still safe to assume that their game sales make over two billion a year. AKA well over their loot box money.
I like how when valve does it, it’s ‘gambling,’ but every other company out there it’s just ‘microtransactions’ and ‘monetization.’
Valve somehow gets 99% of the hate online for lootboxes, despite having one of the most transparent and fair implementations of them.
Like, have you people never seen a gacha? Half of them don’t even fucking publish the rates for what you can get, and make far more money than Valve does.
No, there are actual gambling sites for counter-strike items that are run by scammers who hire a youtuber, give them a huge (deliberate) win to entice kids to bet their parents wage on some stupid cosmetics’ slot machine.
steam is just so based.
I dont think a single more based company has ever existed. It rivals the greats like linux, with a touch of gambling.
Linux isn’t a company.
I dont think a single more based company has ever existed.
Hyperbole much? I like Steam as much as the next guy but lets not pretend the guy that owns 6 yachts is a good person just because he’s better than the next worst. Steam DRMs the shit out of games sold on their platform and if you’re an indie dev that wants to sell your game Steam is THE place to do it.
Steam made $10bn last year, they have about 100 employees (their parent company Valve has about 400). I used to be a bigger fan of GabeN but more recently really started considering him and looking into it and realized he’s just another unethical billionaire. This video by Coffeezilla is a good jumping off point. regarding the intentional targeting of youth with addictive gambling mechanics in loot crates and circumventing gambling laws. It’s all very purposeful and continues to this day.
Steam’s DRM is completely optional and is among the least intrusive DRMs available for developers to use. Many games are sold 100% DRM-free on Steam.
I don’t know of a single game on/from Steam that doesn’t require Steam to run. Thats DRM.
Stardew Valley, Terraria, and Starbound, to name a few I’m pretty sure are DRM free (Starbound I’m certain of). Probably plenty of others, but I haven’t tested. To see if a game requires steam, literally just install the game on Steam, copy the game folder out of the Steam install path, close steam, and launch the game.
It is entirely up to the developer if they want to use it though. It is not mandatory for a developer to use Steam DRM even if publishing on Steam.
Kerbal Space Program 1, at least used to not require steam running at all. I havent tried in a while, but it was supposed to stay that way.
It looks like they miss out on the Steamworks features “(e.g. online multiplayer, achievements, leaderboards, trading cards, etc.)” if they opt not to use their DRM, so I can understand why the vast majority of devs would want to use it.
You can actually pick and choose which parts of the steamworks api to implement, so you can have trading cards, multiplayer etc without the drm side.
from memory, i think you do need to use the drm to use family sharing, we had issue with that when we chose not to use the drm, but everything else we could implement fine without it.
Ah I didn’t realise that, thanks. The overview page made it seem like the DRM was required for any of that to work.
I will always have some admiration for a person that sets up shop in Microsoft’s back yard and bases the system on Linux. I hate the DRM aspect and couldn’t care less about what promoting whatever with children because quite frankly that’s just not going to be solved by anything other than parents taking better care of their kids. The same can be said about exposure to any kind of media, including not letting children watch commercials on Saturday morning because gee whiz, that stuff is exploitative.
To me complaints about exposing kids to gambling is just finding something to be pissed off about and reinforces my feeling that the Left has picked up the kinds of puritanism that used to be associated with the Right.
But yeah. DRM software is a serious thing to worry about. Selling people vapor is kind of a shitty thing to do.
Yeh plus they let neonazi groups usw their forums for recruiting and hate speech, because they don’t want to pay any mods.
Paying someone to do that kind of work is the opposite of Valve’s ideal, if I understand them correctly.
They prefer systems working well enough with as little human assistance as possible—see: review system with reactions and surge detection; user-defined game tags; front page recommendations completely based on trends; the market; and so on.
That’s not to say these are bad, but they could often be improved, if only Valve was willing to pay the human cost. But part of the reason Valve remains small is they try to automate as much as they can (and if it can’t be automated, it might never get done, specially considering their corporate structure).
N.B. I still prefer them over majority of companies in this space, but let’s not ignore their issues, e.g. gambling. As an aside, I also appreciate GOG’s “no DRM” stance, but I use Linux and sadly native support isn’t there. Kudos also to Itch.io.
While I wasn’t a mod for Steam proper, I was a mod for a popular game that routinely had its share of hate groups and 8ch mobs try to take over. The flagging system worked pretty well for keeping the worst of this stuff out. Plus, the publisher is permitted to make moderators for its own Steam forum. So if you are seeing shit get out of hand on a particular title, blame the publisher, not Steam.
You are allowed to say Fuck on the Internet. Why are you following the self-censorship rules for Instagram and other social networks if you are making a joke about them?
