They kind of did, with their sudden pivot from primarily making singleplayer games to almost exclusively making F2P GaaS titles the instant they got a taste of lootbox money. Half-Life 3 and Portal 3 will never happen because Valve makes 100x as much money with 1/100th of the effort by peddling Counter Strike skins.
No official announcement yet.
Simply raising the $1800 transaction limit and $2000 balance limit would have been far less disruptive, but that may have put Valve in financial regulators crosshairs. There's surely a reason why they chose those numbers in particular.
Yes, they are loot box whores but so is everyone else.
Steam is a community, social media, and a store. The community is what they built and that community is extremely loyal. That community is also what developers are paying for.
In Gaben, we trust. I have 20 years of experience saying Gabe won't fuck me over to increase EBIDA by .5%. Are they perfect? No, but they are lightyears better than most of their competitors except GOG in terms of putting consumers first.
I keep giving Valve my money because they keep giving me good value for that money and a trustworthy environment to spend that money in. I have no loyalty. I also buy games from Humble Bundle and GOG.
I'm not excited about the prospect of losing my 4000 games but the literal only options available for consumers right now are "Pay money and get a game that we can take away at any time, fuck you over, do all sorts of bad things, and we demonstrably hate you", or "Pay money to get a game and a refund period and a bunch of features and maybe when Gabe dies we will do that other thing"
There is no alternative. GOG is run by the same people who released CyberPunk2077 as a bug ridden mess to please upper management, so they even have evidence of already straddling that line right now.
GOG is also amazing.
1.0 was 5/10 (quit after a few days) 1.5 was 7/10 (finished) Phantom Liberty was a 9/10 (finished)
It took 2 full years of additional development for 2077 to be in the amazing state it is in now.
It's a terrible incentive for the industry and why I still refuse to buy No Man's Sky.
It's essentially the concept of early access but lying about not being early access.
They had to be sued to get them to offer refunds
They had to be sued to get them to remove forced arbitration clause
Lol Valve is taking a cut of a ridiculous amount of video game sales while releasing no games.
I like some of their work on the linux support side, but they have sold out as much as Apple has if anything.
Ah yeah unregulated illegal underage gambling, the great resistance. Gabe could shutdown the whole thing with 1 click, all the sites are using the Steam API, but they don't and you know why.
Valve did a lot of things good but they are also the original source of a lot of bad things from lootboxes to skin gambling to the FOMO battle pass cancer of modern gaming.
Until people stop buying games from these places nothing will change.
The issue is trying to force (or likely, continue) bad practices when they're clearly not working and then lacking the leadership to realize that a retaliatory layoff is only going to make things worse.
(But I may also argue the point they never sold out in terms of being a game studio as opposed to a publisher.... "So when's Half Life 3 releasing?")
They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)
They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.
Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility.
The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.
The sales you will miss are what steam brings to the table
You don't get to decide that. Apple's price is not set by free market competition, Valve's is.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/19/apple-may-lower-app-store-com...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...
It's especially backwards when you consider that those AAA games put far more strain on Steams infrastructure with their >150GB install sizes.
There are even games you can buy on one service and play multiplayer with people who buy it on steam! I chose to buy MSFS2020 through steam for example because the steam platform is dramatically better than the absurd way the Windows Store does anything, but we fly in the same skies!
There's no lock in or exclusivity. You can literally buy the same exact executable from multiple places, and the only change is the feature the store program supports. Buying a game through the Epic Store for example won't let you use steam input, but you can even then play it on the steam deck with some effort! I think you can even use Proton on executables you don't get through steam!
A dev can even make it so that, if you buy their game on steam, you do not have to have steam running or installed to play it. They have that freedom. They also have the freedom to mark a version of the game such that steam allows you to access that old version forever
If you are a dev who releases a game on steam, you can mint a bulk quantity of steam keys and sell or distribute those outside of steam!. Probably if you abused it, Valve would tighten it up or ban you, but why would you bite the hand that feeds you? It's how, for example, Humble Bundle initially worked.
