> This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
Same with Steam -- it's just an interface to get to the games. Doesn't need to be obtrusive or detailed, just good enough to help me do what I need it to do.
Controller support in Steam has continued to improve: supporting pretty much any controller, gyroscopes, per-game custom mappings, sharing/applying community created mappings, etc. I'm not aware of anything similar in competitor's stores.
Library filtering and search is hugely improved over the old system that only supported manually adding games to your own tag categories. "Dynamic collections" can be created which include games based on store tags, genre, controller support, whether a particular list of friends also have the game, and a few other things.
Updates/news for games you own or are following is a lot more visible than it used to be as well.
That's done by the game developers not Valve. It's not obligatory to have achievements unlike on the PlayStation
While it is indeed mandatory for your game to have achievements on Playstation, the TRCs don't specify anything about the quanity nor quality of those achivements. If you want you can launch the game with a single achievement for starting the game and it would still be approved.
Meanwhile, no one is reviewing all of the cheapo garbage on Amazon. 44 different drop shippers all selling stuff from China, and all without any meaningful way to differentiate them. Hell, they could all be the same company.
Spore is the worst example[0] that I remember. The article has someone complaining "no way am I paying $50 to rent a game!", but while we still do that (irritatingly) at least the "rental" process is now smooth and streamlined, and, in my experience, works great.
[0] https://www.denofgeek.com/games/has-spore-been-destroyed-by-...
It was about time that someone standardized the game purchase/update process, and yeah publishers are gonna want DRM, but I wasn't happy with the choice. Steam was needlessly in the way. (Past tense cause I don't play games anymore)
- it's not open source
- games are expensive (even though it's set by the publishers not Valve)
- DRM (even though the Steam launcher is not a DRM itself which people mistaking with the SteamWorks DRM system which is optional)
- monopoly (even though you can use GOG, Uplay, EA, Humble, BattleNet, Amazon Prime, MS Store and the countless other options on PC if you wish unlike on iOS and consoles) etc.
Epic: "Okay, we've started buiding one."
Users: "Yeah well it sucks because it doesn't have these extra, non-core features it took Steam two decades to build."
There are many valid and grave complaints people have regarding them, not merely some princess and the pea type things as how you make it out to be.
This whole conversation always devolves into straw man nonsense and it gets old. Is steam perfect? No. It has a lot of classic valve issues and the biggest argument I see is should they be able to take 30%.
Was epic a competitor? So far no, and mostly because of screw ups on their end. If you want people to adopt an alternative from something that's already very convenient , then you need to make yours more so, not less. People aren't sticking with steam because of forums or profiles or whatever. They're sticking with steam because the only competitive advantage epic offers is Free games (which are easy enough to grab and dip) and exclusives (which ignoring if this should or shouldn't be a thing, isn't nearly enough to pull people over rather than make them sometimes hop across)
Valve charges 30%. I personally believe that this is an evil amount. The fact that the market bears it is, by my estimation, strong evidence of their monopoly position. The same argument holds for any "platform" charging that much more than the the cost of hosting.
Calling your opposition terminally negative is pretty shitty.
Meaning those stores would be put at a terrible financial disadvantage trying to get developers onto their store. Hence why most of them (excluding GOG and Epic) just have their first party games on there. This pull is so intense, that most of those you've listed have put their games on Steam again.
Then there are those like Humble, which aren't actually a separate platform, they just sell keys and for the longest time they exclusively sold Steam keys. This is crucial to understand because "using Humble" still means encouraging Steam lock in.
GOG and Epic are real competitors, with GOG's competitive edge being they only have games that are DRM free. I suppose this is a bit of a double edged sword, as most gamers don't care about DRM and therefore just want the latest game available, which GOG does not carry if it has DRM. GOG usually gets games years after launch when the developer feels DRM is no longer needed. So their competitive edge becomes yet another reason most GOG buyers also have Steam accounts.
Note that if you're an indie developer and you want to make money, you pretty much are going to use Steam. The alternative is if someone like Epic sponsors development or something. But yeah, you can release on stores like itch. Nobody will buy it, but you can do it.
