@GossiTheDog on one hand, yes

On the other hand, somehow, everyone else is worse. Epic is particularly galling for being aggressively monopolistic while pretending to be underdog upstarts/good guys. At least EA, Ubisoft and Activision don't even pretend to be anything but Evil.

GOG and itch are cool though

@GossiTheDog it's something that's in the back of some of our minds, and it really sucks.

The sad thing is, Valve were given a free run for so long that they became the default platform for gaming, even on Linux.

I think a lot of the reason gamers aren't up in arms about this stuff is we already had these fights in the early 2000's, and Valve learned to stay out of any controversy.

To butcher the quote: the greatest trick Valve ever pulled was convincing gamers they do not exist

@GossiTheDog It's a tough thing to sell to people because despite that, Valve does a lot of good work, especially for gaming on Linux in recent years. It's hard for some people to recognize the bad about Valve when they also feel like they're almost always the best option and have the best product. EA, uPlay etc. don't even come close.

That said, I have started rebuying games I'm passionate about from GoG and putting the offline installers on my home server as insurance.

@GossiTheDog No corporation is your friend, but Valve having a gajillion dollars seems to me like more a fault of US tax policy than anything else.

I'd love for them to do things more like GOG, but at the same time they're the only big player in the space investing and contributing to gaming in Linux. This is only going to become more vital as Microsoft continues enshittifying Windows 11 as Win10 goes on the chopping block.

@GossiTheDog So? They made efficient system that's not inherently asshole to the consumers and they make billions from it. Can't really blame them for that.

EA had that chance and they cocked it up with their dumbass policies, garbage store with even more garbage client. Same with Ubisoft, just even worse somehow.

You know who isn't? GOG. It has its flaws, but they created a nostalgia niche of keeping old games alive and they run this DRM free shtick that works and people like it.

@GossiTheDog

Then the gamers of the world are the most important sponsors of #yachtgirls?

I had not expected that.

@GossiTheDog I'm amazed that Steam became popular. I used to play a lot of Counter Strike. I owned Half Life on CD and had downloaded Counter Strike (a free mod). And then Steam came out. And it required me to download the entire game again. Not just an update, the entire 1 GiB game.

That doesn't seem bad now, but back then I had a 1 Mb/s Internet connection, shared with three housemates. 1 Mb/s was the most expensive connection that you could buy, most people were still on MODEMs, which topped out at 56 Kb/s (often less because phone lines were bad).

Even with the fastest broadband available, it took several hours to download a game I already owned, with the version I already had installed, to be allowed to play online again.

That was the point at which I decided I would never give Valve any more money.

Oh, and after it had installed, it came with an app that needed to be running all of the time for games to work and which slowed down the games a lot (to the point of making them unplayable for friends with slightly slower computers than mine).