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Comment by LorenDB | Hacker News Reader

I am impressed at just how amazingly great Valve is at being a responsible tech company.

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...)

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My biggest worry is the direction Valve will take post-Gabe. I really hope he's got his Tim Cook-equivalent lined up. Someone who won't try to shake up the company too much and just keep things going how they are. All it takes is one (1) MBA to come in and do what they do and destroy everything Valve has built up for short term gains.

Being an entirely private company makes that much less likely, especially with every other employee heavily invested in the way that valve operates now.

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)

I thought publishers could already pay to be spotlighted (frontpage or the announcement popups)?

Note there is an implied drm baked into nearly every steam game, They will only run if they find a authorized steam service running.

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)

The steam wrapper is an optional step the developer can apply (and it does not come by default, and is even a little bit of a pain to setup). Many steam games do not do this, so they can be launched without steam open.

So it's essentially left up to the developer just as an extra protection measure.

You are correct, that being said there are a few "Steam Emulators" out there (of varying levels of shadiness) and Valve hasn't tried to take them down. It seems like they rely on "the ecosystem" as some sort of DRM over traditional almost-rootkit-level DRM implementations. i.e. initial + update distribution, achievements, redistributables, cloud saves, workshop, key management, matchmaking etc.

Gotta love a company who is existentially staked on healthy open platforms.

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.

Chrome is an act of “Embrace & Extend” the web. It may have started as a “preserve the web” against IE in the IE 5.5 / 6 days.

But once that war was won, it became an act of Embrace & Extend.

Therea an extremely strong loud section of people who declare this to be true, but I don't see that. I don't see how they see that.

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.

It doesn't at all matter how it looks on the mailing list; What matters is the web.

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.

Valve can afford to be responsible on this front thanks to Steam printing them money.

No need to resort to short term tricks to appease shareholders either thanks to being private.

I'd argue that a lot of company don't need so but they do anyways for the sake of infinity growth.

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