this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 15 hours ago

To all social reformers this poster, who is held in good standing except for those times badposts were made, doth say this: I am a loyal subject of the Good King Gaben, most venerable and wise and just, whose reign shall be eternal. No darkness can enter into these bountiful lands so long as those who hold fast to the King remain faithful.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Everybody is defending Steam like it isn't a nasty proprietary binary blob shit-stain on their Linux system to play their video games. Lefty gaming should become a scene totally divorced from the market, with extremely exclusive clubs of amateur developers, artists and writers bringing games back to their essence.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Something like itch.io but decentralized? Like an open source fediverse-style storefront?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 16 hours ago

No like real fuck off collectives that run their own gits and people make cringe urban legend Reddit posts about.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 17 hours ago

I mean yeah, they're right, but as long as capitalist conditions exist, I'll take Steam over EA or Epic.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

We keep joking about PC Gamer being a communist magazine but holy shit we've straight up got links to marxist.org in the article

[–] [email protected] 27 points 21 hours ago

They're just doing their research!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 17 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 24 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

does this code as like annoying pandering to anybody else

[–] [email protected] 28 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

It is healthy to distrust anyone who is trying to sell you something

[–] [email protected] 42 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (3 children)

Is it bad I like steam for what they've done for Linux gaming

Also piracy, indirectly

[–] [email protected] 18 points 22 hours ago

At least proton is open source

[–] [email protected] 14 points 22 hours ago

Linux is self-serving for them because it's the only way to not have to pay a third-party for licensing the OS. Enjoying the side effects of that is still fine though.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

~~If I'm not mistaken Steam is cooperatively owned by its employees, which is why it's far from the worst hegemonic online distribution platform.~~

I was mistaken, see below.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

It's not a co-op. They're just relatively small and mostly hire senior developers who demand a higher level of respect and work/life balance. They used to only work on projects people wanted to based on consensus and personal interest. People floated between teams, you were free to convince people to work on your pet project instead, etc. They stopped doing that when they started on Half Life Alyx and talk about it in the design booklet because it also meant that literally nothing ever got completed since there was no direction and promising projects floundered from lack of support.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Yeah I looked into it a bit more and they've never actually revealed how ownership at Valve is structured, it's just their management which they keep as flat as possible (though perhaps it was too flat for a while).

[–] [email protected] 12 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

I don't think this is true I think Gaben owns it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago

not to give any capitalists too much credit but often privately held companies will make better decisions for consoomers than traded companies which are gonna have an array of varying levels of rabidly money hungry capitalists calling the shots. like as if epic games would ever put out something like steam families.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 22 hours ago

Hmm okay so from what I can tell they've never released info about who owns it and everybody is just speculating or citing one Forbes article that says that Gabe owns "50% or more."

What I was thinking of was something Yanis Varoufakis said in an interview with Hasan Piker, where Hasan asked if Valve was a still cooperative and Varoufakis said "not really... Valve today is very different to when I was there in 2011/2012," so maybe it was at one point or maybe it never was and Hasan was mistaken too, I dunno.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 day ago

ZA/UM (Unified Marxist-Leninist) vs ZA/UM (Maoist Centre) vs ZA/UM (Workers Peasants Party)

[–] [email protected] 18 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Good on them. Steam is the reason that you don’t ‘own’ games anymore, you pay a company a fee to be able to access it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

astronaut-1 always has been. They were just forced to be more up front about it.

GOG is better in that respect

[–] [email protected] 10 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

You've never owned games. You've always owned a license to run a game. The license used to be tied to a piece of physical media. Now it's not. But the underlying legal model never changed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Bullshit. You could sell your physical copy on the second hand market. This is protected by the "doctrine of first sale." When you buy a a copy of a work, you have the right to lend it, trade it, or sell it. This right was functionally eliminated by platforms like Steam.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I swear you people would start defending Monsanto licenses if they had sales for video games and supported porting games to Linux.

Removing the license from the actual media means that there is no used game market. It is a pretty significant step.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

There already was no used game market for PC games before Steam. The vast majority of publishers were already requiring you to activate your CD key, and limiting the number of times a key could be activated.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 18 hours ago

I can tell you that there used to be, I was a part of it. But I’m talking about 20+ years ago.

Having online verification for offline video games was something that Valve pioneered and made the standard for all PC games. So much of todays shitty gaming climate was pioneered by Valve including loot boxes, achievements and always on drm.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 19 hours ago

I know Gabe Newell is a dumbass libertarian type and that Valve is a weird workplace with... not the best conditions (or so I've heard) but at least steam isn't doing all the bullshit all the other big platforms (that failed because they tried to do all sorts of bs) tried to do. Not talking about epic, but all those proprietary platforms, windows live or whatever it was for example.

Gonna be interesting to see what happens when he dies. Just full venture capital I imagine

[–] [email protected] 31 points 23 hours ago

It'd be really nice if Itch.io's employees bought it out and turned it into a coop.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I agree and hope that what comes after it is even better at supporting gaming on GNU/Linux and contributing to various libre and opensource projects like KDE and Proton and Mesa and such.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

It would be a power move for Gabe to gift Steam to KDE or something when he retires.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 21 hours ago

I'm guessing whenever GabeN steps down it's going to be the gaming equivalent to Tito dying

[–] [email protected] 8 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

the SteamBox (with the Steam Controller) was the first attempt at a Linux based "console".

they improved those designs greatly and re-released it as the SteamDeck. I challenge you to find a better PC than the SteamDeck for less than $400.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago