/ga/ - Games

You rock Gabe!

The video game industry has many and much bigger enemies before we finally get to Gabe Newell

>>12257
Anon, what you must realize is that Gabe Newell is like a bourgeois politician: he assists other bourgeoisie who then proceed to do all these nasty things to gamers. Where are all the games with aggressive microtransactions sold? Steam. Where are all the games with Denuvo sold? Steam. Where is review bombing not allowed? Steam. Where does your account get banned if you decide to sell it? Also Steam.

Don't pretend like Valve isn't complicit in this because it very much is. It's a monopoly that stifles competition that can't even use its power for the benefit of gaming while all these greedy game publishers abuse their power without even a second thought. Don't get me wrong, the fact that Valve made the Steam Deck and Proton and that there's little to no censorship of games on Steam is awesome but I think Valve is much better as a hardware and software developer than a game retailer.

>>12257
Does it really though? This DRM peddling worm almost singlehandedly ruined PC gaming for me.

>>12262
If we make a comparison, i would say that
GOG is the most consumer-friendly and it fully respects personal property.

Steam is less consumer-friendly than GOG but it still has drm-free games without annoying nickel and dime crap. So you can have a good time with it, if you pick games wisely, usually games from indie developers. Plus the steam-deck hardware is relatively open and it lets you run it like a normal computer.

Nintendoh does not respect personal property at all, every game is infected with the digital repression mechanism. Their Snitch hard-ware is completely borked, you have to be a level 60 computer wizard to use it like a normal computer.

Steam does lower prices when games get older, nintendon't, it's their fiefdom and the gamer-peasants have to pay the tendo-tax.

I would say critical support for valve if they can dethrone the snitch with the steamdeck, eventually, hopefully. You gotta give Valve credit for supporting the free open source software stack. I know that it was rational business-sense to pick linux as the operating system, but most companies would have gone "not invented here" and instead cooked up yet another decrepit incompatible proprietary crap-ware.

Maybe GOG will eventually build hardware too, like a low-cost handheld based-on a budget SOC, but yeah that's probably gonna be a while. Maybe once AI-coding gets mature enough, that they can port their game library mostly automatically. I'm guessing that's at least a decade away.

>>12263
>Steam is less consumer-friendly than GOG but it still has drm-free games without annoying nickel and dime crap.
You have a very free-market liberal mindset, copyright itself is tyranny so the publishing platform should itself protect us from techno-feudalism. Which Valve consistently refuses to do and even encourages through its review censorship, thus being complicit in spreading techno-feudalism. Nintendo may be worse but the bar is already set too low. It's like paupery: we accept the bare minimum of what should be essential and praise Valve for it.

>>12265 (me)
Also, PC gamers shouldn't focus on how anti-consumer Nintendo is since Valve, not Nintendo, is the one who has a huge influence on the PC gaming market. So the fact that there are companies worse than Valve is irrelevant. There may be your EAs and your Ubisofts but all their problems are universal so the root of the problem is still Steam. Keep in mind that Valve directly profits from all this, getting a hefty 30% cut, so I think Gabe is afraid that the bougies will go on strike.

>>12265
>>12266
I agree with you that copy-feudalism is bad, and that distribution platforms should not peddle this.
However I think it's technically incorrect to say that "copyright" is compatible with free-markets. It's a monopoly which is not a free market.

>Nintendo may be worse but
>the root of the problem is still Steam.
I think that is foolish,
Valve makes an open-platform hand-held console while Nintendo makes a closed platform handheld console.
Valve supports FOSS projects, while Nintendo is attacking FOSS projects.
Obviously we have to prioritize struggle against Nintendo.

>Also, PC gamers shouldn't focus on how anti-consumer Nintendo is since Valve, not Nintendo, is the one who has a huge influence on the PC gaming market.
I'm getting strange vibes, your basic message is don't attack Nintendo, attack valve.
I think that if we did this, things would get worse.

I don't want to be unfair and make unfounded accusations, but your strategy does not seem sound.

Can you justify your position ?

>>12270
>However I think it's technically incorrect to say that "copyright" is compatible with free-markets. It's a monopoly which is not a free market.
Hi, Proudhon.

I mean, I said "free-market liberal." Though "market liberal" is more accurate ig.
>Valve makes an open-platform hand-held console while Nintendo makes a closed platform handheld console.
I said "Steam," not "Steam Deck."
>Valve supports FOSS projects, while Nintendo is attacking FOSS projects.
I mean, Google does it too but FOR SOME REASON people hate it and call it evil. It's as if opportunistically supporting certain FOSS projects isn't enough.
>Obviously we have to prioritize struggle against Nintendo.
No, it's not obviously. You're trying to redirect people's anger onto single issues which is a very liberal thing to do. "First we need to deal with this, then we can move to this." We must tackle issues all at once.
>your basic message is don't attack Nintendo, attack valve
No? Where did you get that from? If anything, you're the one who's saying "Don't attack Valve, attack Nintendo."
>Can you justify your position ?
Uh, anti-capitalism?

>>12272
>We must tackle issues all at once.
And you think that will work better than the sequential approach ?

I'm willing to listen, how does one do this ?

>>12273
>I'm willing to listen, how does one do this ?
I think we should criticize all platform holders, not just Nintendo. I think we should move to better platforms like GOG. I think we should reduce the amount of proprietary software and DRM we're using. We should pirate DRM'd games if needed.
https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-games.html

GAYbe Newell.

>>12276
Dare I say, pwned