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Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

Steam is great, in no small part because Valve isn't beholden to quarterly earnings numbers. But I'm worried what will happen when Gabe Newell retires. Valve has been a pretty good (though at times imperfect) steward for PC gaming and it'll be sad if a change in leadership decides to extract value from 20+ years of goodwill.

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I think the biggest problem with Steam is that when you buy a game on Steam, it's tied to your Steam account forever. In theory, Gabe could croak and they get bought by a VC firm that decides that a Steam account costs $45/month. At that point, you either give up all the games you purchased on Steam, or pay the $45/month.

I don't know why anyone would prefer their games tied to a service in that way. Especially when we've seen other digital stores go belly up, resulting in inaccessible collections.

Steam was the OG online store, it grandfathered itself in before a time people started to think that having their gaming library behind such a service might offer some downsides.

Nowadays I mostly buy PC games on GoG for that reason, but I have plenty on Steam. I do worry about it a little.

One of the things that drives me a little crazy about Steam is that there was actually an earlier digital game store (run by Stardock IIRC) that made the launcher and other tie-ins optional. That one didn't take off, though. Steam required a tie-in to the launcher, and it took off.

I would've much rather had the launcher and all that be optional, but I'm guessing that requiring Steam for games like Half-life 2 probably was the smarter move (from a profit perspective) than having it be optional, so that's the way the market went.

Steam, and this concern, is an illustration of why we used to have rules that marketplaces need to be run by the government.

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