People have wasted their time defending their platform's "honour" for decades. It used to be Sega vs Nintendo. Then it was PlayStation vs XBox. Now it's Steam vs EGS.

Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:

- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)

- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't

- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5

- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers

- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.

There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.

> No User-written text reviews

Everything you don’t like, you can avoid.

First thing in the article: "this is such a good day to be a sweeney hater" I don't even want to know what this means, dude needs to get a hobby.

Without competition Valve would never have bothered making Steam faster. Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade, and feels well out of date. I celebrate Epic forcing Valve to finally make some improvements. Turns out they could do it in a day all along.

I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.

Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.

I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.

People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.

Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.

Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.

The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.

Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.

I think in this case people just really hate Epic.

One of the top post on the steam sub reddit is titled "They got us guys." as if they work for Valve.

Bonus points, this is the text from the post.

> How out of touch can you be as a company, this is embarrassing

Steam client is INFINITELY faster than Epic client, across those dimensions.

BTW Gaben is my friend and I identify as Dr Gordon Freeman.

/s

Parasocial relationships are a byproduct of the technology you (I assume) and I have and continue to create & roll-out to society, increasing physical distance from actual humans as well as increasing "in the head, only" identity, or identities, that culture carries with itself more and more.

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