I’d say Valve. It’s a gant stinky US-bigtech that destroyed used games and owning of games, buuuut also transformed gaming into a a community and also made linux-gaming not only possible but absolutely great.

Without steam I’d be forced to boot back to fucking winblows just to game something. Thanks to them I don’t even have a winblows to boot to anymore, because it became 100% obsolete.

Hard to hate those guys…

Yep Valve is fighting the good fight, even with their shitty gambling. Nothing is perfect…

True. Although I was so pissed at them when their greed made them dissapear the inventory-gifts. Loved buying shit on discounts only to maybe use it later. And so many other things.

But all in all they’re indeed doing more good than bad.

It’s not greed, it was scams and fraud.
They would love selling you games that sit idle in your inventory, but it created a secondary market for stolen accounts and allowed card thieves to extract money after buying and gifting on Steam.

I don’t buy the just-to-protect-us. Yes there was exploiting of regional price differences. They wanted to kill THAT. And they partially did. But if they can take advantage of being global, why can’t we? If not for greed. They could’ve introduced limits on gifts. Like, as an e.g. Russian, I can only gift one gift to one distinct non-russian a month or so. Would still not kill the gifting but eliminate the trading.

I liked hoarding gifts to either redeem some day or just gift away. Being in one of the expensive countries makes it easy now, but not the other way round, which is highly unfair.

Never said they do that to protect us, it’s to protect themselves and the publishers.
IIRC there were region restrictions but it was not enough