This can lead to a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Ideally, devs will put up both a Steam version and an Itch/GOG version. But in practice they often don't; you sell on the store that brings in the vast majority of revenue. And then pretty soon your mods start getting managed through Steam Workshop, your input starts getting managed through Steam Input, your achievements/multiplayer starts getting managed though Steam's cloud. Because frankly, players want that. Steam players want to use Steam Workshop, and they don't really care if that means the mods are harder to use outside of Steam.
None of these services can be separated easily from the Steam platform. You can't pay Valve some money and integrate seamless workshop support into your game when it's booted up from GOG.
So users may try to avoid Steam for a while (I generally do), but you can only really do that if you're willing to skip games (still waiting on Spelunky 2, Ultrakill, Cruelty Squad, etc...). GOG and Itch are great and some devs are genuinely great about supporting multiple storefronts, but it's always going to be a subset. So eventually users get tired and just buy everything from Steam. I mean, if you buy from Steam you get input profiles set up out of the box, you get cached shaders, and importantly you never need to wonder whether or not a game is coming to the storefront you use. Never. And if a game ever doesn't come to Steam (hello Epic Games) you can have an existential meltdown and say that the devs are ruining PC gaming.
And as a consequence, if you're an indie developer, you are releasing on Steam. Because it's really difficult for users to avoid Steam because that's where the games are, and as a developer it's really difficult to avoid Steam because that's where the users are, and we go round and round until a nontrivial portion of PC players believe that PC gaming effectively means Steam, and anything that's not on Steam might as well just not exist.
You kind of saw this with the Epic Games fights around exclusives. I'm no friend of DRM and I'm no friend of exclusives, but not being able to get a game because it's not on the storefront I want to use is extremely common for me, and it was extremely weird seeing Steam users act like this was the end of the world when it happened to them. It really cued me in to how much power that Steam has, to the point where people basically treat it as a default platform. On some level it is on devs like me to support multiple storefronts, but people need to recognize that there's really not a lot of incentive to do so beyond trying to make the ecosystem healthy. Breaking Steam's stranglehold over the PC market would need to be a coordinated effort from both developers and players, it's not something developers can do on their own.
If you are looking at weirdo things - Microsoft still makes keyboards. That has to be such a minuscule part of the business as to be completely irrelevant.
Fortunately, it mostly works to launch games, which is all it needs to do. Valve's own legendary internal dysfunction is perhaps a reason why it hasn't been enshittified as thoroughly as other launchers. (And I say this as someone who is happy that Valve puts any thought at all into gaming on Linux, and intends to buy a Steam Deck someday.)
It's pretty clear they have spent a lot of time and effort on this release, without enshittifying it.
Valve has gotten a lot of attention, and a lot of flak, over its flat structure and "drivers", but I'm not sure that's particularly worse than some of the atrociously broken engineering practices I've seen at F500 companies.
I mean we could model them as a totally dysfunctional game company they happens to have a platform. Or as a basically prudent platform company that happens to release a game once a decade or so.
They should get rid of their web browser, that’s the sort of market where they can’t keep up.
I do sort of wonder—Valve is notoriously slow with their development. Maybe that’s an advantage for a platform developer. They seems to make surprisingly few shit moves, but then, they also don’t make many moves at all. Either they are on the same enshittification trajectory as everybody else, just moving along more slowly. Or they can see the other platforms steal their ideas, sprint ahead in to shitsville, and say “ok let’s not do that.”
Some dude will run roughshod over the worst potholes and never say a peep to city hall (or even vote), but if their copy of Steam crashes twice a week they'll get on every platform known to man and complain.
The main issue is that Steam takes a much bigger cut than Epic (30% vs 12%). Of course Epic will inevitably enshittify themselves once they take market share away from Steam.
The Steam client just gets stuff incoherently bolted on top of old codebase, and the UI became eclectic.
GoG client library can seamlessly integrate with Epic client. It used to work well with Steam too, but now integration with Steam has become clunky and buggy. I'm not entirely sure whose fault is that, but I suspect Steam started defending their moat.
Remote Play/Remote Play Together alone puts Steam ahead personally.
* Suggesting Steam is a platform like any other, and therefore likely to experience the same process.
* Critical of the quality of some of the titles released on the platform. Steam used to be much more selective in deciding which games made it on to their store. Indie developers and even small publishers were often unable to get their games approved for distribution. This didn't start to change until the introduction of Steam Greenlight[0] in 2012, allowing users to vote on which indie games they'd like to see on the platform for the first time. However, approvals were still heavily curated compared to what we have today. Greenlight was replaced by Steam Direct[1] in 2017.
