If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.

Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode… Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019

Funny enough, the only platform with a 64-bit Steam client is Mac.

I don’t disagree with concerns about monopoly, but the author’s key example is Macs. And from the example, it sounds to me like Apple disregards backwards compatibility (dropping 32-bit support, moving to ARM chips) and Valve isn’t investing to keep up. Meanwhile, Windows has a heavy backwards-compatibility focus, and Linux isn’t too bad either, so no wonder they still get Valve’s attention. So who is being “anti-consumer” in this example, Valve or Apple?

That has to be one of the dumbest articles I’ve read in a while.

While I personally use Steam very rarely (I prefer to use DRM-free versions of games), Steam has done very little to be considered on its way towards enshittification.

The macos situation is completely irrelevant because at this point its market share on steam is lower than linux and it makes no sense for them to invest only to be constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms. My guess is it will be dropped within the next 3-5 years.

The author points out the deprecation of Steam on older platforms, but fails to mention the fact that this wasn’t always their choice, for instance the recent drop of Windows 7 support was caused by the fact that there’s an embedded chromium browser in it and google dropped support for Windows 7 around that time. A similar situation happened for Windows XP, which was dropped in 2019, a full FIVE years after Microsoft dropped support for it, and at this time Steam on XP was only used for retrogaming, it made no sense to keep supporting it, there are better ways to get old games on XP.

There’s barely a mention of all the good things that Valve has done for Linux gaming, but the article complains about Steam being 32 bit (which is still a requirement for wine to run, at least until the new wow64 mode becomes stable, and steam comes with its steam runtime specifically to avoid distro compatibility issues); they could have made proton only work with steam, they could have made their dxvk and vkd3d forks proprietary like nvidia did, but instead it’s all open source and very easy to build on all platforms and I use my own fork every day to play games without steam. Heck, there are even competitors for the steam deck that run proton.

Also, can we mention the fact that Steam has not turned into yet another subscription service like some of its competitors?

If I had to point at something that Steam absolutely did wrong, I’d say it’s allowing third party DRMs on the store, it’s a consistent source of issues, especially for old games. I understand that when they made the choice we didn’t have cancer like kernel level anticheat and denuvo, but still, Steam launching a launcher launching another launcher that launches the game is a trashy gaming experience and adds points of failure as we’ve already seen several times when big titles launch and their DRM servers go down, or when games get old and the DRM servers are shut down permanently.

While I’m sure Steam will eventually become enshittified, I don’t see that happening any time soon, maybe after Gabe retires, and that’s why you should keep a collection of DRM free games on your drives and not rely solely on Steam and other stores.

Just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree.

Lol at the last section of the article. Valve is actually bad guys! Just trust me!

Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.

Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full ‘enshittification’ of Steam will commence.

The article in no way describes any actions taken by Valve that leads me to believe there is any impending enshittification. They simply have made decisions, a lot of which they have stuck with for many years.

Enshittification has to do with bait and switch, effectively. It’s luring customers into a false sense of loyalty and then abusing that to their financial gain (see: Reddit and Spez from 2023).

The article basically says “there are some decisions by Valve I like, and some I don’t.” That in no way provides any path toward some bomb going off. Perhaps time will prove the author right, of course, because any company can easily decide to screw over their customers, but the article is click-bait and completely speculative as to what may happen.

And due to all of the above, I think the bomb is about to go off where elephants will fly out of my refrigerator and steal my soda.

Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism

I’m glad that the author recognized the actual root cause of their argument, which is that Capitalism is bad and ruins everything, but why blame Steam for essentially just existing in a Capitalist world? They didn’t choose that, and they’re certainly doing a hell of a lot more than almost any other company their size that I can think of to resist shitty Capitalist practices.

It really feels like this author is just saying, “they’re resisting anti-consumer enshittification practices now, so the only place to go is down, ergo ‘timebomb’!”.

“Every person who isn’t a murderer is just a murder away from becoming a murderer. Timebomb!”

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TLDR - Steam is shit because it’s still 32bit?

I have my criticisms of Steam, but I see no sign of it marching toward some kind of big anti-customer explosion as suggested in this article. Unlike most others, it’s run by a privately owned company, so it doesn’t have investors pressuring toward enshittification. We can see the result by looking back at the past decade or so: Steam has been operating more or less the same.

Meanwhile, the author offers for contrast Epic Games, a major source of platform exclusives and surveillance software (file-snooping store app, client-side anti-cheat, Epic Online Services “telemetry”), all of which are very much anti-customer.

AFAIK, only one of the other stores listed is actually better for customers in any significant way: GOG. (For the record, I mostly like GOG.) But it was mentioned so briefly that it feels like the author only did so in hopes of influencing GOG fans.

Overall, this post looks a lot like astroturfing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be sponsored by Epic or Microsoft.

Edit: I forgot something that has changed in the past decade:

Valve has spent the past five years investing in open platforms: At first by funding key parts (often the most difficult ones) of the open-source software stack that now makes gaming great on linux, and more recently by developing remarkably good and fairly open PC hardware for mobile gaming. No vendor lock-in. No subscription fees. No artificially crippled features. This has already freed many gamers from Microsoft’s stranglehold, and more of us are reaping the benefits every day.

This is the polar opposite of what the author would have us fear.

What a garbage article lol. The only two arguments I can pick out are 1. Old steam games haven’t been updated to work on macOS and 2. Some games require 3rd party launchers. I think the author was just angry that his mac dropped support for a 20 year old game.