If valve laid off 1000 people, there wouldn’t be anyone left. The company has like 200 employees and gaben and maybe 3 other people make almost all the money. Gabens yatch fleet is worth a cool billion, or was before he added an other one a few months ago.
People simping for billionaires disgust me.
Gabens is worst than Tim. At least Epic developed Unreal Studio. Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own. Steam being nice to use doesn’t magic away the highway robbery, all games stores are shit (gog and itch not included).
FYI you have never owned a game. It’s always been a license. Even when it was physical. It’s the same for GoG too sep you get an installer for later. It’s still only a license.
Also Steam did not give us DRM. DRM has existed for decades before steam was made.
The software licensing we know today for everything software related only started in like '82 or '83. What about games from the 70s? (Granted the person you responded to may still have never owned a game if they weren’t even alive in the 70s; I sure as hell wasn’t)
Yes, if we want to get technical, we don’t legally own those games, obviously. However, so long as they are DRM free, we can always install them on whatever hardware we choose, as long as its supported. Thats why people say DRM takes away a player’s ability to “own” their games.
Yeah, I have a few games like that. That means they’re DRM free. The issue with Steam is not that it forces all games on it to have DRM, but that is doesn’t make games that DON’T have DRM easy to identify.
Yeah he’s a billionaire. But he’s the least bad one . we can appreciate that. Valve is (basically) single handedly keeping all pc gaming from becoming instant shit. Imagine if ea bought valve. Scary thought. Instantly you’d have a 20 dollar a month subscription and a limit of 2 game installs/downloads a month. And your drivers license/id would be scanned.
Yes its a closed Eco system which isnt great but we still have gog. And steam games unless noted do not have DRM. They are playable without the steam client.
I think we have many, many more billionaires to worry about than attacking valves employees. As far as I know, valve employees aren’t donating to fascism and death camps, rigging elections, and promoting disinformation bots. Or denying healthcare.
Have you ever looked at the steam forums? Valve absolutely promotes fascism and bigotry by not monitoring the content on their platform. They have more than enough money to do it or to just close the forums because mothing good ever came from there anyways, but because Newell is a libertarian fuckwad his platform promotes hatespeech.
Can you please give me some links to the fascism on their forums? I already know they sell fascist games like The Great Rebellion (GOG is guilty too), or that one asset flip where LGBTQ people somehow rule the US with an iron fist - I forget its name but I saw it in a video and it was genuinely bad and creepy.
I’d dare say they don’t do ANYTHING against fascism, so in my books they are just as much enablers of fascism as the companies actively lobbying for it. You know, Nazi bars and all that. Plus I’ve got a feeling those who insist they aren’t fash because they don’t spend their money on fash things are not aware of or even ignore things they’re actually doing, or benefiting from the current admin.
They certainly are paying tax money to the Trump-Epstein Administration, as is every other American company, further enabling all those things. You have GOG as the European option that won’t pay tax to the Epstein class. Also you don’t really get to be a billionaire without also having substantial political influence…
Sure. But it makes more sense to direct the rage at the actual evil billionaires. I don’t really care if Joe that got rich off wood lag screws made a billion and fucked off to his own land never to be heard from again. I do care about the ones meddling in elections and raping children.
I’ve kept hearing these scare stories for years. Sorry, they’re shallow as shit. I’m not settling for Valve just because scawy EA is worse. To hell with them both. Anti-consuner is anti-consumer. A billionaire is a billionaire, and all of them are delicious.
Same people who wouldnt vote at all in the US Because “Biden might do a bad thing” well guess what, Drump rapes and kills children and kidnaps innocent people, while starting wars.
You know there’s more than two game companies, right? You know that unlike the presidency in the United States of Fascism, there can be more than one game distribution platform, and those can be run by multiple companies, yes? While you’re at it, buying games from Steam means your tax dollars go to the Trump Administration.
Oh ya i know. But no one actually uses anything but steam. Related, If you know normies, they only use Spotify (even though they support ICE and stolen llm slop audio). People dont buy CDs or records or use discogs or bandcamp etc. Same thing.
Skill issue. Literally. See, unlike US politics, you don’t have to choose between lesser evil and pure evil, because there are more options not vetted by two political parties and their donors. And in fairness to US politics, the lesser evil is recognized as a lesser evil, whereas here every single time I call out the pure evil, someone shows up and goes “they’re not pure evil, they’re GOOD GUYS”
Valve has done bad guy things, and I will call out the fact they’ve done things and their owner has been rewarded with seven yachts for it. You can come back to me when the hypotheticals with EA become reality.
