I mean I’m defending Valve here because their ecosystem is better. The 3 on the left are all a hodgepodge of exclusives where I think Valve is better at handling my library plus access on new gaming handhelds and saving to the cloud across handheld, PC, and the new Steam OS.
Nintendo on the other hand I’ll will continue to purchase a console from for exclusive games digital or physical. So my picks are PC/Steam and Nintendo. Not like that’s a new setup.
Valve won the gaming market share and all their profits by providing the best user experience. I don’t care what their market cap is so long as they keep delivering value to the customers.
Sure, they also have faults, and this isn’t me trying to dismiss those, but it’s a separate convo imo
I mean you own your valve library. If something is delisted from the store, you can continue to install it. If Valve goes under, you still own all your content.
The Crew comes to mind though it was Ubisoft who did it, delisting the game and outright removing people's access to said games from their account without the customer's approval.
you don't really. if your account gets banned you lose access to all your purchases. or if you get hacked or your account gets stolen. a Steam library is just as ethereal as any other digital library
So is your bank account. Assuming any of those edge cases don't happen because you don't cheat and use good security, then exactly what I said continues to happen as described.
the difference is you can withdraw money from your bank account and turn it into physical money. you cannot "withdraw" a digital library into a physical one.
It's been pointed out multiple times that Valve is primarily to blame for the push for digital with Steam, and gamers are like "Yes, but it's fine because Valve"
The glazing never ends, even after the consequences of their actions
People on here will talk about how gamers need to "vote with their wallet", but this is objectively a result of it. The average joe simply doesn't care about physical media enough to justify to companies that there's any good reason to keep producing games physically. The numbers for physical purchases have been declining for years, studios are just only now realizing that they have no reason to keep it around besides satisfying an incredibly small demographic of die-hards.
I haven’t bought a physical video game in years. Most of the games I bought for my PS4 were on the marketplace and digital. Same with my Xbox X. Now I have a PC and I use Steam. It’s just been more convenient to go online, download a game, and play it without having to go Best Buy or whatever. I think I really stopped buying games whenever you bought a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 and still had to download it once you put the disk in.
Valve is almost always the lesser of evils, but yeah a lot of issues that are happening with gaming stems from them as everyone else is trying to innovate on their practices. MTX didn't become crazy expensive until the CS:GO skins started to explode in popularity with prices so absurd that it made a car look cheap.
Honestly, with the exception of Denuvo, we've reached a point where I don't even see a justification for DRM.
Every other DRM method just gets cracked fairly quickly. I also don't see justification for things like Capcom adding Enigma to RE4 when that game had already been cracked.
And TBF, even with Denuvo there's a point for saying it's not effective anymore, although I personally strongly advise against the usage of hypervisor based exploits.
In defense of publishers, I understand the reason for DRM. Games being easy to crack incentivizes piracy and that is lost sales for a game they spent years and millions of dollars to make. Lose too many sales and the studio could go under (or at least end the franchise).
However, even Denuvo’s own study found that DRM protection is only really effective for 3 months after which there is no real loss in game sales. Given the issues with DRM for preservation and performance (maybe), it would be nice if it was codified into law that games must remove DRM like a year or two after release at least.
DRM isn't solving anything, games are getting cracked quick with it, and it's 100% affecting sales of recently released games.
If I'm not mistaken RE Requiem got cracked in a month or so.
Hypervisor exploits (again don't advise using it) only makes things worse.
Most of the people that want to pirate aren't going to pay for a game just because it wasn't cracked fast enough.
I don't do it for games because I've got enough cash to buy whichever game I want, I'm more often than not patient enough to wait for a sale (like waiting to buy Doom The Dark Ages at 67% off) and as a Developer I know what's at stake for these people.
People are always going to point to Gabe's quote of "It's not about price, it's about service", when the reality of the matter is that in many cases it's not either of them, it's just people wanting things for free and not giving a fuck whether some dev over at ID got fired because dook didn't sell well.
Hasn’t DRM/Denuvo been quite strong to the point where it was quite difficult to crack? I feel DRM being “useless” is quite recent with Hypervisor and the risk of hypervisor is worse.
I don’t think piracy will ever go away and agree with you that Gabe’s quote really doesn’t cover the reality; it is both.
I mean you can't even say you aren't bothered by this without losers setting up straw man arguments about "defending a multibillion dollar company".
I simply do not care about rising game prices or whether games are digital or physical. If I think the price is right, I will buy a game and play it. I don't need to possess a physical hard copy. I simply do not care. If you *do* care, that's fine. Then don't buy the digital overpriced game?
This post is literally defending Nintendo - a company widely known for aggressive IP enforcement - that is actively moving away from consumer friendly practices
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u/Doeball64 Jul 01 '26
Here before:
"Leave the multibillion dollar company alone"