That's right, you don't even need to buy your game from Valve to use all their features! A substantial portion of my library paid money to Amazon instead, through humble bundle.
People use Steam because it has 20 years of established trustworthiness in an industry otherwise made up entirely of assholes who hate you.
Meanwhile, in the place that Steam does poorly: Old games, GOG has much more of the market.
People actually are willing to pay for trust and care. Steam has repeatedly and regularly improved how their storefront displays information and informs consumers, because their primary problem is discoverability and wading through the mountains of games from people desperate to collect some of the money waterfall that Valve enables.
When you put a game on Steam, the contract ensures that anyone who purchases it cannot lose access without it being Valve's decision. Developers or publishers who do stupid things or pull games five years down the line cannot prevent you from playing a game you buy on steam if it isn't dependent on some server somewhere. None of the other storefronts have ANYTHING like this, mostly because they are run by the exact companies who WANT to be able to prevent you from ever playing an old game again, so they can sell the same thing to you in a new box.
Compare that to Apple's 30%, which similarly has lots of features their platform enables including unlocking significant consumer spending, but they do not give you any alternative. If you want even a single dollar from someone on an iPhone, you HAVE to pay apple 30%, and at least for a while they wanted that even to cover netflix subscriptions for example.
If you as a developer do not want to pay valve 30%, you are free to do like Notch did for Minecraft and distribute it yourself, and you are free to run into the same problem it had where my friend was unable to purchase minecraft for decades because his bank refused to send money to the Scandinavian bank involved, whereas even a literal child without a debit card can use birthday money to buy a steam gift card and purchase your game with no adult involvement. (maybe that's not a good thing for society, but it's great for game dev business).
Valve does not have a moat other than simply consumer trust. Minecraft sold a hundred million copies through a dude's website. There has literally never been a moat in computer game distribution. An entire industry of British children existed writing games and selling them in local stores. A moat has never been possible, because Valve cannot make your computer not run other software.
Heck, I've not bought games because they were not on Steam or required another launcher. Ubisoft and Rockstar are so bad that I held off on buying some games I really wanted to play; they're just that awful. EA's Origin was also pretty bad last time I checked.
I guess it's an actually hard problem to make a somewhat decent launcher in big companies with too many PMs playing turfwars, but still, almost everyone except Valve is shitting the bed so hard that as a consumer I'd happily pay quite the markup if it would allow me to avoid other launchers. They're that bad.
That is not a good argument though. Try building your own distribution and take some of those billions.
You are welcome to start your own progressive game market place for PC. Go undercut him and charge 5% fees. You literally just need to dump game files on a CDN right? How hard can it be? /s
I do find it odd that this account is new and the type of posts it leaves. Seems almost like an LLM...
So does Apple. Despite this, they are both engaged in rent-seeking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking), which has a harmful effect on everyone but them.
Imagine if roads weren't public, but were built by a single private company. You have a business that moves goods by truck. You can use the private company's roads, but only if you pay 30% of the profit of your goods to the company that owns the roads. It only takes 2% of the profit to maintain the roads; the other 28% is profit (rent) for the road-owning company.
You could choose not to use the roads. But then the only way to deliver the goods is by parachute (which may be possible, but isn't practical). So you use the roads. But this means you have to jack up your prices to make any profit for yourself. Competing is much harder (tighter margins), and your customers are paying more than necessary. Everyone's life is harder, except for the road company.
Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?
While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.
Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .
This doesn't match with the definition of rent-seeking at all, as described in your wikipedia link:
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.
To my knowledge, Valve has not manipulated public policy or economic conditions to maintain Steam's dominance. Steam hasn't pushed for legislation to prevent competitors, it hasn't prevented developers from selling their games on other platforms, and it doesn't even prevent you from installing non-Steam games on Valve's own proprietary hardware and operating system.