Not that odd. Valve doesn’t have mass layoffs because they don’t over-hire. Beyond that, it’s salt in the wound towards Sweeney’s inability to compete.
Valve runs such a lean ship that Gaben was able to buy a boat with a fully functional hospital aboard.
Every other company that greedily sucks away profit from their consumers to the point of creating billionaires is criticised but steam gets a pass because they don’t have any employees to lay off. Jfc.
They don’t hire at all because it’s a money making machine sucking wealth out of gamers and devs alike. It needs zero manpower, it literally just prints money.
You’re conflating. While I don’t disagree that Valve is soaking up money, and when it fleet-of-yachts money, it’s just as sickening as when any-and-everyone else does it. Where there’s a difference is in the ‘How’. While I have my problems with Steam, generally speaking, they offer a good service. They provide servers and bandwidth while selling games far cheaper than their closest competitors, by one means or another.
There’s also how they’re using that money as a company. Right now, I can think of three different lawsuits Valve is involved in just off the top of my head, all of which are fighting to worsen the hobby for gamers and Valve is opposing. Obviously, it’s in Valve’s interest as a game’s marketplace to keep gamers throwing money at them, but the ‘Why’ matters a lot less in this circumstance that the ‘What’. Even if it’s not the express purpose, Valve is the only company I know of that’s putting in any amount of effort to defend consumer rights in the gaming space. Everyone else with money comparable to what Valve has are too busy trying to exploit the market or diminish Valve’s share while providing nothing as close to as good as Steam.
News that has come out since your comment involving Valve includes an agreement with Facepunch Studios to make Source 2 available to public without any licensing fee under the name of s&box. While it’s obviously in Valve’s interest to increase the possible amount of games that will be sold on their platform, and Facepunch have done a significant amount of heavy lifting in making Source 2 both available and useful to the masses, that’s still Valve doing their part to make the gaming community a better place and provide an alternative to the (in some people’s opinions) over-used Unreal and (horribly untrustworthy) Unity.
As Zorque has said before me, Valve aren’t angles, but I truly believe Valve is bringing a net positive to the market, unlike any other company with comparable bank balances.
Ya, that’s why I said all stores. Xbox and Valve are the same coin, just a different face. Valve did popularize DRM though, before Xbox and the rest got in on it. Xbox is overall worst though.
Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own.
THANK YOU for saying this. Their launcher based DRM scheme and its direct attack on ownership, physical and used games has been a scourge. Don’t forget their popularizing the F2P economy model and lootboxes, leading to more US-grown harm.
THANK YOU for saying this. Their launcher based DRM scheme and its direct attack on ownership
FYI Steam only applies a very weak DRM to stop people from copying games, but you can easily bypass it using Goldberg. Just copy/paste a few files into the game folder and you can play it outside of Steam.
I know it is weak, I have cracked the games I used to have there myself before just giving up the account. It doesn’t change the facts it harmed games forever, that it is the poster child of “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”
You say this like Steam created DRM… DRM already existed back in the day, and in way more intrusive ways. Having CD keys, games that would activate only once by connecting to the servers, etc…
Steam is the poster child of making digital games popular. That’s it. It’s not that deep.
Iirc, half life 2 was the first major game, having DRM and needing validation through steam, even with a hardcopy. After that, all the other companies jumped aboard with using DRM with steam.
I feel like people think cd keys are the bar and if you are slightly better (online activation) them you get flying marks. Same with comparing to Xbox and epic.
They all fail, including steam. It’s crazy to see people defending any of them but Gaben always gets defended. Steam deserves the critique as much as the rest.
It’s crazy to see people defending any of them but Gaben always gets defended.
Well I should’ve looked at the sub before deriding yacht owners. Of course it is pcgaming. He is their god. To criticize him or his company is sacrilege. Never mind that he is cut from the same cloth as every other CEO. But he did one good thing so clearly the two billion bad things don’t matter.
Just because there was bad (CD keys), doesn’t mean we must settle for worse (phoning home to servers owned and run by a private company based in the fucking United States to play a fucking single player game). But if you’re happy owning nothing… Well, I’m not.
If valve laid off 1000 people, there wouldn’t be anyone left. The company has like 200 employees and gaben and maybe 3 other people make almost all the money. Gabens yatch fleet is worth a cool billion, or was before he added an other one a few months ago.
People simping for billionaires disgust me.
Gabens is worst than Tim. At least Epic developed Unreal Studio. Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own. Steam being nice to use doesn’t magic away the highway robbery, all games stores are shit (gog and itch not included).
