Valve still seems like a great company, with a strong customer focus (refunds, sales, mods, community, reviews, etc.), decent hardware (Deck, Index), good open source software (Proton), and good customer support.
Oh and did you forget about lootboxes? and their effects on children?
(Note I'm taking a somewhat exaggerated position here -- I don't think Valve is a terrible company as far as companies nowadays go. But the bar in this question seems intended to be absolute, not relative.)
GOG has been selling DRM free for a decade or so now, but I still choose Steam because their software is so much better (Galaxy is atrocious and has gotten worse recently).
And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess? I've bought some (too many) for Path of Exile. I'm glad they are a funding model that enables free to play. I find it less obnoxious than the paid DLC model, in-game advertising, etc. As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway?
Unplayable because you don't have the machines to execute them (or because you didn't take care to copy your media that got damaged), not unplayable because the companies subsequently revoked your access to them. Those are... pretty darn different things. It's like saying "my groceries spoiled" is the same as "the supermarket came back and seized my groceries" just because they have the same end result.
> I still choose Steam because their software is so much better
You're of course welcome to, but your question wasn't about product quality. Great product != great company.
> And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess?
Lots of countries did. If your bar for respectable is "I don't care about it"... that's not really a question to pose to the rest of the world.
> As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway?
This is a much bigger conversation than we can have in this box, but suffice it to say lots of people don't buy this kind of excuse.
What I think they are doing is pushing toward what would be good, but doing that very slowly.
I wish gog worked well with the steam deck, and had all the cool steam stuff for controllers and linux support, but they aren't doing any of that.
I know HN skews wanting to "own" games, but that's just not a big deal to most gamers. Physical media and DRM-free have always competed with Steam and GamePass and uPlay etc, but the latter are increasingly popular.
Countries are free to have their values, of course, but regardless, I don't think the presence of lootboxes in a couple games overrides all the other good Valve has done for the PC gaming community.
Other companies can (and do) implement loot boxes too. Fortnite's are much worse, being pay to win (in its original Save the World coop mode, not the more popular Battle Royale mode), but Epic's game store and exclusivity policies are much worse for the community. Activision, EA, Ubi, etc have similar lootboxes, often with similar DRM, but without any of the good of Steam and the customer focus of Valve.
Those are industry wide problems that probably should be resolved with regulation. But that doesn't make Valve a good or bad company, IMO. Of course others can disagree.
As for parents and kids, yeah, it's another discussion, but sounds like the same old thing about video games ruining kids. Whether it's Wolfenstein and violence or lootboxes or TikTok addiction or whatever, it still comes down to parental guidance. Its not an excuse, it's just a reality that kids grow up with way more technology and marketing than in the past, and that's a cultural issue way bigger than any one company (or government, for that matter). That's not on Valve.
> I don't think using DRM makes a company evil
I don't either, but this is neither pure DRM, nor was "evil" the bar to begin with. There's a lot of room in the middle for both. DRM technologies have existed that didn't prevent you from owning or transferring your own copy.
> I know HN skews wanting to "own" games, but that's just not a big deal to most gamers.
HN also "skews" toward caring about privacy, but billions of people use (say) Google and Microsoft etc. without minding what they do. If your bar is "it's not a big deal to most users" then wouldn't tons of companies easily pass it easily, especially the giants? They didn't become giants by being boycotted...
But I think that's kinda the overall discussion, isn't it? There are different facets to every company and people have different values. What bothers one person might not bother another.
I remember Sun, in its heyday, as being disliked as well because its workstations were so expensive and Java was terrible in its browser applet days (in the same way Microsoft would come to be disliked for ActiveX).
I tremendously respect Valve and am grateful that they've stayed privately owned and able to maintain their culture. At the same time, others may find fault in the way they do business. I don't expect all of us to agree on who the respectable companies are.
Example: Team Fortress 2, the official servers for the game have been overrun by bots that aimbot, votekick, say slurs, spam illegal content, what are they doing about it? Nothing. https://save.tf
Example 2: CSGO/CS2, also full of cheaters and illegal gambling sites
What difference does that make when the magnitude for one game was on the order of a billion cases?
Counterstrike doesn't define Valve. They do so much more than that, especially for those of us who don't even play CS. The lootboxes were something they added much later. It was originally just a Half-Life mod.
https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/
And you have a skin that has sold for over $1 million now.
https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o...
but the one mark against them is that by pushing Steam, they normalized DRM in the video game space and killed physical media on PCs.