That's actually a very easy choice to make.
I think they're being sued over delisting someone for this last I checked, even if their public policy might not interpret their MFN that way
Source?
Additionally, when I actually look into the alleged statistics of claims that "Valve is primarily white and male", the numbers ... don't actually look that bad? We shouldn't expect any company to fit national demographics exactly.
Allegations of unpaid labor: https://web.archive.org/web/20160209211205/https://www.reddi...
As for the second, I'm confused as to why anyone would provide unpaid labor to a large, profitable corporation.
And yes, while it was mostly "unpaid", during my time there (2016-2020), we had a year-end rally every year which the "fastest" teams to complete translations would receive Steam wallet codes for their effort. I received up to $350 the first year of rally.
The next year they gave us Artifact keys...
and then the one Valve employee managing the server left Valve, and STS was slowly being replaced by Crowdin
they essentially killed crowdsourcing starting with Artifact. We (the STS members) had no access to new strings, then came Underlords, the new client... Only TF2 translations are crowdsourced to this day. The rest are done by their external teams.
This controversy is known and there are a few translators on Steam/Valve that came from the community, but nowadays it is mostly outsourced, and they do a terrible job (they replaced gamers with people who can't even bother to download the game to check the context a string is applied to).
The medium link says nothing about women and minorities specifically. It's a critique of flat management structures in general.
It seems like the flat management structure allowed an ad-hoc hierarchy of cliques to form in the office anyway, pitting entrenched teams of old-timers against new hires, but implicitly. When you think of the lack of support for TF2 over the years, this is illuminating.
It's astounding that Valve/Steam are still as successful as they are in spite of this culture.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...
Steam is much much easier for Valve.
I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.
Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
Steam also has a solid update/beta pipeline. Game companies post blog posts about new game updates so you keep up to date with development. They also did an amazing job with SteamOS which feels rock solid.
I never had issues with GOG or Epic (where I buy less to be honest), but that might be me.
But Steam has the network effect. They launched first. Of were the first that successfully did it.
Ultimately, reviews of games tend to be pretty useless because people who play games have very little understanding of a) what makes games fun, and b) the complexity involved in making the games.
I have creators I follow whose tastes are closest to my own, and I watch their content for reviews, then go to the store that makes the best offer.
The overall score tends to fairly represent the likelihood that I’ll like the game, and when in doubt reading a couple of reviews tends to give a clearer picture. And then, the reviews themselves can be rated, and there’s a “recent reviews” score that protects against review bombings and gives a clearer picture of the game’s current state. Not to say that there aren’t exceptions - there’s a poorly-received game that I’ve poured hundreds of hours into recently - but I literally wouldn’t know how to set up a better system myself.
In contrast, the Epic storefront is fucking laughable.
Actually, something I always complain about Steam is that the videos of the games are not about the gameplay.
They are most of the time about the trailer, like if it was a movie. I want to see the game playing!
The up front risk you take on Steam is $100. It still ends up being a meaningful risk because the numbers show almost nobody makes that back, because developers are so interested in selling their game on steam that the market is outright supersaturated.
>Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
I used to buy video games at walmart. Unlike games I bought at walmart, Valve has done things that retroactively add value to games I bought decades ago, like remote play together, adding internet multiplayer to games that never even thought about it, and a controller system that allows pretty much anything you can think of. Games that had zero controller support for a decade just do now, no extra download, and the required configuration is often the single button press to select whatever configuration someone else made. Valve created an entirely new software platform for games that makes it so even games that are utterly broken on modern systems can work again, and it's just built in. If I buy a game today, I'm pretty confident I can play it in 20 years. An actual system for sharing digital games with other accounts, with large caveats.
Refunds, despite Valve only offering them because it's the law in several countries and they were losing court cases, are not a thing for physical game purchases here in the US. Once you take off the shrink wrap, you are fucked.