FYI you have never owned a game. It’s always been a license. Even when it was physical. It’s the same for GoG too sep you get an installer for later. It’s still only a license.
Also Steam did not give us DRM. DRM has existed for decades before steam was made.
The software licensing we know today for everything software related only started in like '82 or '83. What about games from the 70s? (Granted the person you responded to may still have never owned a game if they weren’t even alive in the 70s; I sure as hell wasn’t)
Hahaha.
Oh, I’ve owned a game.
I own many games.
I can give them to whoever I want.
… you just have to be clever.
Yes, if we want to get technical, we don’t legally own those games, obviously. However, so long as they are DRM free, we can always install them on whatever hardware we choose, as long as its supported. Thats why people say DRM takes away a player’s ability to “own” their games.
For a lot of games, Steam is just an installer. They start fine on their own if you copy the folder.
Yeah, I have a few games like that. That means they’re DRM free. The issue with Steam is not that it forces all games on it to have DRM, but that is doesn’t make games that DON’T have DRM easy to identify.
Lemmy commenter can’t hold a coherent idea in their head for three seconds. Remarkable.
Yeah he’s a billionaire. But he’s the least bad one . we can appreciate that. Valve is (basically) single handedly keeping all pc gaming from becoming instant shit. Imagine if ea bought valve. Scary thought. Instantly you’d have a 20 dollar a month subscription and a limit of 2 game installs/downloads a month. And your drivers license/id would be scanned.
Yes its a closed Eco system which isnt great but we still have gog. And steam games unless noted do not have DRM. They are playable without the steam client.
No such thing as a good billionaire. Least bad doesn’t cut it.
I think we have many, many more billionaires to worry about than attacking valves employees. As far as I know, valve employees aren’t donating to fascism and death camps, rigging elections, and promoting disinformation bots. Or denying healthcare.
Have you ever looked at the steam forums? Valve absolutely promotes fascism and bigotry by not monitoring the content on their platform. They have more than enough money to do it or to just close the forums because mothing good ever came from there anyways, but because Newell is a libertarian fuckwad his platform promotes hatespeech.
Can you please give me some links to the fascism on their forums? I already know they sell fascist games like The Great Rebellion (GOG is guilty too), or that one asset flip where LGBTQ people somehow rule the US with an iron fist - I forget its name but I saw it in a video and it was genuinely bad and creepy.
I’d dare say they don’t do ANYTHING against fascism, so in my books they are just as much enablers of fascism as the companies actively lobbying for it. You know, Nazi bars and all that. Plus I’ve got a feeling those who insist they aren’t fash because they don’t spend their money on fash things are not aware of or even ignore things they’re actually doing, or benefiting from the current admin.
They certainly are paying tax money to the Trump-Epstein Administration, as is every other American company, further enabling all those things. You have GOG as the European option that won’t pay tax to the Epstein class. Also you don’t really get to be a billionaire without also having substantial political influence…
Gabens isn’t the employee, he is the owner. When I talk shit about Amazon and Bezos, I’m not attacking the employees.
Sure. But it makes more sense to direct the rage at the actual evil billionaires. I don’t really care if Joe that got rich off wood lag screws made a billion and fucked off to his own land never to be heard from again. I do care about the ones meddling in elections and raping children.
Its like the incel Nintendo rage. No one cares.
I’ve kept hearing these scare stories for years. Sorry, they’re shallow as shit. I’m not settling for Valve just because scawy EA is worse. To hell with them both. Anti-consuner is anti-consumer. A billionaire is a billionaire, and all of them are delicious.
Very lemming of you.
“Perfect is the enemy of good”.
Same people who wouldnt vote at all in the US Because “Biden might do a bad thing” well guess what, Drump rapes and kills children and kidnaps innocent people, while starting wars.
You know there’s more than two game companies, right? You know that unlike the presidency in the United States of Fascism, there can be more than one game distribution platform, and those can be run by multiple companies, yes? While you’re at it, buying games from Steam means your tax dollars go to the Trump Administration.
Oh ya i know. But no one actually uses anything but steam. Related, If you know normies, they only use Spotify (even though they support ICE and stolen llm slop audio). People dont buy CDs or records or use discogs or bandcamp etc. Same thing.
Lemmings are .000001% of the population.
Skill issue. Literally. See, unlike US politics, you don’t have to choose between lesser evil and pure evil, because there are more options not vetted by two political parties and their donors. And in fairness to US politics, the lesser evil is recognized as a lesser evil, whereas here every single time I call out the pure evil, someone shows up and goes “they’re not pure evil, they’re GOOD GUYS”
Valve has done bad guy things, and I will call out the fact they’ve done things and their owner has been rewarded with seven yachts for it. You can come back to me when the hypotheticals with EA become reality.
