Valve still seems like a great company, with a strong customer focus (refunds, sales, mods, community, reviews, etc.), decent hardware (Deck, Index), good open source software (Proton), and good customer support.
The fact that your one-time purchases are perpetually held hostage by Valve is a pretty rotten principle at the very core, and Valve is guilty here just like many other companies. Why should your continued ability to play games you've purchased offline depend on Valve deciding you're still in their good graces? Why can't you have your own independent & transferable copy of what you've purchased so they can't dictate what you do with it outside their servers? How do you respect a company that sells you something but still maintains the right to revoke your access to it?
Oh and did you forget about lootboxes? and their effects on children?
(Note I'm taking a somewhat exaggerated position here -- I don't think Valve is a terrible company as far as companies nowadays go. But the bar in this question seems intended to be absolute, not relative.)
I guess none of that has ever bothered me? I grew up in the 90s with physical media, and many of those games are now unplayable too. But Steam enabled indie gaming like never before, surpassing even the shareware scene. The easy storefront plus good discoverability and community and good downloads management makes me choose Steam despite DRM.
GOG has been selling DRM free for a decade or so now, but I still choose Steam because their software is so much better (Galaxy is atrocious and has gotten worse recently).
And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess? I've bought some (too many) for Path of Exile. I'm glad they are a funding model that enables free to play. I find it less obnoxious than the paid DLC model, in-game advertising, etc. As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway?
I guess none of that has ever bothered me? I grew up in the 90s with physical media, and many of those games are now unplayable too.
Unplayable because you don't have the machines to execute them (or because you didn't take care to copy your media that got damaged), not unplayable because the companies subsequently revoked your access to them. Those are... pretty darn different things. It's like saying "my groceries spoiled" is the same as "the supermarket came back and seized my groceries" just because they have the same end result.
I still choose Steam because their software is so much better
You're of course welcome to, but your question wasn't about product quality. Great product != great company.
And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess?
Lots of countries did. If your bar for respectable is "I don't care about it"... that's not really a question to pose to the rest of the world.
As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway?
This is a much bigger conversation than we can have in this box, but suffice it to say lots of people don't buy this kind of excuse.
I agree with you from one perspective, but on the other side steam made a drm that it's possible to bypass, while still complying, to allow selling games that wouldn't have been available on gog otherwise.
What I think they are doing is pushing toward what would be good, but doing that very slowly.
I wish gog worked well with the steam deck, and had all the cool steam stuff for controllers and linux support, but they aren't doing any of that.
I don't think using DRM makes a company evil, unless the DRM is so intrusive it screws with the rest of the system (Sony rootkits, Denuvo, etc.) It's just a reality of digital marketplaces where piracy is rampant. Lootboxes and always-on servers actually kinda help with that, at the expense of truly being a subscription and not ownership.
I know HN skews wanting to "own" games, but that's just not a big deal to most gamers. Physical media and DRM-free have always competed with Steam and GamePass and uPlay etc, but the latter are increasingly popular.
Countries are free to have their values, of course, but regardless, I don't think the presence of lootboxes in a couple games overrides all the other good Valve has done for the PC gaming community.
Other companies can (and do) implement loot boxes too. Fortnite's are much worse, being pay to win (in its original Save the World coop mode, not the more popular Battle Royale mode), but Epic's game store and exclusivity policies are much worse for the community. Activision, EA, Ubi, etc have similar lootboxes, often with similar DRM, but without any of the good of Steam and the customer focus of Valve.
Those are industry wide problems that probably should be resolved with regulation. But that doesn't make Valve a good or bad company, IMO. Of course others can disagree.
As for parents and kids, yeah, it's another discussion, but sounds like the same old thing about video games ruining kids. Whether it's Wolfenstein and violence or lootboxes or TikTok addiction or whatever, it still comes down to parental guidance. Its not an excuse, it's just a reality that kids grow up with way more technology and marketing than in the past, and that's a cultural issue way bigger than any one company (or government, for that matter). That's not on Valve.
I don't have the bandwidth to continue most of this discussion, so I'll leave it to others, but just a couple quick notes because I feel these are moving goalposts:
I don't think using DRM makes a company evil
I don't either, but this is neither pure DRM, nor was "evil" the bar to begin with. There's a lot of room in the middle for both. DRM technologies have existed that didn't prevent you from owning or transferring your own copy.
I know HN skews wanting to "own" games, but that's just not a big deal to most gamers.
HN also "skews" toward caring about privacy, but billions of people use (say) Google and Microsoft etc. without minding what they do. If your bar is "it's not a big deal to most users" then wouldn't tons of companies easily pass it easily, especially the giants? They didn't become giants by being boycotted...
