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This article is essentially written by an Epic fan boy that’s “hoping” Steam will eventually succumb to capitalism and commence the enshittification that is happening elsewhere.
Plot twist! OP is actually the “author”, Corbin Davenport. 😱🤫
(Judging by their replies here, you’re 100% spot on.)
I mean, it will. Such is the fate of platforms.
After Gabe retires what’s going to happen with Valve?
I don’t think the author is an Epic fan per se. The Epic argument appears to be a distraction from their main point, which appears to be their dissatisfaction with Valve’s support of Steam on Mac. As an example, even though Epic game store ( by a quick google search) seems to support Mac, they make no mention as to why they didn’t exercise consumer choice and simply use Epic game store for their Mac gaming needs.
I agree with your basic assessment.
As a mac user I’d love to see more mac games. I think it’s a relatively underutilized platform. Im not a game developer but it seems like one of the main issues of game development is the complete mishmash of supported hardware and different components and trying to optimize and support all of them. In that respect, macs seem more like consoles in their limited number of configurations and hardware variance so optimizations SHOULD be easier. Or at the very least not as complex. But macs are expensive and there is not a lot of overlap between gamers and mac. So therefore not a lot of mac games. It was easier when you could bootcamp and also play games on windows but that’s not really possible anymore.
Epic Games has been clear about seeing Steam as a direct competitor, and has done everything from giving away free games to paying for timed exclusives to entice players.
Yup, that’s everything. Those are their only options. Yup. Nothing else to be done. It’s an unsolvable problem if those things don’t work.
This is supposed to be how competition in the marketplace works
In case the above sarcasm wasn’t clear, no, this is not how competition in the marketplace is supposed to work.
If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company’s efforts on Mac.
This is an example of Apple making life difficult for its customers, not Valve.
There’s no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.
There is, because Apple wanted to control their entire hardware pipeline, which meant breaking compatibility with the entire history of PC gaming when they did so. If this is your smoking gun, author, try harder.
Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full ‘enshittification’ of Steam will commence.
I hate this enshittification term so much, because all it means is that they got complacent, and competitors can pick up the slack. You just spend your money elsewhere, whether it’s Xbox vs. PlayStation or Steam vs. GOG. It is a problem that Steam has so much control of the marketplace, but they got there because their competitors aren’t truly competing. I finally found a reason to shop on GOG again, despite the fact that they don’t support their Linux customers as well as their Windows customers, and definitely not as well as Valve treats them, but DRM-free is a compelling argument for me. Epic does not make a compelling argument for the consumer, which is why that meme, pasted in the middle of the article, exists.
There’s a difference between Valve deciding to not make Mac games anymore and Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs. The former only affects people who want to play Valve games, the latter affects a lot more people.
Is it perhaps a slow, laggy mess because Apple decided to break from the same convention that everyone else uses and has used for decades and now has to emulate a different processor architecture? Apple is the one who made gaming shittier on Macs, and they’re going to point to Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4, expecting the flood gates to be open, and now everyone’s going to port their games to Mac. Except they’re not. Apple won’t understand why not, but once again, as they’ve always done, breaking from convention and establishing your own standard that doesn’t play nice with what everyone else is building around is bad for developers. Before this, they were still making developers’ lives harder by not supporting certain graphics APIs. Valve made a Vulkan translation layer to Apple’s Metal, since Apple wouldn’t officially allow for Vulkan, and that was shortly before the architecture change.
Your argument’s logical fallacies are as transparent as the author’s… That’s uncanny.
Lmao, that is the author.
🤫 That’s the joke. 😜
I done got whooshed
Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs.
Apple decided Macs are for playing iPhone games on bigger screens.
I’ve kind of drifted away from Steam around the Greenlight/Direct debacle, when it quickly went from too tightly curated to an unexplorable paradise for thousands of fake games. Steam is not the inescapable monopoly this weird editorial makes it to be.
Nowadays, I need a good reason to buy on Steam, like decent workshop integration. And even then, I don’t even have to buy on Steam to have that. I bought Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress DRM-free from Ludeon’s site and itch.io and that included Steam key activations too.
Centralised library may have been an argument once, but it has not been for a long time. Stuff like Playnite obfuscates all that launcher explosion crap.
Also, every game launcher on Windows still puts games in the start menu.
Oof, what a shit take.
Although I disagree with some of the points (which have been mentioned in other comments), I do wish Steam had less of a monopoly. That’s not to say I blame Valve, I just think there is a lack of good competitors and people willing to budge. Epic launcher is just a joke. I only use it for the free games, which is why I assume they are giving away the games for free in the first place. Not enough people use GOG. Thankful to Valve for making proton, Linux gaming would be a lot worse than it is if it weren’t for proton. But damn, make a 64 bit client already, I have to use the multilib repo because it is the only 32 bit application on my system XD. EDIT: not to mention the terrible performance on some older systems.
I saw this posted a couple days ago which pretty succinctly summarizes the current state of the market.
That said, worth noting that these launchers and complex storefronts aren’t really needed either, which is part of why I don’t have an issue with Steam. If you have a good game, you can just sell it on your own website like Minecraft, League of Legends, or Tarkov. Steam’s biggest (or at least most universal) utility for developers is just that it provides very cheap, very effective marketing.
Insofar as your point is a call to action for Steam’s competitors to do better with their own services, I completely agree with you. Epic & OP are whiny bitches with half-assed output that expect to be taken seriously without putting in the work. 🤌🏽
You could try the Flatpak version. At least your OS will be clean, and the only 32-bits parts will be inside the flatpak runtimes.
True, although correct me if I’m wrong, people have issues with the flatpak version? I apologise if I’m talking out my ass, I couldn’t tell you what these “problems” are. It may just be a baseless claim. XD
After many years playing on the Flatpaked Steam, I’m yet to see any problem.
Ahh, thanks for that, I’m probably making shit up.
Maybe not. Like every new format, Flatpak probably had some rough edges at first, and a software as complex as Steam must have been a nightmare to convert. It was probably broken at first, but it was probably enough for some to consider it as unredeemable.
I haven’t had much sleep today so maybe its just me, but I’m a bit confused here:
Valve isn’t obligated to continue supporting all its games and software features on Mac, especially when Apple’s reluctance to natively support Vulkan and other cross-platform technologies makes game development more complex.
Then the next sentence:
There’s no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.
As others have mentioned, Apple was the one who chose to abandon x86 and go with ARM - and anyways are there any games that are on Steam that actually are ARM native? You would still end up having to launch a game that is x86 as far as I understand correctly (I haven’t used a Mac since the Apple Silicon transition)?
are there any games that are on Steam that actually are ARM native
Yes. Not a game in this case but still from Steam:
Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Krita/krita.app/Contents/MacOS/krita: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]The Steam launcher’s architecture is irrelevant to the games and applications on the Steam store.
When I block OP and his trash articles from my feed, it’ll be his fault for not going out of his way to deliver content to me anyway. And when I block his next attempt too, it just means he’s being anti-consumer in not catering to me anyway.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but enshitification seems like a problem entirely contained to publicly traded companies. Valve is a privately owned company and doesn’t need to grow, thus they can just enjoy the millions if not billions of dollar revenue.
I’m a bit concerned what happens when Gabe Newell dies
I skimmed the article but I’m still not sure what the “bomb” is supposed to be.
