So basically Steam is fine, has been for 20 years, and has competitors waiting to step in and take over the market if Gaben and co ever succumb to the temptation to cash in for a quick boost to corporate profits for a few years at the expense of ruining the business forever after, as impatient shareholders might demand if it were a public company, which it isn’t.

It’s true though, it could fall apart at any moment. So could anything. I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.

Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode… Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

I don’t disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author’s key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn’t investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn’t too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve’s attention. So who is being “anti-consumer” in this example, Valve or Apple?

I have my criticisms of Steam, but I see no sign of it marching toward some kind of big anti-customer explosion as suggested in this article. Unlike most others, it’s run by a privately owned company, so it doesn’t have investors pressuring toward enshittification. We can see the result by looking back at the past decade or so: Steam has been operating more or less the same.

Meanwhile, the author offers for contrast Epic Games, a major source of platform exclusives and surveillance software (file-snooping store app, client-side anti-cheat, Epic Online Services “telemetry”), all of which are very much anti-customer.

AFAIK, only one of the other stores listed is actually better for customers in any significant way: GOG. (For the record, I mostly like GOG.) But it was mentioned so briefly that it feels like the author only did so in hopes of influencing GOG fans.

Overall, this post looks a lot like astroturfing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be sponsored by Epic or Microsoft.

Edit: I forgot something that has changed in the past decade:

Valve has spent the past five years investing in open platforms: At first by funding key parts (often the most difficult ones) of the open-source software stack that now makes gaming great on linux, and more recently by developing remarkably good and fairly open PC hardware for mobile gaming. No vendor lock-in. No subscription fees. No artificially crippled features. This has already freed many gamers from Microsoft’s stranglehold, and more of us are reaping the benefits every day.

This is the polar opposite of what the author would have us fear.

Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism

I’m glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn’t choose that, and they’re certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.

It really feels like this author is just saying, “they’re resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo ‘timebomb’!”.

“Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”

Looks like an article paid for by Epic.

Here’s a repost of what I said the last time the Steam vs Epic Games Store “debate” was brought up:

My biggest concern with Epic is their insistence on kernel level anti-cheat which is just ridiculous overkill and probably being used as spyware let’s be honest. They have many ties to China’s Tencent which has a 40% stake in the company and is known to basically just be an extension of the Chinese government.

There’s also the very odd fact that just having the Epic Games Store open in the background will deplete your laptops battery life by up to 20%. Is it just horribly optimized and uses all that battery even when idling, or is it doing something nefarious in the background? We don’t know.

As for exclusives, they have bought exclusives that were mostly crowd funded from the start which is quite the kick in the teeth to the early investors that helped get the project off the ground. And there were even some exclusives that were already listed for pre-order through Steam, forcing everyone to need to get a refund.

Plus, any good will that they’ve purchased so far is just in service of making a good name for themselves. They’ve been losing around $400 million per year since 2019 just to bring in new users. They’re going to suddenly turn around and start being cut-throat as soon as they think they can.

They are not consumer friendly, they want to dictate trends in gaming. Valve is already the king of that throne and they’re fairly benevolent and have pushed trends that are good for gaming and consumers overall. I have serious doubt that Epic would be anywhere near as good for gaming as Valve has been if they should actually become profitable, and an industry leader. Especially when it’s projected that they won’t be profitable until 2027, which means they’ll need to recoup their investment of nearly $3.2 billion since 2019.