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Comment by belugacat | Hacker News Reader

The day Valve falls, for whatever reason (greed, incompetence, some impossible to predict market shift/tech innovation... Gabe doesn't have decades and decades left as CEO after all) - the open world of PC gaming as we know it will probably fall, to be devoured by the Microsoft/Epic/Ubisoft/etc of the world.

Compared to most other tech/gaming companies, it's shocking how non predatory and customer friendly they are.

I've been able to maintain my digital library for almost 2 decades now, I've played those games on dozens of different hardware configuration without having to pay a single cent for it - compared to my other digital libraries, many of which (Wii, 3DS, PSP, etc) are completely lost to time.

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I think Valve gets way too much credit. They haven't abused their market position as much as they could have but they did normalize always-online DRM schemes. CS2 skin trading is also a hive of illegal/underage gambling and scams.

If you want to valorize a digital games retailers, I would suggest GOG is a better candidate.

> I think Valve gets way too much credit. They haven't abused their market position as much as they could have but they did normalize always-online DRM schemes.

Always online DRM schemes were inevitable and even with Steam its ultimately the developer's choice. There's plenty of Steam games where you can just run the .exe from the folder without even having Steam running. And let's never go back to the bad-old-days of needing to download the latest patch from the developer's website.

> CS2 skin trading is also a hive of illegal/underage gambling and scams.

This is not ideal, but back in the day it was RuneScape scams, etc. I'm not sure whether it's actually better to have kids who've been wholly sheltered from gambling until they're 21 then be suddenly allowed to gamble. Ideally, we wouldn't have gambling for adults either tbh, but maybe there's something to the idea of needing to develop in a world where you're exposed to that kinda thing and are more immune to it when older? Or maybe its the other way around. Also kinda rings hollow if we're marketing trading-card games to kids, which are also definitely gambling.

>I would suggest GOG is a better candidate.

I love the idea of GOG, and I ADORE that they're making old games available (GOG peeps, if you're reading this, civ 2 please!), but if I were a PC gamer I'd buy through steam just for proton compatibility on linux. It's that good.

As a steam deck user, I wish GoG would do something to better support it and linux. I bought CP2077 on GoG and now I kind of wish I hadn't. Everything from steam just works so well from the moment of purchase. I wouldn't even mind an extra step of having to load up GoG galaxy to download stuff and then have it set it up to run in the deck launcher. But getting stuff from steam is just so smooth. And things like the shader precompilation can really make a world of difference to the overall experience.

> Compared to most other tech/gaming companies, it's shocking how non predatory and customer friendly they are.

That is a low bar indeed. Steam got its initial install base because Valve bought Counter-Strike and then made Steam a functional requirement to play it.

I mean this in the nicest way but "we used to hate steam you know" is some sure-grandma-lets-get-you-to-bed meme shit.

Alternatively, a way to put children to bed:

"Once upon a time, we enjoyed the right of first sale[0]..."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

The trick is as a player you are not really the main customer of steam. You are the product. The customers are game developers, and they are as predatory toward them as any big corp online store. Not worse, but not better either.

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