Steam is a ticking time bomb.
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This coming from game journalism, which has just turned into a mouthpiece and constantly been used to lie about how good games are.
Funny how the date of this article comes out around the time that Amazon is failing, Epic is failing, Ubisoft is failing, and they're failing because they hate the people that they sell their products to, and they refuse to be user-friendly and user-focused.
Steam isn't perfect, but the reason why they're a monopoly is they actually give a shit about gamers, unlike all of their competition.
Gamers aren't a product, they're a user, and Steam understands that offering the voice to those people makes their product what it is. The more users they have, the more money they make. They don't need to nickel and dime and squeeze.
This is something that every single competitor they have had has just blatantly ignored.
Cross posted from: https://lemmy.world/comment/15611343
The likeliest explanation is that games press lie about how good games are and not that they just have a different opinion than you? Also, this isn't even a major outlet. It's just some guy's blog, not even exclusively about games.
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The piece about Mac makes no sense. That's purely a result of Apple's decision to drop support. In general, if you are interested in older games, MacOS is not a viable platform.
It's the opposite tbh. If you want to play emulators or old (as in 2015) PC games via Wine/VM, mac has you covered. It's newer games that are tougher because 80% of them don't get ports and Wine/VM will have to turn down the graphics to run well.
Even so, I can still run most modern games at medium settings with a low-tier, 2 generations old mac. Small price to pay for avoiding windows' godawful UX, ads, tracking, ai spam, onedrive spam, monthly subscription for solitaire, etc.
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OK? I wonder how many of them you played and how many are there ¯_(ツ)_/¯ eh don't care
I've played every game I own. Who gets a game and doesn't play it?
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It's the opposite tbh. If you want to play emulators or old (as in 2015) PC games via Wine/VM, mac has you covered. It's newer games that are tougher because 80% of them don't get ports and Wine/VM will have to turn down the graphics to run well.
Even so, I can still run most modern games at medium settings with a low-tier, 2 generations old mac. Small price to pay for avoiding windows' godawful UX, ads, tracking, ai spam, onedrive spam, monthly subscription for solitaire, etc.
Can you provide one real world example? An older Windows game that works better on Mac than on Windows?
I will also add that 2015 is a random number. Win10 easily handles anything after 2005 or so. It's the pre 2005 games that often require some deal of research.
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I've played every game I own. Who gets a game and doesn't play it?
Yeah sure bud. 99.8% of epic users
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Can you provide one real world example? An older Windows game that works better on Mac than on Windows?
I will also add that 2015 is a random number. Win10 easily handles anything after 2005 or so. It's the pre 2005 games that often require some deal of research.
I've heard of some edge cases where Wine is now a better option than native windows for really weirdly built 2000s era games. But overall most won't run better since they have to use a compatibility layer. The point is they do run and my computer isn't just for gaming. Windows has gone deep into enshittification for ten years now, and it's worth trading some FPS to Wine to not have to live with that.
Also this only matters for new games. If you're a HoMM3 addict or only care about emulators there's no downside.
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The likeliest explanation is that games press lie about how good games are and not that they just have a different opinion than you? Also, this isn't even a major outlet. It's just some guy's blog, not even exclusively about games.
It's definitely happened before, though I couldn't say to what extent. The reason has been that if they rate games from major developers too poorly they stop getting access to their new games before release.
I care very little about critics these days though, and it's mostly for the reason you suggest, differing opinions. If they don't like the same types of games I like, what good is their rating to me? I'm not taking the time to try to find a critic that has similar tastes as me.
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Get this clown the fuck out of here
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That blog is just the worst. I haven't seen any decent article since it appeared on lemmy
a few months back. Nvm is the same 1yo article. -
What a weaksauce article, spends most of the time arguing against itself, and the problem is most of the strawman arguments it sets up to argue against actually win in my opinion. Most of its arguments follow this kind of format:
I think that 2 + 2 = 5, now I know you might hear that 2 + 2 = 4, but the only thing that says that is thousands of years of math, and we can't assume that's going to continue into the future because Valve made a mistake doing math once.
Finally ends with some vague hypothetical about how even though they admit Valve is pretty good today, but still it will become evil someday because grr capitalism bad.
Steam is fantastic, they've made mistakes yes (Australia's gaming laws are well known to be crazy for example so that's not completely Valve's responsibility) but on the whole they are doing great things and making money while doing it, which is great because a successful and profitable Steam is able to continue to do great things. Making money is not a sin if they do it fairly and ethically, and they do. 30% is a bargain for what they're providing, especially the devoted audience which they have attracted (completely legitimately), and if you don't agree it's worth that 30% you're welcome to distribute your game literally anywhere else.
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I've played every game I own. Who gets a game and doesn't play it?
Hi there
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I can think of very few companies or services that I approve of more than Valve and Steam. Being private and free of shareholder greed is huge. They’ve never once screwed me over.
Only moment of worry will be when the company changes hands, but I’m sure Gabe has already thought about a worthy successor who won’t destroy the soul of the company.
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Hi there
Oh dang what games are you sleeping on?
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Oh dang what games are you sleeping on?
Think the oldest game I own that I haven't yet played is Tomb Raider. Got it with my original PlayStation.
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I can think of very few companies or services that I approve of more than Valve and Steam. Being private and free of shareholder greed is huge. They’ve never once screwed me over.
Only moment of worry will be when the company changes hands, but I’m sure Gabe has already thought about a worthy successor who won’t destroy the soul of the company.
I've even wanted to bring up Valve in some recent political discussions on corporate governance. With the blatant exception of CSGO child-focused gambling, it is otherwise the "shining ideal" of a good company: They invented a product that people like and enjoy, maintain it well to please their customers, and pay their employees well without growing excessively or finding ways to cheat customers out of their money.
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The piece about Mac makes no sense. That's purely a result of Apple's decision to drop support. In general, if you are interested in older games, MacOS is not a viable platform.
Macs also lack GPUs suitable for gaming. The modern ones are remarkably efficient, partly because they didn't jam a 4060's worth of graphic silicon into them. Why would they? Macs are for web browsing, media creation, productivity if you're in the C-suite and making other people think you're cool if you're in a coffee shop. Their users do not expect to run AAA games at 4k60fps.
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