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Polygon: Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming

https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/16/15622366/valve-gabe-newell-sales-origin-destructive

The drive to be on the bleeding edge of technology powers the PC gaming community. We want nothing more than to run our ridiculously powerful rigs on barely stable beta drivers, with our CPUs overclocked to speeds that are neither advisable nor guaranteed to be safe for our systems.

It’s a good match for the ship-first-iterate-later approach of major Silicon Valley companies who want to expand at all costs and don’t care what it takes.

But companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Fiverr and the others are starting to feel the risk of that edge. The world is finally realizing that a hands-off, profit-first, tax-dodging “connection and services platform,” powered by the cheap labor of people who aren't technically employees and have no rights isn't exactly a good idea. In fact, it may be a very bad one. Whether this means government regulators finally getting their act together, unions winning court cases or citizens voting them out of town, these companies are starting to feel the downside of moving fast and breaking things.

If you were to ask the average PC gamer, they’d swear up and down that there’s no way they’d ever give their money to such a corporation. They’d not only be caught dead before helping a company like that come to power, they might even join the resistance to stop them.

And yet, that sort of operation is exactly what the PC gaming community has been supporting, promoting and defending since 2004 when Valve more or less forced us to install Steam by bundling it with Half-Life 2.

This, then, is Good Guy Valve — a corporation which employs precision-engineered psychological tools to trick people into giving them money in exchange for goods they don't legally own and may never actually use while profiting from a whole lot of unpaid labor and speculative work ... but isn't “evil.”

This is the Good Guy everyone seems too afraid to call out, the toxic friend who is so popular that upsetting him will just make things worse for you, so you convince yourself he's really not that bad and that everyone else is over-reacting. Once the Good Guy illusion has disappeared, we're left with the uncomfortable truth: Valve is nothing more than one of the new breed of digital rentiers, an unapologetic platform monopolist growing rich on its 30 percent cut of every purchase — and all the while abrogating every shred of corporate or moral responsibility under the Uber-esque pretense of simply being a "platform that connects gamers to creators.”

A company which will spend what has to be millions on legal fees to avoid having to pay you $15 in refunds, but which isn't “evil.” A company which exploits, underpays, deceives, obfuscates and refuses to cooperate at nearly every turn, but would never be caught dead doing “evil.”

The imaginary Gabe, the one in our memes, is a cultural defense mechanism, a happy fiction we all invented to make us feel better about the fact that we were, and remain, willing partners in installing PC gaming's biggest, most opaque, exploitative monopoly — one which we know deep down doesn't care about us at all.

Maybe it's time for all of us to wake up.

It's a surprisingly good article from Polygon. It goes into the dodgy stuff Valve has done over the years (being forced into providing refunds, taking advantage of community creations as free labour) but I disagree that they're overall bad for gaming. A lot of their initiatives are quite good for the consumer.

Kind Regards,
Darmik

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May 17, 2017

Polygon: Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming

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