I don't necessarily disagree with either, although I do think Steam has been improving rather than "shittifying". Wading through low quality games is annoying but there are a lot of fantastic games that would never have been approved under the old system; Vampire Survivors is a great example of something that probably would have gone straight in the bin.
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail... [1] https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
The only real exception to this are the devs working on Proton.
Buying studios and canceling their projects? What are you even talking about?
Valve’s console allows other competing game stores to run on it out of the box. It even and directly supports installing Windows. Any other console manufacturers doing that?
I would argue that anyone who wants to stop buying on Steam has almost no friction to doing so compared to other platforms. All you have to do is buy all your games from somewhere else from now on. You don’t have to replace any Valve hardware you own because their hardware is the most open and well-supported on the market.
I’m just struggling to figure out how Valve “no longer cares.”
I actually hate Steam. I despise Steam. But I have to go to bat for them here and say that they don't seem any worse today than they ever have been, and every time I get dragged into opening their shitty app to buy a game that isn't available elsewhere, the app is at least a little better than it was last time I used it.
The only things about them that are particularly user-hostile and make me hate them are:
1. DRM - The DRM isn't particularly onerous but it is there. All your dozens or hundreds of games get locked together into one account, and even if you own two or three computers, you can only play a game on one of them at a time. This made it very difficult for me to maintain a VR gaming station at my house, since my nephews playing VR upstairs meant that I couldn't play DotA 2 downstairs unless I started a second account.
2. Customer Service - Their customer service isn't as nonexistent as some companies', but it's pretty thin on the ground
So far as I can tell, they seem to go out of their way not to enshittify anything in any way ever.
Over the last few years they've released the Steam Deck and Valve Index, supporting them with pretty decent software.
The Steam Deck UI improvements have made their way over to "Big Picture Mode" and similar UI changes for the PC client are currently available in the public beta.
> You're going to stop buying on Steam? Yeah right.
Frankly, It's annoying when I can't buy on Steam. Epic spent tens of millions on exclusivity deals to force me to choose between their shitty client or hoping it gets released on Steam in a year or two. The only result is that I have less regard for both Epic and those developers.
My fear is that once he goes, the bulwark goes with him.
Also means they don't have to grind or worry about specific quarterly performance.
It shows -- the platform is generally pretty good. I've had grumbles, but compared to most of the other paid software I use, Steam still delivers -- even on Fedora Linux.
Proton in Linux is great, btw. Been able to run Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon ZD, and other major games with little to no issue. Shout out to the ProtonDB and WineDB -- if anything doesn't work they usually have the answers on how to fix.
As per your example: how did we learn about Vampire Survivors? From neogaf or kotaku or some eceleb video. Someone is doing the curation for us.
I didn't buy it at first but it was recommended in one of the "Since you like X" carousels and it was so cheap that I didn't really care if it was bad.
I've found a fair few games through the Steam store that I've really enjoyed. Two off the top of my head:
- "Gunfire reborn" is a fun rogue-like shooter from a chinese developer.
- "Risk of Rain 2", another roguelike. I'd played the original 2d version and didn't particularly enjoy it. The 3D sequel was great.
I also think that the lack of gatekeeping on low quality games is actually more of a benefit than a drawback considering Steam’s robust review system and lenient return policy. Customers on steam want to play unfinished games so long as the early access disclaimer is there, and the indie PC scene that has low barrier to entry has launched some of the gaming infustry’s biggest hits (like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Terraria, etc).
The old school console system where developers have to sign contracts and shell out thousands of dollars for SDKs led to less innovative software.
-game inventories system.
--extreme slowness and shittiness of this feature (pages not loading, low rate limits for looking at inventory pages)
-player item trading.
--trading experience sucks it also runs into the rate limit and inventories not loading.
-steam market.
--half-baked, can't sell quickly. If you get 5 items it takes like 2 minutes to list each individual item. This is ALSO affected by the slow pages. Using a bot is against the TOS but is also the only decent experience.
-social hub for each game, maybe this is too opinionated but now every game is also a social media page. Bad/abandoned games even get used as an image hosting service for unrelated profile adornments.