Steam has built in support for Beta branches and old game versions that the game dev can enable. Steam has built in support for DLC, and market systems for trading and selling digital "goods", not that I really think that's a good thing but some people seem to. Steam has fully built in support for cloud saves.
Steam has a fully integrated "friends" system, and that system is convenient for the end user and includes features like screen sharing and voice chat and gifting people games.
Steam offers fully integrated mod management for at least a large subset of all possible mods for any game.
Like I cannot stress enough how even if video games were 30% more expensive in steam (they aren't, devs distributing through steam are making a larger portion of the profit than they used to), retroactively adding functionality to games I bought a decade ago and producing a system that makes it very likely I can play these same games in 20 years is so worth it. Everything else is just a bonus. Their hardware also shows great value per dollar, so the "They are overcharging" narrative just doesn't track.
Meanwhile, steam avoids problems that plague other digital storefronts. Easy returns (again, forced on them), their launcher mostly respects my resources and doesn't destroy my computer every time there's an update, the way Valve negotiates terms they have a much better setup: Even if a publisher or developer pulls their game, as long as you bought it before then you can always install it and play it. Transformers Devastation was pulled from the store years ago and cannot be purchased by anyone I think anywhere, but I can still download and play it on a new machine because that's the contract Valve got Activision to sign. The game literally doesn't have a store page anymore.
Fuck Valve's child gambling profits and invention of loot boxes, but their distribution business is unambiguously the most respectful of the consumer and developer. Only GOG with their work towards preservation and lack of DRM comes close.
I own 4000 games on steam. That's about 3900 more than I would have ever bought in a world without Steam. Their wishlist system is a direct driver of sales that wouldn't happen otherwise. When the Epic Store launched, it didn't even have a damn shopping cart.
That was exactly my point. Distributors like EA or Activision will charge you because they took that risk. It wasn't Nintendo or SEGA.
Valve is like Activision, not like Nintendo.
Nintendo charged you because they lost money on the consoles. Valve looses no money.
I’d suggest that it’s cheap, at least historically compared to just about any other product that’s been sold. If I had a popular marketplace platform that basically sold my product without much need for human intervention on the transaction, that has real value. Honestly 30% seems like a bargain to me.
In marketing and sales of the product, any human that touches the process ultimately is getting a piece of that transaction. We may not have physical media, but that was actually probably the least of the expense associated with software products back in the day. Consider the army of people needed just to wholesale to retail, coordinate distribution, distribute…
My recollection from those days is that if the dev got 10% royalties of a purchase price they would have been ecstatic. If you offered them 70%? They probably would have thought “what’s the catch?”
If they don't like the culture, then they should work elsewhere.
I hear Google is hiring.
Nothing worse than joining a company you contributed zero to building from the ground up, then unilaterally deciding the culture needs to change according to your whims, right now.
You might feel uncomfortable working in a black barber shop. Or a cat cafe with pet allergies. You've contributed nothing to their business, they shouldn't have to change for you.
You should feel empowered to have a voice in the products of your labor. And you should feel empowered to have a voice in the culture that produces those products.
Your employment is "at will".
You are not entitled to any item in your list of demands.
You are, however, free to leave at any time for something more suited to your tastes.
Can you point to the word entitled in my posts? Or are you putting words in my mouth?
Can you point to any demands? Or are you arguing against something I didn't say?
You listed a bunch of things which should be, an opinion, he says your not entitled to those things, a probable fact relevant to the likelihood of attaining your professed desires, and he then offers a solution if you are unhappy with not having the things you professed 'should' be afforded.
I made no demands and I made no assertions about entitlements. That reply to me was a strawman.
I made two statements: 1) I suggested people have multiple criteria for selecting a workplace, not just culture. 2) I suggested people should have the ability to voice their input over their work. (Note, that's a weaker claim than "people should have input over their work". Just that they should feel like they are able to voice their input.)