For sure we don't have to keep arguing these things. They are trivialities in the grand scheme of things :)
But I think that's kinda the overall discussion, isn't it? There are different facets to every company and people have different values. What bothers one person might not bother another.
I remember Sun, in its heyday, as being disliked as well because its workstations were so expensive and Java was terrible in its browser applet days (in the same way Microsoft would come to be disliked for ActiveX).
I tremendously respect Valve and am grateful that they've stayed privately owned and able to maintain their culture. At the same time, others may find fault in the way they do business. I don't expect all of us to agree on who the respectable companies are.
Family view. Everybody forgets until you get children. The upgrade currently in beta allows the family to lock the library only per game and not per library, so we can finally have a real gaming library
Valve lets their games rot whilst still extracting tons of money from them.
Example: Team Fortress 2, the official servers for the game have been overrun by bots that aimbot, votekick, say slurs, spam illegal content, what are they doing about it? Nothing. https://save.tf
Example 2: CSGO/CS2, also full of cheaters and illegal gambling sites
This is like saying Microsoft is an evil company because Overwatch has cosmetics. It's just one of their products.
Counterstrike doesn't define Valve. They do so much more than that, especially for those of us who don't even play CS. The lootboxes were something they added much later. It was originally just a Half-Life mod.
I don't think enough is made of this aspect of Valve. Who knows if it's accurate, but a report claimed they did $1 billion in Counter Strike cases last year.
I think that "killing physical media on PCs" is a bit of a misattribution here. Physical media is all but dead on consoles as well, and people mostly buy their games online. PC gamers are fortunate enough that at the exact right time, a company operated with a bit of moral character essentially created the killer app for digital distribution, and with its dominant position forced tons and tons of positive changes to the PC ecosystem. Without Valve there would be no proton/Linux support, granular regional pricing, unobtrusive DRM, game library sharing, steam workshop, the ability to mod accessibility into games through forced controller mapping, booting games directly into friend's lobbies through the friends list, and probably more I can't think of offhand.
Comments
Valve still seems like a great company, with a strong customer focus (refunds, sales, mods, community, reviews, etc.), decent hardware (Deck, Index), good open source software (Proton), and good customer support.
The fact that your one-time purchases are perpetually held hostage by Valve is a pretty rotten principle at the very core, and Valve is guilty here just like many other companies. Why should your continued ability to play games you've purchased offline depend on Valve deciding you're still in their good graces? Why can't you have your own independent & transferable copy of what you've purchased so they can't dictate what you do with it outside their servers? How do you respect a company that sells you something but still maintains the right to revoke your access to it?
Oh and did you forget about lootboxes? and their effects on children?
(Note I'm taking a somewhat exaggerated position here -- I don't think Valve is a terrible company as far as companies nowadays go. But the bar in this question seems intended to be absolute, not relative.)
I guess none of that has ever bothered me? I grew up in the 90s with physical media, and many of those games are now unplayable too. But Steam enabled indie gaming like never before, surpassing even the shareware scene. The easy storefront plus good discoverability and community and good downloads management makes me choose Steam despite DRM.
GOG has been selling DRM free for a decade or so now, but I still choose Steam because their software is so much better (Galaxy is atrocious and has gotten worse recently).
And I don't really care about cosmetic lootboxes, I guess? I've bought some (too many) for Path of Exile. I'm glad they are a funding model that enables free to play. I find it less obnoxious than the paid DLC model, in-game advertising, etc. As for kids, well, shouldn't parents control their spending anyway?
Unplayable because you don't have the machines to execute them (or because you didn't take care to copy your media that got damaged), not unplayable because the companies subsequently revoked your access to them. Those are... pretty darn different things. It's like saying "my groceries spoiled" is the same as "the supermarket came back and seized my groceries" just because they have the same end result.
You're of course welcome to, but your question wasn't about product quality. Great product != great company.
Lots of countries did. If your bar for respectable is "I don't care about it"... that's not really a question to pose to the rest of the world.
This is a much bigger conversation than we can have in this box, but suffice it to say lots of people don't buy this kind of excuse.
I agree with you from one perspective, but on the other side steam made a drm that it's possible to bypass, while still complying, to allow selling games that wouldn't have been available on gog otherwise.
What I think they are doing is pushing toward what would be good, but doing that very slowly.
I wish gog worked well with the steam deck, and had all the cool steam stuff for controllers and linux support, but they aren't doing any of that.
I don't think using DRM makes a company evil, unless the DRM is so intrusive it screws with the rest of the system (Sony rootkits, Denuvo, etc.) It's just a reality of digital marketplaces where piracy is rampant. Lootboxes and always-on servers actually kinda help with that, at the expense of truly being a subscription and not ownership.
