Success is not illegal. In Valve and Gaben’s case, it’s deserved, and probably as clean as you’ll ever see.
I firmly believe that Steam has allowed fair competition to exist. Epic had the greatest chance to become viable competition, but they fumbled the store’s launch, poached Metro Exodus and fucked over the people who preordered, did not have the foresight to implement some kind of preloading for Borderlands 3, and pissed people off when they refused to allow non-exclusive indie games to exist on the store while they made an exception for Cyberpunk 2077. In that time, the only thing that Valve did that might have hurt EGS is refuse to host store pages and ads for games that weren’t going to launch on their platform. Shortly after that, Valve released the Steam Deck (the most pro-consumer handheld I’ve seen to date), SteamOS (free), Proton (free), DXVK (free), Gamescope (free), and have contributed (for free) to upstream projects like Wine. Of all the billionaires, Gaben is the only one I can think of that I’m okay with being a billionaire.
You are one of the few who share my exact same feelings toward Epic as compared to Steam. I intentionally have never, and will never, have any of my money go to Epic for the shady “exclusivity deals” they made with shitty devs, to poach business from Steam. I only just now bought Metro: Exodus, in Steam, because of their lead dev’s comments to the backlash they faced when pulling it from Steam.
You missed something, however. If I recall Epic did all the things you mentioned, but also was caught stealing user data from Steam .dat files found on the machine.
Y’all wanna know what anti-competitive business practices look like? Turn your gaze toward EGS, cause that’s what it looks like. Steam is the beast it is thanks to Gabe and the work of talented devs over the last 20 years. Make better products, get more loyal consumers!
Sucks that so many misinformed consumers/devs conflate success from better products with success from monopolistic actions. But then again, we got another 4 years of tRump due to that illiteracy so…
Success is not illegal. In Valve and Gaben’s case, it’s deserved, and probably as clean as you’ll ever see.
Fuck off. Steam is a third party proprietary launcher that promotes gambling to kids. We are on the verge of a climate disaster and people are getting poorer every year that goes by. A fleet of mega yachts is a smack on everyone and the planet.
Making billions off a proprietary app targeted at kids and spending the money on yacht it’s not success, it’s greed and mental illness. You do not make billions in a clean way.
Steam promotes gambling to kids? Care to elaborate? Are you referring to the playing cards? Because certainly you don’t mean CS:GO shit. Because I’ve never seen that on Steam.
If you’re so passionate about the subject, why don’t you redirect that energy into making a real change? Join a protest, call a politician, get organized, instead of engaging in tired, empty, useless whataboutisms on the internet.
