Buy European

I dont think a single more based company has ever existed.

Hyperbole much? I like Steam as much as the next guy but lets not pretend the guy that owns 6 yachts is a good person just because he's better than the next worst. Steam DRMs the shit out of games sold on their platform and if you're an indie dev that wants to sell your game Steam is THE place to do it.

Steam made $10bn last year, they have about 100 employees (their parent company Valve has about 400). I used to be a bigger fan of GabeN but more recently really started considering him and looking into it and realized he's just another unethical billionaire. This video by Coffeezilla is a good jumping off point. regarding the intentional targeting of youth with addictive gambling mechanics in loot crates and circumventing gambling laws. It's all very purposeful and continues to this day.

That's my fear too , whoever gets their hand on valve will decide the future of pc gaming kinda , I just hope it won't get sold to ea , riot , tencent or whatever

gabe is a very smart person, if he doesnt have a post death plan for steam i would be immensely surprised.

Honestly, I've been weaning myself off Steam for awhile now. It's great what they did to make PC gaming more accessible, but I also feel like Steam itself is an unnecessary dependency for most video games.

There should be protocols that games can implement to integrate with launchers and organize playing online.

Depends on who inherents his shares

Remember steam started the business model of not actually owning your games.

GOG exists, go use GOG. Steam is popular because they don't fuck over buyers, and they run a good business model, people are ok not "owning" things if the service is reasonably well put together.

Gabe has made billions by stealing profit from the workers that actually make games.

steam takes a 30% cut, which isn't all that high, especially when you consider that they develop things like proton at zero cost to anybody, including developers. You're also getting the single largest and most widely used publishing platform, period. It's really hard to beat something of that caliber, so it's definitely a tradeoff. There are also cases of devs making games that become so popular they pull in millions of dollars worth of revenue.

They host tons of malware and shovelware and outright scam games and even protect them from “”““review bombing””"

in defense of steam, if they specifically curated high quality games people like you would accuse them of gate keeping the platform. Scams are definitely a thing, malware, technically is. I've not seen malware ever in my personal experience, and i doubt most people have, and whenever it does happen, steam responds accordingly so i'm not sure its a fair statement.

They pushed “early access” into the mainstream.

there's nothing necessarily wrong with early access, i actually think it's a really productive way to provide tons of play testing and development potential for smaller dev teams. Does it also incentivize shovelware? Sure, but it's a platform you can make money on, that's not abnormal. And again, it's usually very well known when games are abandonware.

And because of people like you that would literally suck Gabes dick for the meme, they get away with it.

surprised you didn't mention gambling, that's probably the most significant argument against steam right now, they effectively run what can be considered an online casino.

Ok then fund linux gaming

While I think capitalism encourages unethical business practices, keep in mind that Valve actively supports the development and popularization of the kernel as well as other projects like Wine from their profits.