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 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.
If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company's efforts on Mac.
Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode.... Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019
Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.
I don't disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author's key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn't investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn't too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve's attention. So who is being "anti-consumer" in this example, Valve or Apple?
It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. Apple very obviously doesn't want the Mac gaming ecosystem to exist in the same capacity as Windows and Linux, but Valve also has an obligation to its customers using Macs to keep the service running well.
macOS 10.14 has been EOL for more than 2 years now and basically every Mac released since 2012 is compatible with 10.15. Valve also didn't actively flip a switch and disable functionality; they're just no longer providing updates. I don't think Valve shoulders any blame in this specific case - it's unreasonable to expect any company to indefinitely support platforms that are effectively obsolete.
I meant more that the Steam client needs to be fully functional on modern macOS. Dropping older operating systems is more justifiable, but does still add to the picture of Valve not treating Mac owners all that well.
I got my first mac a few years back off the side of the road, a 2009 imac that didn't work. I went to a lot of trouble to find and install the most up to date mac os I could get on it for the challenge and because I'd never used a intel mac before.
Believe me, they absolutely did just flick a switch. everything about steam worked fine until the day it didn't even load up. removing support is one thing, actively bricking your product is a total scum fuck move that is just common practice in gaming now.
On the modern ARM based Macs (the M1/2/3/X processors), it isn't an option. The only real solution is to use desktop virtualisation software like Parallels to install Windows (ARM based) and try to get Steam going. There are cheaper alternatives to Parallels, but they are often a faff.
I have an M2 Air which can run the Windows version of Steam via Whisky. Its ability can be patchy, but the fact it runs any games at all is little short of a miracle. I’ve been playing The Talos Principle II that way, and while my wife thinks the glitchy graphics are hilarious, I’m not too fussed because the gameplay is still there.
Of course, it’s not perfect, and while I can get Fallout 4 to run, it looks like shit even on the lowest settings. However, in the context of the gripes in this thread, it means I can play Portal 2 and its various mod packs on my Mac. And they look great.
Yeah, Valve has put a lot of effort into bridging the compatibility gap for Linux. Most of that work could also be ported to macOS, but they just don’t care.
It’s a shame, because getting 32-bit to 64-bit compatibility working would help Linux as well. I don’t know how much longer distros want to keep supporting 32-bit libraries, and some distros have already dropped them.
That said, macOS compatibility seems like a non-sequitur for an article calling Steam a “time bomb.” DRM is definitely the bigger issue here.
It's not just 32 on 64 bit, new Macs use ARM64 processors so x86/x86_64 code is effectively obsolete on Mac. I would love to see Valve pour resources into a cross platform x86 on ARM64 emulation layer though, it would benefit Linux as well.
The ARM translation may be less of a problem on macOS because of Rosetta. That said, integrating something like Box64 would absolutely benefit both Mac and Linux.
Agreed. This is a superficial history lesson masquerading as an article. While nothing lasts forever and Steam has its issues, the examples being cited are not supporting the not outrageous prediction that Steam might get worse in the future. It's just not very insightful.
Anyone who, unlike the author, actually had to deal with early versions of Steam can attest to the fact that in most ways, the platform has dramatically improved.
To be clear there’s only been a single generation (2006) of x86 based Macs that weren’t 64bit. They’ve been telling everyone since 2007 (well actually earlier even, the final PPC generation was 64bit), that the 32bit was going to go away.
I hate to defend Apple arbitrarily but all us developers had plenty of notice, and had to specifically reconfigure the default settings on their projects to only be 32bit. If developers ignore deprecation notices for over a decade, then is it really the fault of the other side?
I am not a developer and honestly curious about this. What's Apple's reason for ditching 32 bit programs? Isn't backwards compatibility a net positive for both developers and consumers?
I wouldn't say Apple disregards backwards compatibility, but they certainly don't prioritize it to the degree Microsoft does, or that the general open-source community does. For Microsoft, backwards compatibility is their bread and butter. Enterprise customers have all sorts of unsupported legacy shit, and it dictates purchasing decisions and upgrade schedules.
Apple gave devs and users a ton of lead time before dropping 32-bit support. The last 32-bit Mac hardware was in 2006 (the first gen of Intel Macs); it wasn't until Catalina's release in 2019 that 32-bit apps stopped running, and Apple continued releasing security updates for older OSes that could run 32-bit apps for a couple years after that. So that was basically 15 years of notice for devs to release 64-bit apps.
That was much more time than they gave Classic Mac apps under OS X, or PowerPC apps on Intel. I was much more annoyed when PowerPC support was axed. Only a matter of time until Intel apps stop running on Apple Silicon, too. That's gonna be the end of the world for Steam games. Ironically, it's already easier to run legacy Windows and Linux games on Mac than it is to run legacy Mac games.
Yeah, totally agree that we shouldn't go all in on trusting valve, but apple is definitely the anti-consumer one here. I don't think valve would support DX if they could get away with it. Apple deprecating everything but metal without making it an open spec basically said, "we don't want anyone gaming on our platform".
Here's a repost of what I said the last time the Steam vs Epic Games Store "debate" was brought up:
My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let's be honest. They have many ties to China's Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.
There's also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don't know.
As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.
Plus, any good will that they've purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They've been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They're going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.
They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they're fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it's projected that they won't be profitable until 2027, which means they'll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.
So basically Steam is fine, has been for 20 years, and has competitors waiting to step in and take over the market if Gaben and co ever succumb to the temptation to cash in for a quick boost to corporate profits for a few years at the expense of ruining the business forever after, as impatient shareholders might demand if it were a public company, which it isn't.
It's true though, it could fall apart at any moment. So could anything. I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.
Luckily it's not a public company and it seems its shareholders aren't interested in making a quick buck. If they were they'd have already made it obvious. If they decide to sell or IPO on the other hand (also sell), then quick buck will be the name of the game in no time.
I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.
Exactly my thought. And backing up games and stripping Steam DRM from the games that use it (very easy to do, or so I hear.)
If Valve announces Steam is shutting down (or enshittifies), then everyone who can (and cares) will just backup their games, and everyone else will just download the DRM-stripped versions using their favourite piracy platform.
Right now, it's easier to buy a game on Steam than fuff about with piracy. Even at minimum wage, it's usually cheaper in the opportunity cost of time to just buy games (if you're a patient gamer, at any rate; higher income levels needed for full box price).
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.
I do this too. If it's on Gog I buy it there. I hope gog manages to stay around but even if it doesn't I can grab the offline installers for the games I have purchased and back them up elsewhere.
Does anyone actually use offline installers on a regular basis? I tried a few times and I had problems. Dunno if just bad luck. Never managed to install Pillars on eternity with it because it errored out every time. Another game's offline installer (can’t remember which) would stall for hours then crash. I suspect a lot of users would be in for a surprise if they actually tried them.
This looks like a problem with your system to me. Run a few checks on your RAM and storage devices. I had files corrupt on my NAS and a PC of mine, because both had defective memory. I only noticed it, because installers and 7zip began to produce errors.
