shareholders…owners… who cares about the vernacular.
Turns out, quite a few people when those words are describing very different things.
I just hope to christ Gabe Newell’s successor(s) are in line with his actions.
This is how I know that you don’t know much at all. GabeN has changed valve from being a game developer making amazing things like Half Life and Team Fortress 2, to microtransactions and no games. A continuation of what Gabe is doing is pretty much in line with the rest of the industry, except NBA 2k4 would be the last one and it would have microtransaction DLC for the next 15 years.
Valve are major players in Linux being a viable option for gaming and actively fighting the Microsoft monopoly for PC gaming. Not in line with other players in the industry.
They are actively developing proton as well as their own controller support for any games within their platform.
What is the rest of the industry doing in line with this?
I played Dota 2 from its first beta release, and many years after. Eventually stopped about 2 years ago. In that time I put 4 digit sum into that game, and received nothing that would give me any gameplay advantage. I did it to support the game, that also worked on Linux.
I understand that MTX are not ideal, but there are very different approaches to them. And at least in Dota 2, I can and did support it.
That is fair, Dota 2 is cosmetic only. TF2 on the other hand, is selling items with stats, mostly sidegrades rather than upgrades, but they do play into a certain kind of play, which does make it a de facto upgrade if your style of play matches the items use case.
Okay, I know nothing at all!
Hope you enjoy your Steam game library being ripped out of your hands or a forced subscription or recurring purchase or mandatory timed video ads showing up whenever someone who can make decisions for the future of the Valve LLC believes that is the right decision.
The fact is, whoever has possession (e.g. OWNERSHIP) of the decisions for a company can choose to do this, to not do this, or to do something else, or nothing at all. Inevitably decisions by whoever owns that control will change from the predecessors and eventually someone or some combination of someones constituting the deciding majority will sell out. No one lives forever.
Epic Games Store, Gog, UPlay (or whatever ubisoft’s is called), Origin/EA Downloader have all not done this and yet they’re not controlled by Gabe Newell.
Fact is that steam, no one else, started the road down the licensing and not ownership of games path we are firmly on with regards to PC.
Most PC’s don’t even have a disc drive any more, it’s all downloads.
And Gog is the only one that still allows ownership and not licensing of software.
So yeah, you do know nothing at all.
“hurr durr nobody else has does it yet so clearly it can never happen”
Nobody else has 70%+ market share. The others are all competing for a bigger slice, they can’t afford to be predatory.
The market leader can and the rest will follow suit. Haven’t you seen overdraft charges (just now having laws change…decades after becoming a problem), minimal interest rates on savings accounts, ads in streaming services across the board, a reigning in of account sharing based on IP addresses for streaming services…
I get that you just can’t imagine a world where your game library is RIPPED out of your hands after a 30 day notice of service changes… i’ve seen it happen time and time again for various platforms and games. Digital services can and will fuck you eventually.
Signed: Hellgate London lifetime subscription holder
Skates@feddit.nl 8 months ago
Sorry but I agree with the guy on this. It’s 2024, idgaf about valve IP anymore, they can ruin their games with microtransactions and I honestly won’t care. I use Valve like you and the rest of the world use it: buying and managing a collection of games. And right now, Steam has good practices in that regard. I can get refunds if I play a game for a couple of hours and I don’t like it. I can access any of the games I bought, they haven’t gone Sony on me and restricted my purchases. They’ve proven themselves to be good guys in this and I too fear the day GabeN is replaced by some fuck who just wants to get a quick few million, so he shits all over us and our collections of games.
Wodge@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You’re simping for a shop. The PC Shop wars have managed to be even more pathetic than the console wars.
I have Steam, Epic Games Store, GoG Galaxy, Battle.net, XBox, Ubisoft and EA’s thing installed and they all miraculously work since I’m on PC and it’s not a locked down consoles. I get to play games that aren’t on steam!
Stop locking your PC down, it’s not a console.
Jajcus@kbin.social 8 months ago
Valve is the company responsible for unlocking my PC for gaming. Most games can now be played without using Windows and Valve is mostly responsible for that. Because most game developers do not care and would rather force you to use proprietary OS than let you use what you prefer.
Wodge@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You’re still playing proprietary games on your FOSS OS. Furthermore, the vast majority of people don’t care.
If it matters to you personally, I get that. But linux gaming is personally DOA for me as it still doesn’t support my simracing hardware.
ABCDE@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s only a recent thing and because it benefits them and their handheld device. They introduced online DRM and you are sucking it up.
Skates@feddit.nl 8 months ago
What are you even talking about? I have all of those installed as well, and a few others on top. I’m incredibly wary of any of them though - I don’t know if GoG will be around in 10 years, I don’t trust epic as far as I can throw them, I don’t want to support ubisoft and EA, and Blizzard has made so many questionable choices that I’m at the point where I don’t want to support them AND I don’t believe they can make good games anymore.
It’s about trust. I trust valve to allow me access to my games more than I trust the others. Doesn’t mean I don’t have the others, where did I say that?