Ads upon ads upon ads
Enshittification spares no one.
The difference is that Valve is privately owned. They don’t have to please a board of shareholders who want to see the platform milked for the slightest increase in profit margins.
Bingo. Enshittification is mostly confined to companies that have gone public or whose sole aspiration is to do so quickly.
It shifts responsibility from satisfying customers/users to satisfying shareholders (who are never satisfied).
You can build the perfect product and ride a gravy train as a private company in relative perpetuity. As a corporation, you’re just going to strive for perpetually increasing profits on a quarterly basis with no real care or focus past that
This isn’t entirely accurate. If Valve were a public company, the enshittification factor would increase significantly. The reason they’re great now is because the current board is the original founders who are passionate about their business, and actually care.
Private or not, once Gabe and the other old farts die, Valve will enshittificate. That’s almost guaranteed.
(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.
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.
Sure it does, but only those who have a zero-tolerance policy against using proprietary software. In the long run, Free Software is the only kind that can be relied upon not to betray you.
That’s… good. Installing an app on more devices is a nice feature.
I mean silver lining and all, sure. But did you notice that like 55-60% of the screen is ad-driven “suggestions?”
It looks bad, but try replicating it.
When I search two dots, I find exactly the matching app, with screenshot previews and details about it. I get only 1/4 of the screen as ad suggestions. The rest of the screen is related suggestions (non-ad suggestions). So about 3/4 is non-ads for me vs. 1/8th from the OP screenshot.
If I search something more generic like “card battle games”, I get a listing of about 7 games, with tags, and zero ads.
I think what’s shown in the OP is what remains after the user has already read the details and approved installing the app. Considering that this is the end of the user story, what else should be on that page?
Or maybe he’s got a different version of play store than me from A/B testing? Anyway, try it out yourself. I don’t have a problem with too many ads on playstore, my main issue is more that the good apps go to apple store first and only sometimes port to android because apple users are more lucrative.
I, too was not able to reproduce the same result again.
When I tried to do the same search again, I had one column more dedicated to non ad space, namely, showing the description of the game. Dont know how I got that particular spread of ads galore at that particular moment.
Screenshot taken later with the same query:
My version of android is, indeed, an older one, and my region is India, I suppose all these factor into what I see when I search for stuff.
Yup! It’s fucking insane…
Luckily I only have F-Droid on mine.
A single row of ads would be ok, but having this many plus an ad showing up first, where the search results should be… Oof
They can be. I bought a Galaxy s22 with a broken screen for $150, and my carrier just gave me an $1100 credit for it on a new iphone. I don’t need an iPhone, and I will be selling it to get yet another cheap phone and pocketing the money, but it goes to show just how much phones do not cost to the people producing them
The Android licence is free and the Play Store infrastructure has to support tens of millions of devices.
I’m not saying this is an acceptable level, but Samsung ain’t putting a dollar toward Google running the store, in fact, they’d much prefer to run and maintain their own.
That’s not true. Phone manufacturers need to pay if they want to include Google Play in their devices, it’s not free. It can cost as much as $40 per device.