Neither of those two things are demands nor entitlements, and the latter I would assume would be pretty non-controversial unless you believe that bosses should have absolute and complete control over every facet of a worker's job. (I guess I work in tech, where it's pretty widely accepted that people have autonomy to make some decisions on their own about how and what work is achieved.)
I don't have an opinion on Valve or allegations Valve is doing that. I just find it very strange to say it's entitled for a black to want to be treated as equally as a white.
Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable?
No. The easiest solution is he should work elsewhere. He took the job knowing exactly what was involved. So no, you are not entitled to not be culturally uncomfortable.
Also wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture and that minorities/women should expect to be made uncomfortable by lieu of being hired there? I think that's an even weirder take!
Women generally have different interests than men, and different cultures generally have different interests and expectations than others. This is extremely well documented, as is the fact that people have a harder time being comfortable and fitting in around others who are unlike them or don't share their interests.
> wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture
If Valve mostly hires white males, then either you're expecting the employees to not socialize at all (leading to no culture), which is sociopathic, or yes, that's exactly what you would expect.
You're objecting to reality and truth because it offends you, for some reason? There's literally nothing objectionable with any of the above. Being uncomfortable implies zero moral wrongdoing. You should do some reflection and/or research.
Fun fact: Nintendo's revenue split on WiiWare was 60/40, and required minimum downloads to even get your revenue out of Big N.
I'm not sure how any of that is sketchy or gross. As far as marketplaces and platforms go, this is quite reasonable, and there are many successful games which are either not on Steam, or are cross-listed on multiple platforms, or are cross-listed on both Steam and the developer's own distribution channel.
I'll give you lootboxes, they are pretty shitty.
We should be ok with pointing at the shady parts of things we like and going, "It would be better if it were not so shady."
Valve is good in many ways! Valve would be better if it didn't profit from getting kids to gamble on skins!
Hello LLM.
> They also take an absurd cut of developer income
30%-20% is by no means "absurd", given the incredible value that Steam provides to developers: content delivery, payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.
In fact, 30% of revenue is well under what it would cost me to implement all of the features that I want from Steam as a developer, unless I somehow won the jackpot and ended up selling millions of copies (in which case I would end up only paying 20% of revenue anyway).
> and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30%
Which you already mentioned, while somehow conveniently omitting the fact that the cut decreases to 20% if your revenue is high enough.
> and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of
This is the single possibly objectionable thing here.
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
~~Allegations~~ mean nothing. Are there successful lawsuits?
> Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much.
Valve is incomparably better than every other major game distribution platform, which is the comparison that we're making. You are very intentionally making manipulative and dishonest points to try to paint Valve as worst than it is. Which makes sense, because you're a throwaway account.
For all intents and purposes it's "functioning" for me. You can search for a game, hit buy, put in your credit card number, then download/play it. I've seen some spurious arguments about how it lacks a cart or reviews, but it's a stretch to claim the lack of them makes them non "functioning". I never bulk buy games, and for reviews I can go to steam or metacritic.
To be fair most online storefronts don't have that. Amazon/walmart at best have "categories", which epic also has. Even online content portals like spotify don't have tags, preferring something like "more like this".
> but it's baffling that no other store gives at least the same amount of those features to you. Even though they could.
The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price. We see with airlines that consumers are willing to put up with hellish conditions to save a few percent on airfare. Those features are definitely nice, it's just unclear how they can avoid the free-rider problem if there are competing storefronts.
The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
That said, Epic is indirectly competing "on price" by paying publishers and developers for their store exclusivity, for free giveaways and even for just using Unreal Engine. But it's the price for developers, not customers. Tim Sweeney said multiple times that he thought supporting developers was more important than customers, and that customers would follow developers. I don't know how whether it worked though.
- Tiktok was not first. Before it was vine and youtube.
- Google was not first. Before it was yahoo and altavista.
Plenty of todays big companies were not the first in their area.
