PC Gaming

The larger company needs to hinder the smaller company with pointless slapp lawsuits. That way the smaller company will be too busy to innovate anything new.

I admit that I still make Steam purchases, but this has started to be in the back of my mind when doing so. It is still another company that sells stuff that the customer ends up not owning. With all that they've done for gaming on Linux and doing right by their customers so far, it's just so hard to doubt them.

When Gabe dies, sure, enshittification will happen. In the meanwhile, enjoy Steam for what it is for now, but prepare with contingencies.

Could you link a screenshot of the LinkedIn post? I don't want to make a LinkedIn account.

Feels like every 5 years some major Internet company looks at how many billions video games draws in, established markets with PC and consoles, and how much hype and marketing gets thrown around the space and decides they can do it better.

With zero understanding of what consumers want, expecting to be able to charge extra for content that no one asked for or services like steam offer for free, and usually with such an awful UI and interactions with the consumer you wonder if they see potential customers as anything but cattle to be figuratively slaughtered and try to milk as much currency as they can with overpriced subscription(s) and not-so-micro microtransactions.

Edit: For those that want examples, most recent one comes to mind is Stadia

Every prime gaming offer I took was for games on steam. I really thought they were just promoting twitch with drops and stuff, not actually trying to compete. Haha, the balls.

I love your optimism, but looking at the current trends of preorders, microtransactions, gacha games, .... Most gamers don't care about corporate greed and dive into it head first...

There's also this thing that happens where, as a whole, we'll just act capriciously.

I don't know if it's true of younger gamers but my generation seems to really choose at random whether we like your product or want you to die in a fire. Any fishy behavior can tip that scale pretty quickly, and if we already recognize a brand, and it's not one of our arbitrarily Chosen Few, then we might not even give you a chance. Just because we know the name, and that's already a strike against you.

I'm a vivid gamer. I've never heard of prime gaming.

Prime Gaming gives away free games every week or so. It's one of the perks available to those subscribed to Amazon Prime.

Those games can be on EGS, Amazon's own launcher (that nobody uses), GOG, or Legacy Games Launcher.

https://gaming.amazon.com/home

I use gog, but fuck the launcher. Fuck all launchers. An icon on desktop is all I want.

Thankfully it's easy to get no matter the storefront.

GoG is just the best. They don't have all the nice things Steam has, like workshop for example, but they compensate for it by actually selling you a game, not just renting it out with drm.

You're not the only one.

Whilst I do have a small collection of games in Steam, my collection of games in GoG is about 30x larger, because I prefer buying from GoG when I have the chance.

As the old saying goes "Possession is 9/10 of the Law" - when the installer of a game is in your hands (kept in storage media under your control) such as with games in physical media or offline installers downloaded from GoG, even if they wanted to take it away from you, they would have to take you to Court for it, whilst if the installer of a game is in somebody else's hands (in Steam's servers or in GoG's servers if you only ever use their launcher and don't download offline installers) they can take it way from you (even what happenned was that they just mistakenly locked you out of your account) and now it's your problem and you have to throw yourself at their mercy to get what's supposedly your stuff back and if that fails take them to Court (which for most people costs more than the games are worth).

It's hilarious that people think "Steam is great" because they don't often lock people out of their game collections or remove games from people's collections and when they do and people throw themselves at their mercy to get it reversed they're generally understanding, when Steam themselves were the ones who created a system where they have all the power and you have none, it's just that so far they've not purposefully abused it and are generally nice when their own mistakes cause problems which one wouldn't have in a different system - they're comparativelly better than most other stores because those other stores are so shit (except GoG, IMHO), but they're still worse than good old physical media when it comes to consumer rights.

Absolutelly, use Steam when it's worth it for you, just do it with your eyes wide open, aware that you're chosing to be at their mercy because the system they designed for digital game sales makes sure all customers are at their mercy, so they're definitelly not your buddies, just (so far) nowhere as abusive as most faceless companies out there.

PS: Back to the post of the OP, amongst all the digital stores with "it's not really yours" systems, with all the power over gamers than entails, Steam are by far the ones that least abuse it (I think they never did on purpose, though some people have been locked out of their accounts and couldn't recover access to them) so comparativelly are way above the rest, especially Amazon as demonstrated by their practices when it comes to digital books.