It’s not that I trust Valve. It’s that I distrust them the least when compared to the other giant companies out there. And I already have 90% of my games on Steam.
I trust GOG the most, but Steam is solidly second-most. Guaranteed that if Epic had their way, the PC gaming landscape would be just as trash as the console one, if not moreso.
Valve could definitely go off the deep end after Gabe is gone, and that’s why good third-party competition is still healthy. But for right now, they’re one of the few large companies I’ve seen that aren’t on the enshittification warpath.
I too prefer GOG, but the fact that they still haven’t made a native linux port of GOG Galaxy causes me to mostly use Steam. I usually use GOG for indie stuff and thingsI want without it being tied to a launcher or DRM.
Oh, and I recently bought Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 there, as I felt it was about time I gave Chris Sawyer some money for all the fun the pirated version I downloaded 25 years ago have provided.
Have you tried the Heroic Games Launcher? It’s currently the most advanced launcher for GOG games on Linux, even implementing support for some of GOG Galaxy’s online services. Additionally it’s officially affiliated with GOG, so you can “donate” to the project by purchasing games through the client.
I have not. In fact, I’d never even heard of it until you mentioned it.
But I sure as hell will give it a go now that I am aware of its existence. Thanks for the tip!
Yeah, I feel like I trust Steam as long as Gabe is calling the shots at Valve. I’m sure it helps that they’re a private company. Hopefully whoever takes over after him will have learned the lesson that you can make a nearly unimaginable amount of money in this industry without putting the screws to the consumer. If they were public or let the business “experts” in I’m sure there would be all sorts of moves to extract more money from customers that would end my trust, but I feel like overall I have a couple of decades of experience at this point that Valve isn’t actively trying to hurt me.
Oh crap… you bring up a good point. How long do we think Gave has left? There is absolutely no way Steam won’t get worse after that happens. Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess.
It’s also that they put out a product I actually find value from like Linux support, Steam Input, forums, workshop, etc. I enjoy using Steam because I find it to be a good experience.
It’s like reasons people prefer Android or Apple even if they share the same apps. Really can’t discount the experience simple things like navigation and social features do to add value. Those who dismiss it as unimportant probably share the same views as some MBA who only looks at the numbers and think they can just enter and corner a market through brute force spending.
If you’re concerned about what might happen to your game library if Steam disappears or changes drastically, make backups. There’s a good chance you would still be able to play them.
In my experience, it can handle most games that expect the Steam client/libraries to be present, so long as DRM is not involved. Some games might require special configuration, like generating an interfaces file, which is documented. So… pretty reliable?
I have also used the experimental build to block internet access for a game that was trying to collect data from my system and phone home, without breaking LAN multiplayer features. Not foolproof (I don’t think it blocks DNS) but good enough for what I needed.
Thanks. I think I’m still considering multiplayer to be nonexistent for any game without proper LAN support, but this will be great for preserving everything else.
Better alternatives? That is highly subjective. Itch’s store-front experience sucks balls and they lack 98% of the features Steam has. I appreciate their existence and have bought games from them, but language like that will only serve to alienate people that know how much Itch lacks compared to Steam.
Dear god I just wish itch had the ability to sort games in literally any way at all… Please let me sort all the games I got from bundles holy shit it would make me use the store way more…
Honestly even sorting by platform would be enough just fucking anything please
I trust Valve to be lazy and swim in their sea of profits rather than go searching for more.
They have thus far avoided serious levels of enshittification because they don’t seem motivated in maximising immediate profits and killing their golden goose.
The day they get replaced by a competitive non-monopoly is the day it becomes a race for the bottom, who can invent the most predatory way to drain profits from users? Nobody else will be able to compete, so they’ll all be copying each other on their way down.
I don’t trust any corporation. However, Valve has treated customers with respect and doesn’t try to bend us over. For that, I’ll keep buying from them.
However, I fear for the day Gabe Newell is no longer running the show.
I’ve played this in the past because of the unique co-op feature. You can team up with another player and play the game. You both do a battle and if you win, your units can go over to the other fight to help your buddy out. It’s super fun and I played it a good number of hours with my brother. The biggest issue however was the camera, you can’t hardly zoom out. That mean in co-op you can only see your own battle, you can go look at your buddy’s battle, but that means you can’t see your own battle. This sucked really bad, because you couldn’t see what worked and what didn’t and how it was going overall. For us this kinda ruined the co-op game mode, it was just like playing the game solo and sometimes you would get help randomly. We submitted it as feedback to the devs, saying in co-op you need to be able to see both battles at the same time, but I don’t think they ever did anything about it. So we’ve stopped playing it, maybe we’ll give it another go sometimes.
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