• Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    27 days ago

    look, im very grateful for valve employee’s work on proton (& other technologies), and i recognize that out of the major gaming companies, valve is one of the least bad…

    but they’re still a corporation. they’re still unethical. they popularized gambling mechanics and they basically have a monopoly on PC gaming distribution.

    don’t worship companies. they don’t care about you. need i remind you, in the late 2000s/early 2010s, nintendo was the good guy. just making good games and innovating, while everyone else was busy making yearly slop, day one DLCs, paid online, microtransactions, broken games on release… and now, look at them.

    • SparroHawc@lemmy.zip
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      23 days ago

      All it would take for Valve to lose their effective monopoly on PC game distribution would be for someone else to make a better product.

      Every other major PC game distribution platform (besides GOG, and they’re far more niche than Valve) has essentially started their attempt to unseat Valve with enshittification baked in, and it was obvious.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      they popularized gambling mechanics

      Probably their biggest sin. Gab’s mega-yacht was paid for with neurodivergent teenagers sucked into anime-themed slot machines.

      That’s before you get into how modern online gaming has become this nightmare of bigotry and misogyny. Not a Valve specific problem, but one they’ve turned a blind eye to in the name of laissez-faire business.

      need i remind you, in the late 2000s/early 2010s, nintendo was the good guy.

      Well… tap the brakes there. Nintendo had a very different business model, but their Disney-eque sadistic defense of IP was its own kind of problem.

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      26 days ago

      Valve is worker-run and largely worker owned, it’s literally 350 people who just work on whatever they think is a good idea

      They’re technically a corporation, but also an amazing argument for collective ownership

    • IronBird@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      what were you smoking? nintendo has never been the good guy…they successfully patented the “digital representation of water” back in the day

        • REDACTED@infosec.pub
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          26 days ago

          Why is it a bad take? Valve is indeed a corporation. I’m also someone who has grown irritated by their ways of screwing up good games for profit (you know, hat simulator, gambling, push for centralization, etc.). There is also a history of really sketchy anti-consumer choices basically no one is aware of, like them getting sued for not issuing refunds and being forced to implement refund system or accepting money from Microsoft to not release a free DLC to L4D, but rather as a new game (just so they don’t set a good example), paid mods fiasco, barely fighting back against adult content purge, etc