I know HN skews wanting to "own" games, but that's just not a big deal to most gamers. Physical media and DRM-free have always competed with Steam and GamePass and uPlay etc, but the latter are increasingly popular.
Countries are free to have their values, of course, but regardless, I don't think the presence of lootboxes in a couple games overrides all the other good Valve has done for the PC gaming community.
Other companies can (and do) implement loot boxes too. Fortnite's are much worse, being pay to win (in its original Save the World coop mode, not the more popular Battle Royale mode), but Epic's game store and exclusivity policies are much worse for the community. Activision, EA, Ubi, etc have similar lootboxes, often with similar DRM, but without any of the good of Steam and the customer focus of Valve.
Those are industry wide problems that probably should be resolved with regulation. But that doesn't make Valve a good or bad company, IMO. Of course others can disagree.
As for parents and kids, yeah, it's another discussion, but sounds like the same old thing about video games ruining kids. Whether it's Wolfenstein and violence or lootboxes or TikTok addiction or whatever, it still comes down to parental guidance. Its not an excuse, it's just a reality that kids grow up with way more technology and marketing than in the past, and that's a cultural issue way bigger than any one company (or government, for that matter). That's not on Valve.
I don't have the bandwidth to continue most of this discussion, so I'll leave it to others, but just a couple quick notes because I feel these are moving goalposts:
I don't either, but this is neither pure DRM, nor was "evil" the bar to begin with. There's a lot of room in the middle for both. DRM technologies have existed that didn't prevent you from owning or transferring your own copy.
HN also "skews" toward caring about privacy, but billions of people use (say) Google and Microsoft etc. without minding what they do. If your bar is "it's not a big deal to most users" then wouldn't tons of companies easily pass it easily, especially the giants? They didn't become giants by being boycotted...
For sure we don't have to keep arguing these things. They are trivialities in the grand scheme of things :)
But I think that's kinda the overall discussion, isn't it? There are different facets to every company and people have different values. What bothers one person might not bother another.
I remember Sun, in its heyday, as being disliked as well because its workstations were so expensive and Java was terrible in its browser applet days (in the same way Microsoft would come to be disliked for ActiveX).
I tremendously respect Valve and am grateful that they've stayed privately owned and able to maintain their culture. At the same time, others may find fault in the way they do business. I don't expect all of us to agree on who the respectable companies are.
Family view. Everybody forgets until you get children. The upgrade currently in beta allows the family to lock the library only per game and not per library, so we can finally have a real gaming library
Valve lets their games rot whilst still extracting tons of money from them.
Example: Team Fortress 2, the official servers for the game have been overrun by bots that aimbot, votekick, say slurs, spam illegal content, what are they doing about it? Nothing. https://save.tf
Example 2: CSGO/CS2, also full of cheaters and illegal gambling sites
Let’s hope Valve never goes public
The day when Gaben retires.
Valve, the gambling company?
Are you talking about lootboxes? That's only for one or two of their games, isn't it? Meanwhile Steam single handedly remade the PC gaming industry.
What difference does that make when the magnitude for one game was on the order of a billion cases?
This is like saying Microsoft is an evil company because Overwatch has cosmetics. It's just one of their products.
Counterstrike doesn't define Valve. They do so much more than that, especially for those of us who don't even play CS. The lootboxes were something they added much later. It was originally just a Half-Life mod.
I don't think enough is made of this aspect of Valve. Who knows if it's accurate, but a report claimed they did $1 billion in Counter Strike cases last year.
https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/
And you have a skin that has sold for over $1 million now.
https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o...
Based on the first article, it's all cosmetic items, which I think matters a lot to the ethics.
Looks like rich companies tend to look respectable
Valve is a good pick, at least as much as any company can.
but the one mark against them is that by pushing Steam, they normalized DRM in the video game space and killed physical media on PCs.
I think that "killing physical media on PCs" is a bit of a misattribution here. Physical media is all but dead on consoles as well, and people mostly buy their games online. PC gamers are fortunate enough that at the exact right time, a company operated with a bit of moral character essentially created the killer app for digital distribution, and with its dominant position forced tons and tons of positive changes to the PC ecosystem. Without Valve there would be no proton/Linux support, granular regional pricing, unobtrusive DRM, game library sharing, steam workshop, the ability to mod accessibility into games through forced controller mapping, booting games directly into friend's lobbies through the friends list, and probably more I can't think of offhand.
I think customers chose that. GOG has been around forever, but Steam is so much better that DRM was worth it to millions of gamers.