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Comment on Valve adds "all the Team Fortress 2 client and server game code" to its Source mod tools, letting modders "build completely new games based on TF2" and publish them on Steam

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Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

The steam marketplace is an attempt to monetise the user base by creating a bunch of microtransactions and taking a cut for the store. They have created a speculative market, which is essentially gambling, and made it available to minors. This market is designed to exploit people’s psychological weaknesses.

Yes, users and devs get a cut too, and that’s better than some sites will do to you, but creating a market also has a bunch of externalities - extra problems that are offloaded onto other people and not borne by valve.

So suddenly we’ve got a bunch of scammers creating accounts to make money, which obviously can scam users, plus it generats spam, and it creates a need for user-hostile security. Now I can’t friend my kid’s account without spending money on it for instance,

Also there’s the item spam. Now when I get a notification I don’t know if it’s a community forum reply, or just more worthless junk in my inventory.

Some of these are minor inconveniences, but that’s how enshittification happens. It’s little, creeping annoyances that get worse and worse until it starts to make people look for alternatives.

And like I said, it’s not as bad as other places. Steam is still the best distribution platform out there, but it has enshittified a little bit. It has to, because the interests of the owners and the interests of the users are fundamentally at odds - more money spent means more money for the owners.

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DudeDudenson@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Imagine being this salty about steam cards and C’s skins

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- Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yes, I’m so angry and salty that I checks notes wrote a detauled and even-handed analysis of the situation with appropriate caveats. How dare I state facts with sources and explanations of my reasoning.
  
  I’m just absolutely raging. It’s embarrassing, frankly. I’m making a fool of myself. I can’t believe I lost control like that and said words that I believe to be true. Who does that? Unhinged behaviour. Just wild. I should be banned.
  
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zalgotext@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Some of these are minor inconveniences, but that’s how enshittification happens. It’s little, creeping annoyances that get worse and worse until it starts to make people look for alternatives.

Ok, maybe my definition of enshittification is off then. I thought it was when some company offers some product/service for a certain price (or free), then gradually removes features from that product/service while increasing the price. Am I off?

If that definition is right, I don’t understand how the steam marketplace, a completely optional (borderline tangential) part of the steam platform, qualifies as enshittification.

And I’m not trying to defend the steam marketplace, I think it’s stupid and terrible and at minimum needs age restrictions. But like, you can absolutely just not use it and your experience using the steam platform is totally unaffected.

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- Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  That’s one way it happens, but on general the term appears to be about decline in quality for the purposes of profit-seeking, regardless of whether services were offered for free or not.
  
  The wiki article starts with this:
  
  Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
  
  Other articles I looked at seem to agree with this basic concept.
  
  And like I said, spam from scammers and inbox spam are examples of shittiness that seep in regardless of if you engage or not. There is no “no marketplace plz” option, and even if there were scammers can still send you friend request spam.
  
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  - zalgotext@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Eh, maybe I’m being pedantic, but I still don’t really see how the addition of the steam marketplace is an example of the steam platform declining in quality. It was a feature that they added a long time ago, and it doesn’t interfere with or worsen the experience of buying, organizing, or playing my video games. Sure it’s a needless addition (in our opinions), but one that I can easily ignore because it’s so isolated from the main product. Plenty of other products and services out there have features that some don’t like or don’t use, but that isn’t the same thing as enshittification. And I feel like the spam would happen regardless of if the marketplace was there or not. That feels more like a moderation problem, not an enshittification problem.
    
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    Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Sure, if you ignore the worst parts of it that I explicitly laid out and only focus on how it makes you feel personally, then I can see how you might feel that way.
    
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