Maybe you should think about why a company like Valve could have never been founded in the EU instead.
And I tend to agree with that, there are some reason, including the fact that it's a huge country with a wealthy population that use loans and credit cards to buy even more that they can afford. That creates a strong domestic market that you can leverage before having to look at international sales.
Nothing to do with the US government policies of course...
Here in Europe sex isn't nearly as big a taboo as in the US, though they do want age gating.
But a lot of the companies that came out of this like Google, Meta, Microsoft are also a big net negative in the world and causing societal decay with their attention-driving algorithms and hard business practices used to establish their monopolies.
It's not surprising the more ethical business models come from the EU like GOG without its DRM. And valve isn't really one of the worst companies out there, but gog is a lot better and I always buy there if a game is available.
Europe has its issues but look at the state America is in right now. A lot of all that hate is fuelled by people who have been drawing the short end of the capitalism stick for decades. And are now mobilised by the people making things worse for them.
The US would be better off if it had more money to invest in healthcare and education, and Gabe would still be fine living in a house worth a few millions instead of on a half billion yacht.
Why do you think we don't have to worry about someone shooting us for 20€?
These things are not wasted money. They could be spent more efficiently, but I don't think they are a waste at all.
In practice it mostly goes to other rich people/corporations and affluent retirees.
Around half of federal revenues go to retirees (and disproportionately to the affluent ones), another trillion+ dollars goes to defense/VA contractors, another trillion dollars goes to interest (i.e. other rich people/corporations), and then all the rest of it combined is less than any one of those things individually.
At which point you wouldn't need to collect more money, because there is already scads of money being collected, it's just going to the wrong things.
Steam is what normalized always online DRM in gaming. Steam and Valve games also normalized micro-transactions and gambling mechanics. The guy is far from being a saint.
I really like that on gog I can choose to install every version of a game ever released. So they can't remove content like music due to expired licenses etc.
Steam also does not require DRM, developers can choose not to use it, if they do you can just copy the game install dir to a separate folder and run your game without steam.
I guess you could say Valve made this easy, but its not like games didn't have DRM befores team or wouldn't have required always online without steam.
But hey, they have midterms coming up this year. That's a great opportunity to redeem some of their earlier sanity. That is, if the democracy still exists then. It's not just the left that is worried -- many american centrists have started to wonder.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/america-fascism-tr... -- https://archive.is/Maalh