Well thankfully Gabe has lost a ton of weight in recent years. Man is looking absolutely svelte these days. Here’s hoping he has many more years of good health.
I’m also guessing he’ll hand pick a successor that will carry on his views, instead of dying in office and having some kind of CEO election free-for-all.
Not just PC gaming, but the gaming industry as a whole
Well, at least we’ve got global climate change and multiple other threats to the survival of humanity, we won’t have to worry for long.
Piracy is a service problem. They’ll reap what they sow if they change course. I’m not afraid to hoist my sails again when I need to. ;)
Deep discounts are locked behind a subscription
I think Gabe has been getting healthy lately. Last picture I saw of him he was looking like he lost a lot of weight. Maybe repost this in 10 years and then we can panic.
That post is pure hysteria. First no one knows when Gabe is going to die, and even if he live very long he may step down due to old age still.
- also worrying so much about something that may happen 14 years later according to op is unnecessary and distorted thinking.
- why assume there is going to be a power vacuum? can’t he and his leadership make pans of succession?
- then believing a whole made-up story going down the rabbit hole of the worst case scenario is again unnecessary and distorted thinking. Is okay to think of worst case scenarios but to take them as if they were real is gifting ourselves anxiety for free.
- in any case, the mental exercise of thinking of some undesirable possibilities allow us to take precautions and prepare to the extend that is appropriate and reachable. Which would be the most efficient behavior that thwarts “actual fear” as OP writes it.
This is silly. Valve is already a profit driven company. You don’t see the walled garden? The DRM? Valve supports proton because it’s in their monetary interest to do so.
Since it’s not publicly owned it doesn’t have to focus on quarterly profits.
If it gets sold to Microsoft they’re probably going to start stripping it down to please investors banking on how most people will be too lazy to leave it. We’ve seen the same thing happen with reddit and twitter. I’m pretty sure enshittification is inevitable.
How is it walled garden when you can add any non-steam game to your library?
You’re thinking in reverse. Walled gardens keep you in, not out. Without logging into your Steam account (pretending you don’t have one), try to download a mod for a game you bought on GOG and see how it goes for you.
I have seriously no idea, but can you take them out easily? If not, it’s a walled garden.
There’s “profit-driven” and “seeking exclusively the profits of the next quarter”. While capitalism has a lot of downsides in the long run, the vast majority of bullshit people get outraged about is due to publicly traded companies being organized in such a way that their CEOs and shareholders sacrifice all sustainability and instead try to loot your kitchen.
Whatever Steam policies you think are bullshit right now (and I can name a couple more, too), they’re not too much in comparison to what they’d be under more typical management.
Capitalism bad. Support Epic Games instead. /s
Valve doesn’t need infinite growth to survive wallstreet. Proton is open source and very popular.
What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.
Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?
The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.
Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).
Whenever you are afraid of the negative impact on your life of a corporation’s possible failure, it means that you have become reliant on someone you can’t trust. You must act accordingly.
Does this mean I should buy games from GOG? Or support physical media/indies?
Yes. GOG. itch.io. Direct from some other website. That’s right.
Steam is very good; but the hidden cost is that you depend on them maintaining their service. If they turn evil, you’re screwed. You either have to bend to their will, or you lose your library of games.
On the other hand, GOG and itch.io are arguably not as good as Steam right now, but they don’t have any kind of lock-in. So if they start to backslide, you can still walk away with your full library of games. I do think it’s a good idea to ‘not put all your eggs in one basket.’
Reject modernity, move to the woods, return to monke.
Probably not a popular view here but I’ve found my hobbies more fulfilling since I started doing stuff other than gaming. Native plant/food gardening, reading books, working out… all of this stuff can be affected by capitalism too of course but I’m less beholden to it. I still game a bit now and then but much less than I used to.
Even when steam is gone, we’ll still have movies, books and music.
Because of the analogue hole we can capture these and store these as long as unlicensed hard drive possession is allowed.
Of course there are non-culture based activities but I think we shouldn’t tolerate regression from big tech and take steps to prevent them just out of shear principle.
These facilitator middlemen think they can dictate how to live our lives and I think we should make them regret this position severely.
if steam dies we need to support GOGS
Gamers truly are the most oppressed minority group
Steam, my Steam library and Proton could disappear. But at least it will have supported a big traction in the ecosystem : Wine, DXVK, Lutris, Heroic Launcher, Bazzite, etc… are all open source projects (so they can’t really disappear) that have never moved as fast as they are today.
No no…it’s going to be much worse than that.
It’ll be a subscription just to play the game you already own.
