I disagree with the author, the enshittification of Steam started ages ago. Day one, in fact. It's come and gone in waves.
Yesterday there was an article on the exploitative practices of Roblox doing the rounds around here. Some of the bad praxis around monetized UGC called out there was pioneered by Steam. Online DRM for single player games? Steam was there at ground level. NFT stock markets? Steam tried really hard, they were just bad at it. Gig economy automation replacing human moderation and greenlight processes? They banged their head against that wall until they uberified PC game development successfully. Loot boxes? They are remarkably resilient. Where others have moved on, Valve insists on keeping them around for CounterStrike 2.
Also, CounterStrike 2.
There are also ways in which Steam is ahead of the competition, or they wouldn't have the near-monopolistic position they have. Their Linux support may be motivated entirely out of spite and an ironic fear of Microsoft's monopoly, but it's welcomed. Their client is easily the best in the market and there are crucial features from it that should have been universalized by MS or Nvidia and still haven't been, somehow. It's good stuff.
But it's been enshittified since day one of Steam, when it launched torjan horsed with CS and Half Life 2, and it remains problematic in many areas, including its role as a single point of failure for game preservation on PC.
They are, though, by any reasonable definition. Despite what the cryptobros would have you believe, there is no need for a blockchain to have a tradable, persistent token associated to an asset. Besides the fact that the tokens are stored on Valve's servers instead of a distributed blockchain, there is no difference in how those work.
The cryptobros tried to convince everybody that a blockchain made the tokens "non-fungible" as in automatically interoperable and endlessly persistent, which was a lie that only survived until the first time the assets, which were all stored on servers and not in a blockchain, got deleted.
That's a different discussion in any case. The point is it's a stock market of tokenized, tradable items where the transactions are monetized by the company by taxing the trades. It's the same on Roblox and Steam (and in all the NFTs people dumped all that money on).
The public doesn't understand NFTs, and scammers abused that.
[Distributed blockchain] NFTs were never stored on servers, the GIFs were never NFTs, and NFTs usually point to an IPFS URL (a P2P type "server"), which needs to be seeded by someone, doesn't matter who.
In a sane world, the owner of an NFT would seed the corresponding assets on IPFS, because it's in their own interest. Instead, people got swindled into "investing" in NFTs without having a clue of what they were doing... until the inevitable reality check struck them.
It's true that Steam popularized NFTs, hats, digital trading cards, and so on. Those things also existed before Steam, way before the "crypto" NFTs... and if we go further back, check Luther's rant in the XV century about how the Vatican was mass printing "NFT" indulgences.
The author has a MacBook and has discovered that the new Apple Silicon is terrible for games. Particularly 32-bit games. It turns out Valve hasn't re-made these 10-20 year old games to compensate for Apple's hardware compatibility changes.
Somehow, that's Valve's fault and a sign that they're going down the drain.
The person you're responding to is one of those people that thinks Steam is the DRM, because 1) it checks games against your account the first time you run them, and 2) they don't provide offline installers like GOG.
The only "DRM" that they have is checking the game against your steam account the first time you run it. Is that great? No. Would it be nice if they offered offline installers? Of course.
Truth be told, it's a little bit more complicated than that.
PC Gaming has had tons of DRM examples - from SecuROM (anyone remember those times?) to modern day Denuvo DRM.
So there are a few unpopular DRMs out there:
Disc checking based DRM (if the disc was cooked, that's your paid game down the drain)
CD Key based DRM (if you lost the CD Key, that's your paid game down the drain)
Online activation (you registered the same game on two different PCs? Try that again one more time and you're done for. For added bonus, sometimes the activation software would register the same PC as different hardware because someone had the audacity to upgrade their hardware!)
Always online - need I say more?
Cloud gaming - now with the added joy of not owning the ones and zeros you paid for!!
Steam has managed to use account based DRM while avoiding the trappings of pretty much all of the above (for some games you can enter a CD key, and that game is permanently attached to your account, which is great if you lose the disc, but sucks if you want to sell the physical game on afterwards), while the competition used any of the above (some used multiple layers of DRM, which is eurgh).