Yeah, glasses houses and such it’s odd for Valve to comment on this.
Nothing odd about wanting to put Tim’s nose in his shit. The man is beyond oblivious.
Probably because Valve didn’t, some guy who used to work for Valve did.
Not that odd. Valve doesn’t have mass layoffs because they don’t over-hire. Beyond that, it’s salt in the wound towards Sweeney’s inability to compete.
Valve runs such a lean ship that Gaben was able to buy a boat with a fully functional hospital aboard.
Every other company that greedily sucks away profit from their consumers to the point of creating billionaires is criticised but steam gets a pass because they don’t have any employees to lay off. Jfc.
They don’t hire at all because it’s a money making machine sucking wealth out of gamers and devs alike. It needs zero manpower, it literally just prints money.
And yet they still push innovation, both in software and hardware.
Theyre certainly not angels, but they’re far closer than just about anyone else at their level.
You’re conflating. While I don’t disagree that Valve is soaking up money, and when it fleet-of-yachts money, it’s just as sickening as when any-and-everyone else does it. Where there’s a difference is in the ‘How’. While I have my problems with Steam, generally speaking, they offer a good service. They provide servers and bandwidth while selling games far cheaper than their closest competitors, by one means or another.
There’s also how they’re using that money as a company. Right now, I can think of three different lawsuits Valve is involved in just off the top of my head, all of which are fighting to worsen the hobby for gamers and Valve is opposing. Obviously, it’s in Valve’s interest as a game’s marketplace to keep gamers throwing money at them, but the ‘Why’ matters a lot less in this circumstance that the ‘What’. Even if it’s not the express purpose, Valve is the only company I know of that’s putting in any amount of effort to defend consumer rights in the gaming space. Everyone else with money comparable to what Valve has are too busy trying to exploit the market or diminish Valve’s share while providing nothing as close to as good as Steam.
News that has come out since your comment involving Valve includes an agreement with Facepunch Studios to make Source 2 available to public without any licensing fee under the name of s&box. While it’s obviously in Valve’s interest to increase the possible amount of games that will be sold on their platform, and Facepunch have done a significant amount of heavy lifting in making Source 2 both available and useful to the masses, that’s still Valve doing their part to make the gaming community a better place and provide an alternative to the (in some people’s opinions) over-used Unreal and (horribly untrustworthy) Unity.
As Zorque has said before me, Valve aren’t angles, but I truly believe Valve is bringing a net positive to the market, unlike any other company with comparable bank balances.
Xbox with online needed is just the same as DRM; Since you can’t play unless you have a connection to their server.
Ya, that’s why I said all stores. Xbox and Valve are the same coin, just a different face. Valve did popularize DRM though, before Xbox and the rest got in on it. Xbox is overall worst though.
THANK YOU for saying this. Their launcher based DRM scheme and its direct attack on ownership, physical and used games has been a scourge. Don’t forget their popularizing the F2P economy model and lootboxes, leading to more US-grown harm.
FYI Steam only applies a very weak DRM to stop people from copying games, but you can easily bypass it using Goldberg. Just copy/paste a few files into the game folder and you can play it outside of Steam.
I know it is weak, I have cracked the games I used to have there myself before just giving up the account. It doesn’t change the facts it harmed games forever, that it is the poster child of “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”
You say this like Steam created DRM… DRM already existed back in the day, and in way more intrusive ways. Having CD keys, games that would activate only once by connecting to the servers, etc…
Steam is the poster child of making digital games popular. That’s it. It’s not that deep.
Iirc, half life 2 was the first major game, having DRM and needing validation through steam, even with a hardcopy. After that, all the other companies jumped aboard with using DRM with steam.
I feel like people think cd keys are the bar and if you are slightly better (online activation) them you get flying marks. Same with comparing to Xbox and epic.
They all fail, including steam. It’s crazy to see people defending any of them but Gaben always gets defended. Steam deserves the critique as much as the rest.
Well I should’ve looked at the sub before deriding yacht owners. Of course it is pcgaming. He is their god. To criticize him or his company is sacrilege. Never mind that he is cut from the same cloth as every other CEO. But he did one good thing so clearly the two billion bad things don’t matter.
Just because there was bad (CD keys), doesn’t mean we must settle for worse (phoning home to servers owned and run by a private company based in the fucking United States to play a fucking single player game). But if you’re happy owning nothing… Well, I’m not.