Whenever you are afraid of the negative impact on your life of a corporation’s possible failure, it means that you have become reliant on someone you can’t trust. You must act accordingly.
Does this mean I should buy games from GOG? Or support physical media/indies?
Yes. GOG. itch.io. Direct from some other website. That’s right.
Steam is very good; but the hidden cost is that you depend on them maintaining their service. If they turn evil, you’re screwed. You either have to bend to their will, or you lose your library of games.
On the other hand, GOG and itch.io are arguably not as good as Steam right now, but they don’t have any kind of lock-in. So if they start to backslide, you can still walk away with your full library of games. I do think it’s a good idea to ‘not put all your eggs in one basket.’
Reject modernity, move to the woods, return to monke.
Probably not a popular view here but I’ve found my hobbies more fulfilling since I started doing stuff other than gaming. Native plant/food gardening, reading books, working out… all of this stuff can be affected by capitalism too of course but I’m less beholden to it. I still game a bit now and then but much less than I used to.
Even when steam is gone, we’ll still have movies, books and music.
Because of the analogue hole we can capture these and store these as long as unlicensed hard drive possession is allowed.
Of course there are non-culture based activities but I think we shouldn’t tolerate regression from big tech and take steps to prevent them just out of shear principle.
These facilitator middlemen think they can dictate how to live our lives and I think we should make them regret this position severely.
A billionaire who is 61 is very likely to outlive 75, even if they’re fat.
He actually lost a bunch of weight recently
PC gaming is not here to stay. One day, someone, will finally do a cloud /saas streaming solution which works, which solves the latency and fidelity issues and which will be accepted and trusted by the masses.
Hopefully that will be a Valve solution. Not Nvidia, MS, Google or Sony.
From that moment on the client will not matter anymore and you will just stream it to your device and from there cast it to your big screen.
Hopefully I’m full of shit and this will never happen. But I’m afraid I’m not.
Speed of light says no
Yes, I also believe in invisible pink unicorns. You’ll get to see one soon, I promise.
Fiber internet was invented around the 80s. I only got fiber installed at my house a month ago. Most homes around here still have expensive low bandwidth cable. For cloud gaming to actually work you would need to upgrade the world’s internet infrastructure to an incredible degree. This article highlights the issue (in the US, one of the most developed countries)
Unless you change physics the latency will never be solved.
Simply build a gaming server farm in the middle of every small town in the world
Do like Netflix and start putting hardware in every datacenter and at backbone split point you possibly can.
Latency is a non issue if you make the service even remotely decentralised. One server per EU country is enough to push the latency below 50ms, which is more than playable, even for shooters and MOBAs.
Still to much of you want to be decently competitive in a shooter.
Sucks being old.
Is it just prejudice? Stereotype? Laziness?
You see this happen to everything. It all gets enshittified. These corps that started out for the end user all end up selling out for profits.
It’s not a secret, not a revelation, nothing new.
Well, at least we’ve got global climate change and multiple other threats to the survival of humanity, we won’t have to worry for long.
It’s inevitable.
But if steam becomes enshittified I’ll move onto something else and use torrent sites to download the older games I care about that I’ve bought on steam. It wouldn’t really be pirating them, since I’ve bought them already.
For now steam is fine, and I appreciate the work they’ve done on supporting Linux, so I’ll keep on using it to buy games.
gaben is a smart man, i doubt that he isn’t aware of his own mortality, and presumably has someone who he trusts, that he will appoint the position.
It would be beautiful if he just handed the keys over to a true believer when it’s time. Just a quality, stand up person who already has a pocket full of cash and just wants to help gamers get games and indie devs distribute them without squeezing every drop of profit they can at every step.
edit: it’d be even beautifuler if he turned it over to a trust managed by a panel of elected employee representatives
Making the company employee owned would be ideal.
So did Lenin, and look how that turned out.
Someone’s been gaming too much.
Piracy is a service problem. They’ll reap what they sow if they change course. I’m not afraid to hoist my sails again when I need to. ;)
I don’t know why Gabe Newell would die before 75
Cryogenic suicide to preserve his brain for a robotic body?
I think Gabe has been getting healthy lately. Last picture I saw of him he was looking like he lost a lot of weight. Maybe repost this in 10 years and then we can panic.
Not just PC gaming, but the gaming industry as a whole
Well thankfully Gabe has lost a ton of weight in recent years. Man is looking absolutely svelte these days. Here’s hoping he has many more years of good health.
I’m also guessing he’ll hand pick a successor that will carry on his views, instead of dying in office and having some kind of CEO election free-for-all.
For sure, valid to fear the enshittification of steam. But they aren’t killing proton. Maybe ignoring proton at worst. But Steam has profit motivations for not being reliant on Windows, which has actively been trying to supplant them with the Windows Store for years.
As another separate, profit-motivated company, with a gaming division and a lot to gain from eating Steam’s lunch, Microsoft is not Steam’s friend. Proton is a critical bargaining tool for them, and not having to include windows licenses for devices like the Steam Deck helps their costs too.
My fear is them going public or selling. If that happens, it’ll probably be Microsoft willing to spend any amount, and the government hasn’t really been in a “preventing monopolies” mood for a while now.
You can take away peoples home, food, and rights… Just don’t you dare touch their entertainment for the plebs might get antsy…
And you can’t take the sky from me.
Bread and circuses. They’re already giving us scraps.
Wish they were serious about Linux support.
Gaben’s last dying wish is to make every game work on Linux and donates $1 billion to making it happen.