-streaming, intrusive streams in store pages.
-Popularized if not invented loot crates which have now infected everything.
-Popularized cosmetics micro transactions, which turned into far more expensive transactions.
-created new types of FOMO for sales and incentivizing spending money via limited time trinkets (badges, stickers, profile customization), steam points.
Opinions ofc but these range from being somewhat on target to wildly out there and speculative and on top of that many of their projects get quietly dropped and are left without support after initial release like the inventory ui and the market.
But apparently we're in a minority.
Plus, his examples seem to contradict his thesis:
- Mobile app stores have always been controlled by their vendors, there is no illusion of non-shittification there
- Steam has no real shareholders, and exploits suppliers to cater to users and and themselves
- Facebook has a half-dozen different platforms that have all arguably launched in pre-shittified states
- Twitter lives a constant repeating lifecycle of enshittification and resurrection, mostly because most people can't be bothered to find an alternative
It all feels like trying to unify these concepts under one formal thesis of shit is a bad idea. Our expectations of the internet are constantly changing, and our cultural landscape is shifting to realize that we've had a pretty raw deal for the past decade. Now we want to lash out at the platform-holders, when deep-down we know that we're partially to blame.
I just wish Doctorow didn't use this idea to peddle the idea of helplessness to Twitter/Tumblr/Whatever users. There are alternatives, TikTok should not be the be-all-end-all of internet interaction anyways.
I'll agree on Steam - it has its problems, but the users, as a rule of thumb, don't hate it. It works, its reasonably convenient, most users don't get burnt by its policies, and nobody wants to install crap like Origin and UPlay.
Steam/valve also does a lot of things that everyone benefits from. Amazing controller support, Proton, etc.
Even some minor things like allowing p2p games to route through their servers so players IPs aren't shown to others
For everyone else though, it's like digital crack. It was the place to be for a while, even though it's users would chafe over minor changes. And of course, there was the original Cambrian explosion of microblogging movies and blind dates and garage sales and haircuts et. al... mostly replaced today by politics and related vitriol.
It's 100% the fact that there is no meaningful competitor, exacerbated by people being lazy and distrustful of other private platforms. And good - these people should be wary, and Cory Doctorow should be on his soapbox telling people how to live in a post-social-media world rather than riling them up to go yell at clouds online.
I'm not sure Twitter ever was a universal thing. I barely know any people in real life that actually use it. It's only tech nerds/people working in media, and the others don't exist in real life because they don't go outside. It's easy to ignore Twitter drama completely, because nobody cares about Twitter except the people that use Twitter.
Instagram and TikTok however really did capture the mainstream.
I think large, modern, free social like TikTok are often built to be more to be advertiser-friendly, and that prevents such a culture from emerging in the first place. Curation and moderation -- natural ways are to form a bond or culture with other users are prevented by TikTok since the default feed is a stream of videos (and according to the article, selectively controlled by ByteDance). Another thing that these platforms are sneakily controlling is hyperlinking itself -- you cannot actually post a link in a comment on TikTok or Instagram.
> There are alternatives, TikTok should not be the be-all-end-all of internet interaction anyways.
Well, hopefully users read the article and discover new ones! Not sure how old you are, but my understanding is that TikTok and Instagram are pretty much the places to be for teens and college students in the US -- they are basically the Facebook for this generation. And you can't even post a hyperlink on Instagram.
But most people won’t want to bother with that. We will often just call something names if it seems right to us. That’s how words (and in particular, insults) normally work.
So, another way to look at this is that Cory Doctorow came up with a middlebrow justification for calling things shit, and people liked it enough to ask him to write more about it. The justification isn’t necessary though. You could just call it shit, and it’s pretty much equivalent. (Although it leaves out the generic anti-capitalist ideology.)
Miiverse was never going to be the next Twitter… but then, Nintendo didn’t want it to be. It was a pretty niche thing, but for its niche it was unique and clever.
You might think it was godawful, but I wish there were more experimental networks out there like it.
Reddit is kind of an example of both - how low-quality the discourse is in big default subs and on their new interface and app, and how quality is still retained in some places with much smaller memberships with users who mostly prefer the old UI or mobile apps that are more friendly towards reading and writing longer posts.