Steam Audio SDK and all included plugins now available under Apache-2.0 license
steamcommunity.com
steamcommunity.com
They eschew DRM for most or all of their games. They have gone out of their way to support Linux gamers with Proton. They used Linux as the base of SteamOS for their Steam Machines and then again with the Steam Deck. Now they're open-sourcing their audio SDK. They've even publicly stated that they if they ever go out of business, they will make sure you get to keep all your Steam games[0].
I feel a lot better about Steam as a dominant player than I would if pretty much any other company were the dominant player (Tim Sweeney, I'm looking at your and your anti-Linux diatribes).
[0] https://i.imgur.com/4sa1Ln6.jpg (sourced from https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/18mzcn/i_asked_steam...)
I have to hope that if someone is in a position to ruin the company, they can see how much of a money-printing machine it currently is and not mess with their golden goose. I think the first sign of enshittification would be if they started selling ad space for games. (rather than doing an algorithmic discovery-queue, and promoting sales like they currently do)
Now my understanding is that this is fairly easily bypassed, I think you need a fake steam runtime, but it is still drm.
And as a final thought, despite this, steam is still heads and shoulders in front of any other online service I have used in respecting it's users. I like how you can share games, you have to jump through a few hoops, but it is is easy enough to do. As great as this is, it still is very heavy handed in "managing your digital rights" (said in as sarcastic a tone as you can manage)
So it's essentially left up to the developer just as an extra protection measure.
Steam existed adversarial against so many other players: against closed controlled consoles, latter against Microsoft app stores. The best way to compete against Nintendo and Microsoft? Make sure that all games can run well & easily anywhere. Create affordable hardware atop the ecosystems you want to see win.
It reminds me of Google really. Google exists because the web. Google's existentially staked to keeping the web alive & healthy: if the web rots, Google rots. We can argue about other perverse incentives & drives, but personally I think Chrome is overwhelmingly an act of preserving & growing the web ecosystem.
Amazing things happen when great companies work for ecosystems. Rather than typical corporate shit of just trying to own & run everything yourself.
But once that war was won, it became an act of Embrace & Extend.
I read blink-dev a couple times a year pretty closely. This does not look like the destruction of the web. It looks like a team collaborating well with standards bodies, experimenting responsibly with origin trials, and pouring in huge effort to this engine.
The reality is, that with every passing day, there are more websites that break on anything that isn't Chrome, despite Firefox (last independent man standing) supporting all the latest things, and Safari (which has a monopoly on iPhone) supporting recent though not latest standards.
As a firefox user, I now find myself having to resort to Chrome two times a week on average to use websites I must use (banks, government, insurance companies, etc...). It used to be once a month about a year ago, and once a year after IE6 died.
No need to resort to short term tricks to appease shareholders either thanks to being private.
I seem to remember they promised the arch build of SteamOS would be made available after the launch of the Steam Deck, but maybe my shoddy memory just made that up. I hope we eventually get an official build that reinvigorates the concept of a desktop Steam Machine, giving us a console-like experience on more powerful hardware than the Steam Deck offers.