I'm not sure why Steam always seems to be exempt from the "perils of digital ownership" arguments
Because they have been consistently good citizens for more than 2 decades. They built a reputation. Something other companies are eager to piss away at the first opportunity to sell out or squeeze their customers.
It’s not surprising that Valve is successful and trusted with this approach. What is surprising is that it is apparently so incredibly hard for other companies to understand this very simple fact.
1. Build a good product.
2. Consistently act in good faith.
3. Profit.
But as a consumer you have to think about what happens when leadership changes—PE buys them and starts reputation mining.
It takes a while to burn through the good will and for a few years you can make a lot more money off of that than you can continuing thing as usual.
I’m betting that won’t happen, and that the next BDFL is not going to run the thing into the ground fast enough for it to matter to me.
Valve is also facing a class action lawsuit for anticompetitive practices. If they lose, even though they will almost certainly survive, watch the tables flip upside down fast.
Products like the Steam Deck or Steam Controller don't need any Valve software to play games. Valve knows a post-Steam world will exist one day, and they're fine with that. From a consumer standpoint, I respect that.
I am genuinely asking, as I am curious.
#1 on its own isn't so bad, you should indeed treat reputation as a valuable asset, but the way their style of logic invariably jumps to "and therefore you should sell, sell, sell it!" is the source of the problems we see. Especially because they're likely to jump jobs before the consequences occur. We really ought to have a culture of looking askance at executives and decision makers who never spend more than 2 years at a job, rather than celebrating them. If they've never had to live with the effects of their decisions they're really just a fresh-out-of-college person with 10 instances of the same two years of experience.
They're not, really, but they've given us little reason to distrust them.
I'm also fairly confident there would be some fun legal stuff going on if Steam tried that. People have thousands - tens of thousands - of dollars worth of stuff on Steam. That isn't really the same as, say, having to watch ads even after paying for a subscription.
Most folks aren't keeping tabs on how many studios Microsoft nowadays owns as publisher, even moreso after the ABK deal.
Exactly as that famous quote says, currently Steam is the better product, but if Valve would go rogue, that could change easily.
> If Steam decided to charge $10/mo
If you think about games already purchased I suspect that would be illegal in many parts of the world.
Worst case, if I lose access to all of them, whether by choice or by force (they go under), there are other options of obtaining (most of) the same games, and that’s even if I’m interested in playing them again.
Most of the games I really care about, I probably already have on other platforms anyway, in addition to or instead of Steam.
Gabe says that the platform will fail-open if ever necessary, that it would revert to offline DRMless functionality. I believe that he has that intention, but the realities of operating from receivership or assimilation by Microsoft would likely be very different.