Valve is a terrible company and Steam is an awful platform but their stance on piracy is why they deserve a lot of the success they get. In a day and age where everyone was trying as hard as possible to punish their userbase as much as possible for their crappy distribution model, here came a company that actually understood why people pirate in the first place and made a vast majority of the gaming population willingly download DRM then go through it to spend billions on games they will never play.

Lol the valve fanboys found this, yikes. They downvote bombed this like a game which slightly annoyed them.

[–] derpgon@programming.dev 43 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Care to explain why "Valve is a terrible company" and "Steam is an awful platform"? Surely, it has tons of porn games (that you can hide), or shitty games (that is hard to sort through), or CS:GO item gambling problems (don't really care). But I kind of fail to see how the company or the client could be fundamentally bad.

[–] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo

And here are some reason I personally don't like them:

They routinely profit off of crime which they allow on their platforms
Rampant white supremacy goes completely unchallenged
Fuck all quality control
They did NFTs before it was cool
Will not remove hateful media off their platform unless legally forced to
Countless of their games have ties to real life neo-nazi movements (TF2 is especially bad for this)
Their CEO was active on 4chan when they started the company
Predatory FOMO sales tactics which has people buying games they don't even play
EVERYTHING about the steam marketplace
This point was brought up in the video, but extreme institutional racism within the company which bleeds into their games/communities

[–] Duxon@feddit.de 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Their CEO was active on 4chan when they started the company

This one made me giggle. Who are you, the moral internet police?

Glory to Valve for investing in Proton.

[–] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Really telling on yourself with that one.

[–] derpgon@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To sum it up: about the same as any platform where people can interact? What's so FOMO about a game being on sale if it's gonna be on sale next week aswell?

I fail to see how Steam Market is so bad, it is not possible to redeem the cash (unless you do it via black market, which is against the TOS), so all money is still in the system. Yeah, it is being used to do unregulated gambling, but it's a regulatory problem which should be handled by the countries to define what gambling is, and shut these sites down. Why the fuck should Steam care?

NFTs in crypto space are a joke, and everywhere else they are basically in any online software, failing to see the point here.

[–] bookmeat@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Regarding gambling, it's not quite so simple. Valve doesn't exist in a vacuum. Many rich people see what goes on in that ecosystem and they lobby their governments to make it easier for themselves to do even more audacious things. Valve can lead by example instead of opening the door

[–] bookmeat@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

If you didn't sample 4chan in that time you missed out on a lot of Internet culture. Not everyone posting on there was. It was really entertaining to watch the shitshow.

[–] mwguy@infosec.pub 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's always fascinated me that companies who understand their core value proposition of their business can be so fucked up in so many other ways and still succeed.

[–] cooopsspace@infosec.pub 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah you're totally right.

Where the staff are actually long term users and fans of the service.

[–] Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

It's like fighting games. You can have a solid bread&butter and do well, even if you're completely trash at the rest of the game.