Source Memes

Valve getting praised for being a competent store chain owner while having so much love from the gamers tells more about the market than it says about Valve.

Yeah, like, they were clever about lots of things. But they don't throw freebies. Even Deck and SteamOS are not a charity, these are timed bites at empty handhelds market and Win10 retirement. Sales are as predatory as they are in any other store, gambling is there although contained, AI-marking is a calculated effort to win shoppers' gratitude and avoid another wave of oversaturation with slop products they'd need to work on refunding etc. It's all just a healthy business with big margins and not being braindead.

Like every other media industry, it's just too deeply fucked that we cheer on Valve alone for doing convinient services you want to unseal your mom's credit card on. And the level of fuckedness is so gross that a money-printing machine like EPIC can't get the same level of adoration by giving free games every other day. It's almost surreal how deep Steam hardcoded itself into gaming by not being as sloppy as other takes on that idea, besides Sony\Xbox\Nintendo console-locked subs.

And while I've heard some users are afraid of losing Gabe as the head commander of Valve, I honestly find it utterly irrelevant. He is not a saint, and he's completely capable of fucking up things like limiting family sharing because he may find it's not a turning point for buying extra games anymore. He may introduce his own Steam+ subscription plans to bet big on future hits and showel in trash that doesn't get the predicted number of sales (or getting bribes). He can make x64 Steam only accessible in SteamOS to hardline the Apple approach of providing the best UX under ultimately controlled conditions. It just doesn't make money and is tried times again by his peers to various results he can see.

But anytime now, Valve can get a 180 turn, not because they are inherently evil or whatever, but because we delegated them that much power that Steam is PC gaming, and no other company has that power.

As different scriptures of the past tell us, don't make an idol for yourself. It's a build up for a disappointment. Get most of them as a consumer, but don't be blind of the ways they don't even act on the market, but how they shape it.