Every online gaming platform other than Steam and GOG sucks. And in fact GOG competes very well with Steam precisely because it offers something Steam doesn't, which is DRM-free games. Steam didn't just beat the Epic Games Store and Origin and Games For Windows Live because it came first, it's just a better platform and the others offer nothing outside of exclusives which they paid for.
I'd personally say it was better as a launcher. Launching Steam itself takes relatively long and when its just in the background its just there idling with ~400Mb of RAM (specifically its WebHelper), which aren't a problem with Battle.net since it idles at 170MB or you can just close it since it launches way faster.
And for companies that shoehorn really bad launchers as an extra layer on steam like EA, you are doing the work of the devil himself
11 percent. That is the charge back rate in gaming. The "overall" stat for all transactions is something like 3 percent.
Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Is 30 percent a lot. It sure is. Valve isnt a charity, this is how they chose to make money.
Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
1. source?
2. How does that justify a 30% rate, when presumably it's clawed back from developers?
>Card processing isnt free. There are fees, and supporting card processing still has more humans in the loop than one needs. Never mind all the technology that comes with running the dam platform.
Again, nowhere near 30% though
>Meanwhile, AWS has a 30+ percent margin and I dont see CTO's lining up to run hardware...
30% margins on renting hardware is totally different than a 30% tax on transactions, and it's disingenuous to imply they're comparable. At the very least amazon needs to spend the other 70% on running servers and investing in datacenters, whereas valve doesn't. It's studios that are actually doing the development. Valve just is charging 30% on top of that. To take an extreme example, compare the 2-3% fees charged by visa vs the ~15% gross margins that car companies make. Even though that's 5x higher, I doubt many are outraged about car companies' profiteering.
For some reason, people in tech live under the illusion that everything nontangible should be literally free
Strawman.
Apple is a firm technical gatekeeper to their ecosystem. Steam is not at all analogous to that for PCs.
How can user have an optional one-stop-shop that is sustainable for the long-term while not being “evil”.
edit: after some additional search tweaking this is most likely in reference to Wolfire v. Valve, which is now a class-action suit.[0] The argument seems to be that Valve is engaging in anticompetitive behavior by disallowing developers from reselling Steam keys for their games for lower prices on other platforms, not selling the games themselves on other platforms. So this may or may not be what the parent post was referencing.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitru...
Gamescope is even fully open-source, so you could remove the steam deck UI, and still run any game with the same performance benefits of not running it inside KDE. Of course also, you could flash a new OS on the device itself if you wanted to entirely remove Valve’s presence.
Changes get wiped because (as you mentioned) it's an a/b partition; when you switch partitions you lose the changes.
You can actually enable an overlay for root changes, but this causes other issues - you get to choose if you want to track packages you've installed, or packages that are in the base system. It's either in the overlay and you keep your changes but not the base system changes, or it's in the base system and you lose track of changes made in your overlay. - updates to the base system of packages that have been uninstalled in the overlay can cause inconsistencies like orphaned files (the new system update includes extra files from this package that haven't been removed by your uninstall. Hopefully some other package doesn't take this as a sign that an optional dependency library is fully installed, the linked subdependencies might be missing) - updates to the base system can be overridden in specific files that were modified in your overlay, causing packages to become non-functional - imagine rebuilding a library 4.5 to add a feature (or updating to v 4.7), then the base system updates that library to 4.8. All other software now expects version 4.8, but instead your overlay is providing 4.5. better hope it's only a minor patch update and not an update providing a feature, or worse, a major breaking update.
Definitely not comparable to Apple, which is forcing all iPhone users to use their own app store.
Case and point: Valve doesn't have a union.
You have to be very misguided to believe that the c suite in most companies is not engaged in n adversarial relationship with its employees, whether those employees are unionized or not.
This isn't a given, this is just an opinion, and one you didn't bother trying to argue for.
Many systems do function much better with adversarial units in them. Governments have the adversarial units of checks and balances. Companies have the adversarial forces of the market. A news paper has the adversarial units of editors to their writers.