Then on top of that, hats off to Valve - they do tend to listen to their customers and give them what they want, even if the whole point is to keep them tied to using Steam and strangle out the competition:
Cloud saving
Steam Workshops
Game streaming via local network
Sharing the game library with family
Controller support with button remapping for legacy games with poor support
In store game reviews
Store algoritm suggestions based on the game categories you buy and what you friends buy
Discussion forums (even if they can be thoroughly toxic at times)
Guides (the formatting is awful)
Fairly deep and independent social integration
Built in audio streaming via Steam
Those card things that you can sell for a bit of money or craft
Compare that to Origin, Epic Store, GOG etc. They just cannot compete with what Valve offers in terms of features on top of features.
What bothers me about Valve is that
They have such a chokehold on PC gaming that everything else feels inferior, and no other company can really compete in terms of features
They have fought refunds in the past (as mentioned in the article)
The whole paid modding fiasco because Valve really wanted to financially exploit a community known to give stuff away for free
How they often abandon their own products due to lack of customer attention and their limited size due to wanting to remain a limited company
I'm looking at Valve Index, and apart from Half Life: Alyx, I don't see much in the way of new games. Even worse is that I watched someone on YouTube basically explain that there are still glitches and weird stuff that occurs in the Valve Index - aa product that costs £919 here in the UK.
I'm also looking at the Steam Controller, which has been very, very neglected with no talk of a sequel (given how successful the Steam Deck has been, I'm shocked at the lack of a "companion controller")
I'm also looking at the infamous Steam PCs that completely flopped
How TF2 started the trend (at least on Steam) of microtransactions in games, and how CS:GO has carried that flag (and started a gambling community which has probably done untold damage to young children as they grow into adults and are confronted with the world of gambling)
How Valve, as a company that started off making games, has absolutely no desire whatsoever to make games anymore because of how wildly successful they are.
And this is the stuff I can think of at the top of my head. I was going to say it also concerns me they don't have a bug bounty program, but it turns out now they do.
Steam is a major problem for a lot of reasons,but basically none of the reasons the author gave are the main problem - It sounds more like a whining of a Mac/Apple user.
Once again....
There are hundreds of more important problems with Steam.
Not parent poster, but I'm going to see if I can come up with some.
0: If you get banned from Steam, you lose hundreds or thousands of games.
0.1: You can't use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.
0.5: If you're blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you're locked out of all your games that use VAC.
1: Steam requiring other storefronts to sell at the same gross price instead of the same price net fees. This means nobody can compete with their 30% cut... On the other hand, they take 0% for activating games sold elsewhere, which kinda balances it. Still, this is probably the biggest barrier that's maintaining their 30% cut.
2: Discoverability since they stopped curating the games list. (Maybe? Not sure if this is a problem, tbh.)
3: Normalizing the concept of games requiring a launcher to run/DRM.
4: Offline play functionality is inconsistent, so sometimes it breaks when people are traveling with no Internet access.
5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.
6: Region-locked censorship, like gore in Germany.
7: Some people would say region-adjusted pricing, but I disagree. Still, might be a valid reason for some.
(Numbering is wonky because I thought of actual real problems later.)
I think I did pretty well! It's hard to find things to fault. It's a pretty great platform.
0.1: You can't use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.
This or similar actions are very common. Getting chargebacks can be very bad for a businesse even if they haven't done anything wrong. It's also a common type of fraud and the easiest way of reducing that is presumably to never dispute chargebacks and just ban the account and/or credit card.
0.5: If you're blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you're locked out of all your games that use VAC.
That's kinda the point of VAC and you are only locked out of online play.
The good and bad thing about VAC is that it's conservative in handing out bans, so false positives are relatively rare. It does of course reduce it effectiveness against cheating.
5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.
Adult content is a setting which I believe is disabled by default.
Unrelated but I really like their new version of "steam family".
I wish that in the future developer can just host their own game with very minimum cost/overhead unless they really need some platform's backend feature. (multiplayer game mostly.)
