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One extremely important factor that this article neglects to address: Valve is a private company - it’s not publicly traded in Wall Street. That is the reason Steam has remained the best in the business; it’s not beholden to shareholders’ short-sighted meddling. It’s also the reason Steam is effectively immune to enshittification.
The unspoken part is that unless Gabe has a very strong plan involving some sort of employee co-op, when he retires or dies the company will likely get sold by the estate to private capital which is 100x worse than being a public company.
Valve has avoided many of the same anti-consumer moves as other tech and gaming giants, likely due to its smaller size, status as a non-public company, and the long-time leadership of Gabe Newell and other executives. Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.
Valve is not immune to enshittification, and it has already happened on some level with minimal current Mac support, facilitating gambling through item trades, etc.
My primary complaint with Steam is the quality of the games.
I’ve had a Steam account now for… let’s see here… 19 years:
Being primarily a console gamer, I rarely used it until I bought a Steam Deck. Then I went looking for Steam exclusive games I couldn’t otherwise play on my Xbox Series X, PS5, Nintendo Switch…
What I found was a lot of garbage porn games, and a lot of garbage anime games, and a lot of garbage anime porn games.
It’s super difficult finding something worth while to play. So it’s not a surprise to me to see that the #1 game is eight years old:
You know the marketing brainwashing works, when people go look for exclusive games :D
What I found was a lot of garbage porn games, and a lot of garbage anime games, and a lot of garbage anime porn games.
Dang that sucks. Sorry you couldn’t find a porn game you liked.
🤭
