Ads upon ads upon ads
(Except to steam seemingly)
For now. I’m curious what’ll happen when Gabe eventually retires.
We also can’t ignore the fact that the Steam Marketplace is a hellhole and the origin of a lot of today’s microtransaction hell.
If you buy all your games on one platform then you’re thoroughly fucked if it turns heel.
The point still stands though, you can easily filter out anything you don’t want to see.
But I doubt the same would apply if it was owned by shareholders.
A future change in leadership could very easily lead to it going public and then all the regular bullshit follows. Don’t just assume it’ll always be great; always be ready to jump ship.
I get worried with the amount of gamers who want Steam to be a monopoly. The existence of competition seems to upset some people and it’s really odd.
A future change in leadership could very easily lead to it going public and then all the regular bullshit follows. Don’t just assume it’ll always be great; always be ready to jump ship.
Ok, but what has that anything to do with what I said?
We all know the answer to this. There will be a hundred threads with thousands of comments with people saying it’s not bad, the company promised x and y and we should be cautiously optimistic, but in the end it always ends the same way.
Exactly the same thing happens with IBM buying Red Hat. No shortage of articles talking about how this will be good for Red Hat and the entire open source community but of course last month they started the enshitification process that will now March on relentlessly. Even now there are defenders of red hat, talking about how it’s not that bad and there are workarounds, but in the end they fail to see this is just the first step.
Once started on this path, the rule is always enshitification, any exceptions are exceedingly rare. If steam ever gets bought/sold it will follow the same path and it’s defenders will stay by its side until it looks like the screen shot above.