For single player game I really don't see why it is so difficulty to host (even torrent it) would be a hard thing to do. During the shareware/pre-steam days where you may have downloaded the full game with a soft lock, I've played a whole game and then try find way to send my money as well. (was not living in NA at that time and there was no guarantee that a game will be imported with official vendor.)
Yeah, but at the same time, people are "NOT" going to pay for it won't pay for it anyway. You might as well establish your player/fan base. Like even if you give me say, Suicide Squad for free I still won't add it to my library.
That isn't going to happen. Major have studios have developed their own ways of distributing games and found that the public don't really like it. For minor game studios, it is probably a lot cheaper to rely on Steam or an equivalent to do what you are describing.
Not just cheaper, but the vast majority of Indie games need the platform for exposure, despite it being so crowded. Those first few hours on the front page are when most sales are happening, especially given how abysmal to nonexistent the marketing of most small games is.
Developers seem to be under the impression that a few social media posts shortly before or after release are enough, whereas in reality, they need to create a community that is eagerly waiting for the game beforehand, spend at least as much time on marketing and community management as on the game itself.
Then again, the majority of games - and this is something few people are willing to admit, least of all their developers - have absolutely no commercial value, no chance of ever making any money, no business being on any store front and even, in the majority of cases, no business even being distributed for free other than among close friends and family. Over 12000 games were released on Steam last year. Does anyone believe that more than a few hundred of those are even worth looking at, let alone being purchased and played?
Nobody is waiting for the billionth card game or sidescroller with unattractive amateur art. Nobody is waiting for an ugly looking game with a poorly written store page that costs 15 bucks and is coming from a new, unknown developer while similar, better games are routinely on sale for a fraction as much. I've received outraged reactions from both developers and gamers for comparing some first marketed at release titles with other games out there. Almost every time, they were trying to sell their games through sob stories like "I worked seven years on this solo, surviving only on ramen and tears", as if anyone actually cares. Those stories are bonus trivia that you look up and are impressed by after having played a game and caring enough about it to read its Wikipedia article. I'm not buying your terrible time management skills and unrealistic expectations, I'm spending my limited disposable income on entertainment and escapism - and if your seven year amateur project can't keep up with a two year project by an experienced team of fifteen people even at the very first glance at the first screenshot of the typo-ridden store page, then you're out of luck - and I like weird "auteur" Indie games. Those 12,068 titles are not just competing with the other 12,067 released that year, but the entire catalogue on Steam (roughly 73,000 at the beginning of this year), as well as older games, games on other platforms and other types of media.
One has to assume that most people brave enough to dive head-first into Indie games development are either ignorant of these facts or hopelessly optimistic. We kind of need this optimism, without it we would have never gotten gems like Stardew Valley (which did not make any of the mistakes listed above though) or the equally amazing and divisive interactive art that studios like Tale of Tales have produced, but it's still frustrating to witness it pan out very predictably every time. Every single Indie success I've observed from the start was clearly on a winning path and every failure was obviously going to be a failure. I'm shocked how predictable it is, which is what gives me hope. At least success in this sphere is based on clear rules.
One thing that I think is missing from the equation is good video games journalism that covers indie games. Video game journalism has never been doing amazing but it's practically dead now.
Tying discovery to the same platform that you consume things on is really bad, because it always gives that distributor way to much power. Similar story with spotify, but journalism about underground music is at least in a slightly better place.
Yep, I follow The Verge, Kotaku, and PCGamer for gaming news, and I think PCG and Kotaku both have a weekly "Steam releases you might have missed this week" article, and they're always the stuff that no one who checks Steam new releases would have missed. The authors aren't actually diving deep to discover the hidden gems, they're just checking the top releases that aren't AAA publishers.
I get there's not that much money in video game journalism anymore now that they aren't all getting review copies to drive ad revenue (you can actually thank Steam for that in part, since it's more trustworthy for most people just to read user reviews there, and the other part you can thank all the paid YouTube game reviewers for, since publishers much prefer them to an outlet they can't directly write the ad copy for).
I do love me a good video game video essay, but I think that a more traditional journalistic format has a lot of strengths when it comes to covering small games. It's probably true that youtube has replaced a lot of traditional journalism but I think that this is overall bad for the video game echo system.
