this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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On the one hand, yeah it's absolutely important not to idolize any company, because they have no sense of loyalty or generosity. Telling yourself otherwise is a guaranteed path to disappointment.
On the other hand, of all the shit sandwiches we've been served, Steam is one of the fresher ones. Though they developed Proton for their own benefit, it's pretty undeniable that it has made gaming on Linux way more viable than it has ever been, and it's open source. I mean no shade to FOSS solutions like Lutris, but having paid developers work on a project full-time certainly has its advantages.
I do think that the concerns about Steam's pricing rules are valid, as are gripes with its DRM for first party games. But, overall, they've brought a lot of convenience to PC gaming that is hard to find elsewhere in the gaming world.
I get that steam is a pretty nice platform to browse, and being a linux user, Proton is amazing. But steam is business, they build Proton to sell the steam deck, not for Linux users. And aren't they in trial right now for overcharging millions of dollars? We now have eveything in place to replace steam with a fair, user controlled alternative. I will gladly pay a 5% or 10% fee, on top of the game's price, to finance a user controlled infrastructure and dev team for projects such has proton.
I think we generally agree, but I worry that a new platform couldn't do more than GoG+Lutris already do. Perhaps, though, it could be done with a reputable foundation.
And the lawsuit is more or less what I was radio referring to with Steam's price rules. I would definitely be on board with striking the requirement for publishers to offer the same price on all platforms at the same time.
On that note, though, I wouldn't take the whole case at face value, as I think parts of it are pretty frivolous (unless they prove that Steam is actually actively stifling competition and, you know, not just a decent platform that entered the space first.) I also think it's silly to point out Epic's lower commission rate since they've been giving out free games like candy and actually making third party games exclusive to their platform in a very clear attempt to compete with Stream. There's absolutely no guarantee that they won't raise their commission once they have a foothold in the market (though I do concede that their licensing terms for Unreal Engine have remained fairly reasonable).