BassetHound

I gave up on the NDP after years of mismanagement. I voted for the party of Jack and was alright with Mulcair. But under Jagmeet the party has been run into the ground.

That year where Jagmeet and the NDP propped up the obviously dead Trudeau government was the final straw. Willfully choosing to support a wildly unpopular prime minister to avoid the election was gross and made a mockery of their name. If you want to be taken seriously as a party and a leader, you have to be in it to win. There could have been an opportunity to become the opposition again and maybe replace the Liberals in time. Instead they chose to sacrifice their own party. If they don’t even want to be a serious party, why the hell should I vote for them?

Valve grew Steam’s market share by locking in exclusives.

By exclusives you mean their own games? Or are you referring to the time before Steam Greenlight?

There were multiple digital distribution platforms in the early days, IGN even had one.

Yeah I remember D2D, it had awful DRM and they deleted my account one day without refunds.

Then Valve forced exclusivity to starve out the competition.

No the competition died because they were trash. I used D2D, Origin, Impulse, they were all horrible compared to Steam.

Steam has its Most-Favored-Nation clause to prevent publishers selling games for cheaper on other platforms.

No, Steam doesn't let you sell Steam keys to your game on other platforms for cheaper. That's very different.

Valve fought against refunds for years until the EU told them to wise up.

I refunded things multiple times for the policy changes. As long as you gave a good justification and weren't abusing the system then they have always been quite reasonable.

Valve only started supporting Linux when needed to sell consoles. They just like most other companies saw Linux gaming as an extreme niche.

No this started because of the Windows Store initiative back in 2012 where Microsoft was trying to consolidate the sale of all software to their proprietary platform. Supporting Linux was Valve's way of hedging against that future.

Valve doesn’t try and lock in exclusives on their platform like the Epic Store or delete your account with games on it like Origin did. Steam provides plenty of notices about invasive DRM and anti-cheat that other stores don’t. Steam also has an easy refund process that doesn’t require you to call an agent. Valve does a lot to support gaming on Linux while all of the other platforms are almost exclusively Windows only.

Not my point. They aren’t saints, but Steam is still a far better steward for a digital storefront than most.

We only need to look at human history, and animals in general. The power of an individual is very limited, so those with shared interests group together for protection. The bigger and more powerful groups dominate the smaller and weaker ones and power naturally concentrates into the modern nation state, political party, corporation, etc. And whoever controls those groups holds the most power.

Your perspective requires that all humans be willing and able to come to mutually acceptable compromises for any disagreement. But that's obviously not possible, there are many disagreements where humans can't just split the difference or are simply unwilling to make any compromise for whatever reason. And so power becomes the deciding factor.

Steam works because Valve is a private corporation with a leadership who actually like video games.

A few people will always end up with all of the power, it's how its always been because that's how our species works. Having mechanisms for choosing these people peacefully is better than a free for all power grab.