You are even allowed to say fuck on the radio and TV in some countries (like The Netherlands)
Looks like it was baked into the image template they used
No excuse. Build it from scratch again. Build it better.
We can rebuild him. We have the technology
I wouldn’t have started even dual booting Linux if it wasn’t for Steam after being pleasantly surprised with my Steam Deck played most of my Steam library. It’s the primary why I intend to get AMD gpu next time around for the better driver support, but that won’t be for a few years.
Yep, if you want a reason why Valve are “less evil” than other companies, one big thing to point to is the huge investment they’ve made into the Linux ecosystem. Even though it’s in their own interests (Microsoft locking out steam would cripple their income), we can see with Epic suing Google/Apple that there are other, shittier ways that they could have attempted the same thing. The investment they’ve made into Linux, Proton, KDE etc benefit everyone and can’t be taken away on a whim.
For steam I only use their proton compatibility layer for my “DRM free games”, I only bought Terraria on their store and I rarely play it these day I’ll play it again when 1.4.5 come out
It’s crazy how it’s absolutely impossible to criticize steam without getting bashed to oblivion by so-called gamers. The amount of free balls sucking Steam gets is just ridiculous. They have sub 100 employees , take 30% of every god damn games sold on the platform and you don’t own you games. Yeah it’s a cool platform, but in the end it’s just another nasty capitalist business.
Boy are you gonna be surprised as hell when you find out what sort of percentage other publishers take, especially for physical releases!
Shockingly enough, infrastructure requires money to run!
You mean like Epic who takes 12%? Or Itch that let you chose your contribution? Or Humble that takes 25% but give half of that to charity?
BTW steam is not a publisher…The infrastructure argument is just BS in 2025. Just admit you’re an official gamer, meaning you will do anything to protect a soulless capitalist business that make millions everyday but employ like 83 people. Ubisoft bad, Steam good, I know lol.
Oh please, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, etc all take 30%+. Epic is flailing horribly while running EGS at a deficit held up solely by Fortnige skins and gambling (but it’s ok when they do it right?)
Physical publishers take 60%+.
Humble bundle is getting discounted keys because it’s for charity.
Steam is a publisher. They’ll also finance your game with interest-free loans, you don’t even need to publish your game on Steam.
More to the point, Steam offers massive value for that 30%- forums, hosting, security, patching services, hosting, matchmaking, dlc options, the list goes on and on… And more importantly, steam doesnt care if you use those services even while selling keys elsewhere. that means that steam doesn’t even get 30% of the take from those keys.
Dude will rip his shirt to protect a billionaire lol. Kind of remind me of a certain cult…
I’ll just leave this here and wait for your cognitive dissonance to explain me why it’s perfectly ok:
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Steam literally invented the “you don’t own you games” model. But let’s just pretend Ubisoft did.
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Valve’s have create an ecosystem for underage gambling. The main innovation they ever created is making kids addicted to lootbox and shit. In 2023, they made 1 billion fromthat system, it’s FUCKING DISGUSTING. But let’s pretend it’s just Epic and Ubisoft right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
I don’t care for any of the business you mentioned, they are all dirty, capitalist and soulless but the fact is that steam is almost a monopoly, and the greediest one. It’s literally it the most profitable company per employee in the United States, fact. So to see an army of dudes willing to do anything to suck a billionaire’s dick is beyond pathetic.
No, I’m just tired of chuds parroting astroturfed bullshit from epic game’s massive PR campaign against valve that they did instead of improving their service.
Valve did not invent ‘you don’t own your games’, nor did they invent DRM. The entire reason it took off was that it was one of the first PC game DRMs that didn’t suck ass.
Valve did not create the gambling systems, they created a trading system and a marketplace that third parties abused to create gambling sites. If they didn’t have it, you would complain that you cant trade cards or items or hats.
Steam is hilariously far from “the greediest monopoly” lmao. It’s like you’ve never heard of ma bell, meta, or alphabet lol.
You’re brainwashed dead, sorry to tell you. Ever heard about cognitive dissonance You just keep proving me right, that it’s impossible to criticize steam without the gamer cult going off. You actually sound like maga defending their pedo leader. “Epic has started a witch hunt against steam.” Pathetic.
Steam is the most profitable company in the US look it up. 70% profit margin is greedy as fuck but at this point you’re practically begin them to fuck you.
HAVE YOU WATCH THE VIDEO? I know you won’t lol, you’re too mentally weak for challenging ideas. They created a system to introduce kid to gambling and ruined thousand of life because they only care about money.
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Costco is cool too! They have local products.
Most important of all they compensate their employees like they are actual humans.
Keep that DEI and I will keep shopping!
