• Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    15 hours ago

    To all social reformers this poster, who is held in good standing except for those times badposts were made, doth say this: I am a loyal subject of the Good King Gaben, most venerable and wise and just, whose reign shall be eternal. No darkness can enter into these bountiful lands so long as those who hold fast to the King remain faithful.

  • EatPotatoes [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    18 hours ago

    Everybody is defending Steam like it isn’t a nasty proprietary binary blob shit-stain on their Linux system to play their video games. Lefty gaming should become a scene totally divorced from the market, with extremely exclusive clubs of amateur developers, artists and writers bringing games back to their essence.

    • Rose@lemmy.zip
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      21 hours ago

      Linux is self-serving for them because it’s the only way to not have to pay a third-party for licensing the OS. Enjoying the side effects of that is still fine though.

    • SSJ3Marx [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      22 hours ago

      If I’m not mistaken Steam is cooperatively owned by its employees, which is why it’s far from the worst hegemonic online distribution platform.

      I was mistaken, see below.

      • Inui [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        22 hours ago

        It’s not a co-op. They’re just relatively small and mostly hire senior developers who demand a higher level of respect and work/life balance. They used to only work on projects people wanted to based on consensus and personal interest. People floated between teams, you were free to convince people to work on your pet project instead, etc. They stopped doing that when they started on Half Life Alyx and talk about it in the design booklet because it also meant that literally nothing ever got completed since there was no direction and promising projects floundered from lack of support.

        • SSJ3Marx [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          21 hours ago

          Yeah I looked into it a bit more and they’ve never actually revealed how ownership at Valve is structured, it’s just their management which they keep as flat as possible (though perhaps it was too flat for a while).

        • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.net
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          13 hours ago

          not to give any capitalists too much credit but often privately held companies will make better decisions for consoomers than traded companies which are gonna have an array of varying levels of rabidly money hungry capitalists calling the shots. like as if epic games would ever put out something like steam families.

        • SSJ3Marx [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          22 hours ago

          Hmm okay so from what I can tell they’ve never released info about who owns it and everybody is just speculating or citing one Forbes article that says that Gabe owns “50% or more.”

          What I was thinking of was something Yanis Varoufakis said in an interview with Hasan Piker, where Hasan asked if Valve was a still cooperative and Varoufakis said “not really… Valve today is very different to when I was there in 2011/2012,” so maybe it was at one point or maybe it never was and Hasan was mistaken too, I dunno.

  • Barabas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    20 hours ago

    Good on them. Steam is the reason that you don’t ‘own’ games anymore, you pay a company a fee to be able to access it.

    • sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      19 hours ago

      You’ve never owned games. You’ve always owned a license to run a game. The license used to be tied to a piece of physical media. Now it’s not. But the underlying legal model never changed.

      • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        58 minutes ago

        Bullshit. You could sell your physical copy on the second hand market. This is protected by the “doctrine of first sale.” When you buy a a copy of a work, you have the right to lend it, trade it, or sell it. This right was functionally eliminated by platforms like Steam.

      • Barabas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        19 hours ago

        I swear you people would start defending Monsanto licenses if they had sales for video games and supported porting games to Linux.

        Removing the license from the actual media means that there is no used game market. It is a pretty significant step.

        • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
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          18 hours ago

          There already was no used game market for PC games before Steam. The vast majority of publishers were already requiring you to activate your CD key, and limiting the number of times a key could be activated.

          • Barabas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            17 hours ago

            I can tell you that there used to be, I was a part of it. But I’m talking about 20+ years ago.

            Having online verification for offline video games was something that Valve pioneered and made the standard for all PC games. So much of todays shitty gaming climate was pioneered by Valve including loot boxes, achievements and always on drm.

  • REgon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    18 hours ago

    I know Gabe Newell is a dumbass libertarian type and that Valve is a weird workplace with… not the best conditions (or so I’ve heard) but at least steam isn’t doing all the bullshit all the other big platforms (that failed because they tried to do all sorts of bs) tried to do. Not talking about epic, but all those proprietary platforms, windows live or whatever it was for example.

    Gonna be interesting to see what happens when he dies. Just full venture capital I imagine

  • Jure Repinc@lemmy.ml
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    24 hours ago

    I agree and hope that what comes after it is even better at supporting gaming on GNU/Linux and contributing to various libre and opensource projects like KDE and Proton and Mesa and such.

    • sloth [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      21 hours ago

      the SteamBox (with the Steam Controller) was the first attempt at a Linux based “console”.

      they improved those designs greatly and re-released it as the SteamDeck. I challenge you to find a better PC than the SteamDeck for less than $400.