AI use does not mean they will start churning out slop

But they already did with that ugly AI sale banner that was taking over half their front page.

Problem is there's been reports about memory providers cancelling contracts, as the premium AI companies will pay is far higher than breaking the current contracts.

Global Offensive is still playable (at least the core gameplay) in the csgo_legacy branch of CS2 on Steam.

The problem there comes from Epic taking secret deals to settle those cases instead of let any precedent be set that would actually benefit customers.

But Steam didn't kill the idea of ownership of games? It never existed for digital distribution (or even physical with DRM), which existed before Steam.

I'd argue selling games and selling content in those games is the same market though.

And the problem with Google/Apple wasn't "dominance", but more "absolute control", Apple blocked third party stores completely on their hardware, and Google had secret deals with phone manufacturers where they had to include all the Google apps and couldn't include alternate app stores, and made using third party stores difficult. As long as Valve aren't blocking third party stores on their OS and not being pre-shipped on the OS of most of Steam's customers, there's probably not much of a case.

Is this improving their product? These changes benefit users on non-Valve hardware playing any game on Linux (including non-Steam games). Like I'm glad Valve is funding talented free software developers to work on whatever they want but the benefit for Valve is very indirect.

They don't "provide hooks" though, Heroic's Galaxy integration is reverse-engineered and could break at any point that GOG update how they do things. Providing a downloadable installer is nice for some people I'm sure, but most people just want to download the game quickly and easily with features like cloud saves available.

What profit? I can guarantee that Valve has spent far more in hiring hundreds of highly skilled full time contractors for 5+ years than they've made from the 3% of Steam's users on Linux.

Obviously it's a long term strategy for them to eventually make money but we've only gained from their investment.

The problem is these stores (Epic but also the Microsoft Store and Amazon's PC game store) only come along because some executive says "hey what if instead of Valve taking a cut from most PC games, we took a cut from most PC games", there's 0 interest or intent for them to be competition (as seen by the exclusives) for Steam or improve the developer/user experience.

Any time these massive companies offer a cheaper subsidised alternative to any existing product it's to push out the smaller players with less resources and build their own monopoly.

They use regional companies I think, for Europe they use French chocolate (la maison du chocolat).

Pretty sure the latest update with a load of paid mod bs is what caused the bug lol