I feel like the often unspoken rebuttal to any defense of Playstation doing what Steam already does is how much easier it is to pirate your Steam library if they go too far off the rails. I suspect that part of the reason Steam has been slow to enshittify is their recognition that piracy is a competitor.
I buy a lot of games from Steam sales. I re-buy my favourite games from GoG.
I get to sample on cheap, get to really own my favourite games, and the developers of those games get more sales. Everybody wins.
Publicly-held corporations are legally obligated to think only of line go up. Valve (Steam) is privately held, and as such is not forced to maximize profit every quarter.
This is one of those almost correct things that people love saying, but it’s not the whole story. Publicly held corporations are obligated to serve their shareholders’ best interests, but executives are given tons of leeway and the benefit of the doubt in both how that goal is defined and how they choose to pursue it.
The Dodge v Ford case that established the idea of shareholder primacy was back in 1919. America’s entire Golden Age of manufacturing came after that decision. If companies were charged with only providing quarterly profits, then there wouldn’t have been decades of corporate reinvestment and expansion, employee training and education, narrower exec-to-employee pay gaps, or any of the other things people seemed to love about pre-Reagan America.
None of these companies have a legal obligation to be shitty. They’re just incentivized because nobody says or does anything.
It’s even more depressing that it’s a conscious choice, and the exception is a company that wanted didn’t want to pay for birth control for their employees. But thank you for the correction.
I feel like the often unspoken rebuttal to any defense of Playstation doing what Steam already does is how much easier it is to pirate your Steam library if they go too far off the rails. I suspect that part of the reason Steam has been slow to enshittify is their recognition that piracy is a competitor.
Hasn’t Gabe explicitly said this?
Piracy is an issue of service, not price
He’s apparently been saying this for a while
Great. So maybe have your (required) client not use more RAM than half of the games on there? It’s why i prefer to not buy on Steam anymore.
Seriously, this makes me crazy
Only in every single piracy thread known to man in the last 2 years.
No hate, im just tired of seeing the quote
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I buy a lot of games from Steam sales. I re-buy my favourite games from GoG. I get to sample on cheap, get to really own my favourite games, and the developers of those games get more sales. Everybody wins.
Note that GoG also has sales. 😅
Publicly-held corporations are legally obligated to think only of line go up. Valve (Steam) is privately held, and as such is not forced to maximize profit every quarter.
This is one of those almost correct things that people love saying, but it’s not the whole story. Publicly held corporations are obligated to serve their shareholders’ best interests, but executives are given tons of leeway and the benefit of the doubt in both how that goal is defined and how they choose to pursue it.
The Dodge v Ford case that established the idea of shareholder primacy was back in 1919. America’s entire Golden Age of manufacturing came after that decision. If companies were charged with only providing quarterly profits, then there wouldn’t have been decades of corporate reinvestment and expansion, employee training and education, narrower exec-to-employee pay gaps, or any of the other things people seemed to love about pre-Reagan America.
None of these companies have a legal obligation to be shitty. They’re just incentivized because nobody says or does anything.
It’s even more depressing that it’s a conscious choice, and the exception is a company that wanted didn’t want to pay for birth control for their employees. But thank you for the correction.