Valve has done some good things for the game industry: they encouraged modifications, and made some good games.

However, I feel as if the gaming community praises Valve too much.

  • The gaming community praises Valve’s monopoly on game distribution services.

That’s about it though.

  • sibachian
    10·
    3 years ago

    valves “monopoly” with steam singlehandedly saved the pc gaming industry from ending up with copyright region locks and wrangled control away from the traditional giants like EA who still insist on overpricing games, stupid drms, and locking them away from platforms and regions. additionally, back when, they let people share the keys of the original halflife on the precursor to steam (won) with up to 10 friends. and encouraged people to use their sdk for a great modding community (that also ran through won).

    valve in general is pretty open and supportive, with quite liberal policies and have some of the best employment environments in the industry. i actually feel that the quality of their service and library have gone down when they loosened some of their publishing restrictions.

    valve is pretty great as far as capitalism goes. but it’s all thanks to gaben. the day he retires/dies, there are no guarantees valve won’t turn into yet another capitalist cesspool.

    valve’s steam is imo, is still to this day, managing to stay ahead and enabling gamers and devs access to a library in a way that just can’t be found in other entertainment industries (netflix has been gutted by the giants, and spotify is morphing into an awful cesspool of evil).

    i would love for GOG to have succeeded, and put more effort into their client for multiple platforms, and a better publishing transparency. but unfortunately GOG has failed on many levels, and that leaves steam still as the leader in this type of service.

    additionally, i believe services like steam should be publicly owned. same for netflix. etc. there is literally no reason and awful for consumers to split this type of service up among multiple companies or even profit from such services. it should be public. but we don’t live in a world where that’s currently possible. so for now, we just have to be thankful that gaben is a pretty nice guy who doesn’t prioritize greed like all the others, and maintains monopoly despite of it, and thankful that a non-greed-first model has been so successful in establishing a cultural victory among its consumers.

    • MerchantsOfMisery
      31·
      3 years ago

      valve is pretty great as far as capitalism goes. but it’s all thanks to gaben. the day he retires/dies, there are no guarantees valve won’t turn into yet another capitalist cesspool.

      This is the key point people need to realize. Any capitalist company can seem good if it’s run by a decent person but that’s putting a lot of eggs in one basket. No different than how there may very well be some authoritarian leader who manages to be a good person, but the next guy is more likely going to abuse all that power so it’s not particularly an ideal system.