I feel like the often unspoken rebuttal to any defense of Playstation doing what Steam already does is how much easier it is to pirate your Steam library if they go too far off the rails. I suspect that part of the reason Steam has been slow to enshittify is their recognition that piracy is a competitor.
Publicly-held corporations are legally obligated to think only of line go up. Valve (Steam) is privately held, and as such is not forced to maximize profit every quarter.
This is one of those almost correct things that people love saying, but it’s not the whole story. Publicly held corporations are obligated to serve their shareholders’ best interests, but executives are given tons of leeway and the benefit of the doubt in both how that goal is defined and how they choose to pursue it.
The Dodge v Ford case that established the idea of shareholder primacy was back in 1919. America’s entire Golden Age of manufacturing came after that decision. If companies were charged with only providing quarterly profits, then there wouldn’t have been decades of corporate reinvestment and expansion, employee training and education, narrower exec-to-employee pay gaps, or any of the other things people seemed to love about pre-Reagan America.
None of these companies have a legal obligation to be shitty. They’re just incentivized because nobody says or does anything.
It’s even more depressing that it’s a conscious choice, and the exception is a company that wanted didn’t want to pay for birth control for their employees. But thank you for the correction.
you can buy completely drm free games off GOG, download the installer and keep it forever
Shop around on multiple sites, steam, gog, uplay, greenmangaming etc, get good prices
On PlayStation sonys store is your only option… a monopoly (wonder what EU will say?) and while they sometimes have ok discounts, they suck compared to physical games, the used market, trading etc. and being able to play your old games in 20 years is just awesome… not possible when they shut down the ps5 servers, or whatever.
On pc you got emulation, backwards compatibility layers etc. so you can play anything (almost)
And … most people need a computer anyway. Why not just get one that can do gaming too, skip the console?
I buy a lot of games from Steam sales. I re-buy my favourite games from GoG.
I get to sample on cheap, get to really own my favourite games, and the developers of those games get more sales. Everybody wins.
My entirte 1300 title Steam library is cracked and backed up to local media, not a single game isn’t able to be played if Valve decides to cut me off, though I have to crack and run an emulator instead of just saving a local installer like I do with my equally large GOG games library. Added bonus, once cracked they don’t need the Steam client running, so it shaves a bit off the resources demanded of your system to run the game you gut when cracking it.
Which is why the GOG one is growing, and all I buy on Steam anymore is the occasional DLC for a game I already own.
To be fair, even when I still used Steam I cracked Denuvo, the “First Run, please connect to verify license” that poped up again and again no matter how many times I verified the game finally put anything with third party DRM not in a “Crack it” box but in a “Put on your eyepatch” one.
Steamstub is at least functional, I’d not mind it if they didn’t force you to run the full Steam clinet rather than a low resource daemon like they could do. I mean there’s a project to do Galaxy (which is already optional) with Comet, works cross platform and doesn’t need a giant spammy client giving me horrible “For you!” recommendations when I want to play a game.
I feel like the often unspoken rebuttal to any defense of Playstation doing what Steam already does is how much easier it is to pirate your Steam library if they go too far off the rails. I suspect that part of the reason Steam has been slow to enshittify is their recognition that piracy is a competitor.
Publicly-held corporations are legally obligated to think only of line go up. Valve (Steam) is privately held, and as such is not forced to maximize profit every quarter.
This is one of those almost correct things that people love saying, but it’s not the whole story. Publicly held corporations are obligated to serve their shareholders’ best interests, but executives are given tons of leeway and the benefit of the doubt in both how that goal is defined and how they choose to pursue it.
The Dodge v Ford case that established the idea of shareholder primacy was back in 1919. America’s entire Golden Age of manufacturing came after that decision. If companies were charged with only providing quarterly profits, then there wouldn’t have been decades of corporate reinvestment and expansion, employee training and education, narrower exec-to-employee pay gaps, or any of the other things people seemed to love about pre-Reagan America.
None of these companies have a legal obligation to be shitty. They’re just incentivized because nobody says or does anything.
It’s even more depressing that it’s a conscious choice, and the exception is a company that wanted didn’t want to pay for birth control for their employees. But thank you for the correction.
Hasn’t Gabe explicitly said this?
Piracy is an issue of service, not price
He’s apparently been saying this for a while
Great. So maybe have your (required) client not use more RAM than half of the games on there? It’s why i prefer to not buy on Steam anymore.
Only in every single piracy thread known to man in the last 2 years.
No hate, im just tired of seeing the quote
But while its normal on PC
You can shop ANYWHERE
you can buy completely drm free games off GOG, download the installer and keep it forever
Shop around on multiple sites, steam, gog, uplay, greenmangaming etc, get good prices
On PlayStation sonys store is your only option… a monopoly (wonder what EU will say?) and while they sometimes have ok discounts, they suck compared to physical games, the used market, trading etc. and being able to play your old games in 20 years is just awesome… not possible when they shut down the ps5 servers, or whatever.
On pc you got emulation, backwards compatibility layers etc. so you can play anything (almost)
And … most people need a computer anyway. Why not just get one that can do gaming too, skip the console?
I buy a lot of games from Steam sales. I re-buy my favourite games from GoG. I get to sample on cheap, get to really own my favourite games, and the developers of those games get more sales. Everybody wins.
This hasn’t been true for for several years now. For “most people”, a smart phone is all they need for their daily computing tasks.
A smartphone is still a computer, and emulation on arm (including android) is still an option. Just look at things like https://gamenative.app/
Yep, normies dont have computers, can confirm IRL. Phonebrains.
Its crazy to us nerds.
Stop all the downloadin’
My entirte 1300 title Steam library is cracked and backed up to local media, not a single game isn’t able to be played if Valve decides to cut me off, though I have to crack and run an emulator instead of just saving a local installer like I do with my equally large GOG games library. Added bonus, once cracked they don’t need the Steam client running, so it shaves a bit off the resources demanded of your system to run the game you gut when cracking it.
Which is why the GOG one is growing, and all I buy on Steam anymore is the occasional DLC for a game I already own.
hypervisor bypassed games ≢cracks.
To be fair, even when I still used Steam I cracked Denuvo, the “First Run, please connect to verify license” that poped up again and again no matter how many times I verified the game finally put anything with third party DRM not in a “Crack it” box but in a “Put on your eyepatch” one.
Steamstub is at least functional, I’d not mind it if they didn’t force you to run the full Steam clinet rather than a low resource daemon like they could do. I mean there’s a project to do Galaxy (which is already optional) with Comet, works cross platform and doesn’t need a giant spammy client giving me horrible “For you!” recommendations when I want to play a game.