Comment by Shekelphile | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shekelphile | Hacker News Reader

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> Steam would be completely enshittified by now.

Has it not already been shit for like 15 years? It's 2003 shitware with an electron skin on top of it, with a predatory skin marketplace that you can't withdraw funds from and lootbox mechanics included in all their live service games (of which that is all valve has made in the last 15 years excluding HLA).

Valve was never a good company. I would argue their early business model directly lead to the death of game modding in the first place because in their first few years they straight up stole the IPs of successful mods to turn into second rate games internally, usually not giving original developers any cuts of the proceeds beyond a normal position at the company.

> Has it not already been shit for like 15 years?

You could argue that it has been, but "being shit" and "enshittification" are different things.

I don't think it's been shit. As a customer, Valve is one of the only companies left that I feel good about giving money to.

But it simply has not been enshittified. From Doctorow:

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."

Valve hasn't started abusing gamers to benefit developers in any way that I can tell. Compared to the rest of the video game industry, Valve treats both very well.

> I would argue their early business model directly lead to the death of game modding in the first place

Game modding isn't dead or anywhere close to dead, so no.

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