We keep joking about PC Gamer being a communist magazine but holy shit we’ve straight up got links to marxist.org in the article
They’re just doing their research!
holy based
ZA/UM (Unified Marxist-Leninist) vs ZA/UM (Maoist Centre) vs ZA/UM (Workers Peasants Party)
Is it bad I like steam for what they’ve done for Linux gaming
Also piracy, indirectly
At least proton is open source
Linux is self-serving for them because it’s the only way to not have to pay a third-party for licensing the OS. Enjoying the side effects of that is still fine though.
If I’m not mistaken Steam is cooperatively owned by its employees, which is why it’s far from the worst hegemonic online distribution platform.I was mistaken, see below.
It’s not a co-op. They’re just relatively small and mostly hire senior developers who demand a higher level of respect and work/life balance. They used to only work on projects people wanted to based on consensus and personal interest. People floated between teams, you were free to convince people to work on your pet project instead, etc. They stopped doing that when they started on Half Life Alyx and talk about it in the design booklet because it also meant that literally nothing ever got completed since there was no direction and promising projects floundered from lack of support.
Yeah I looked into it a bit more and they’ve never actually revealed how ownership at Valve is structured, it’s just their management which they keep as flat as possible (though perhaps it was too flat for a while).
I don’t think this is true I think Gaben owns it
Hmm okay so from what I can tell they’ve never released info about who owns it and everybody is just speculating or citing one Forbes article that says that Gabe owns “50% or more.”
What I was thinking of was something Yanis Varoufakis said in an interview with Hasan Piker, where Hasan asked if Valve was a still cooperative and Varoufakis said “not really… Valve today is very different to when I was there in 2011/2012,” so maybe it was at one point or maybe it never was and Hasan was mistaken too, I dunno.
not to give any capitalists too much credit but often privately held companies will make better decisions for consoomers than traded companies which are gonna have an array of varying levels of rabidly money hungry capitalists calling the shots. like as if epic games would ever put out something like steam families.
It’d be really nice if Itch.io’s employees bought it out and turned it into a coop.
I agree and hope that what comes after it is even better at supporting gaming on GNU/Linux and contributing to various libre and opensource projects like KDE and Proton and Mesa and such.
It would be a power move for Gabe to gift Steam to KDE or something when he retires.
I’m guessing whenever GabeN steps down it’s going to be the gaming equivalent to Tito dying
the SteamBox (with the Steam Controller) was the first attempt at a Linux based “console”.
they improved those designs greatly and re-released it as the SteamDeck. I challenge you to find a better PC than the SteamDeck for less than $400.
does this code as like annoying pandering to anybody else
It is healthy to distrust anyone who is trying to sell you something
Everybody is defending Steam like it isn’t a nasty proprietary binary blob shit-stain on their Linux system to play their video games. Lefty gaming should become a scene totally divorced from the market, with extremely exclusive clubs of amateur developers, artists and writers bringing games back to their essence.
Something like itch.io but decentralized? Like an open source fediverse-style storefront?
No like real fuck off collectives that run their own gits and people make cringe urban legend Reddit posts about.
Amen
Good on them. Steam is the reason that you don’t ‘own’ games anymore, you pay a company a fee to be able to access it.
always has been. They were just forced to be more up front about it.GOG is better in that respect
You’ve never owned games. You’ve always owned a license to run a game. The license used to be tied to a piece of physical media. Now it’s not. But the underlying legal model never changed.
I swear you people would start defending Monsanto licenses if they had sales for video games and supported porting games to Linux.
Removing the license from the actual media means that there is no used game market. It is a pretty significant step.
There already was no used game market for PC games before Steam. The vast majority of publishers were already requiring you to activate your CD key, and limiting the number of times a key could be activated.
I can tell you that there used to be, I was a part of it. But I’m talking about 20+ years ago.
Having online verification for offline video games was something that Valve pioneered and made the standard for all PC games. So much of todays shitty gaming climate was pioneered by Valve including loot boxes, achievements and always on drm.
Bullshit. You could sell your physical copy on the second hand market. This is protected by the “doctrine of first sale.” When you buy a a copy of a work, you have the right to lend it, trade it, or sell it. This right was functionally eliminated by platforms like Steam.
First sale doctrine applied because the license is tied to the physical media.
If you were to make a copy of your DVD and then sell the physical media on to someone else- that’s always been considered piracy In the eyes of the law.
I’m not making value statements on what’s right and wrong here; I just want to clear up some of the misconceptions around how we currently talk about it.
My personal belief is that digital licenses should be transferrable just like physical ones, and that any company that wants to offer DRM such that a license key becomes invalid shall allow a license key to be transferred to another user without restriction.
On a deeper level, the US needs a rethink on the laws surrounding software and copyright, balancing two truths: digital content creators need to make money; and buying a license or right to use any form of digital media IS ownership, and should come with all the same protections as, e.g., buying a physical book.
I mean yeah, they’re right, but as long as capitalist conditions exist, I’ll take Steam over EA or Epic.
To all social reformers this poster, who is held in good standing except for those times badposts were made, doth say this: I am a loyal subject of the Good King Gaben, most venerable and wise and just, whose reign shall be eternal. No darkness can enter into these bountiful lands so long as those who hold fast to the King remain faithful.
I know Gabe Newell is a dumbass libertarian type and that Valve is a weird workplace with… not the best conditions (or so I’ve heard) but at least steam isn’t doing all the bullshit all the other big platforms (that failed because they tried to do all sorts of bs) tried to do. Not talking about epic, but all those proprietary platforms, windows live or whatever it was for example.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens when he dies. Just full venture capital I imagine
♥️
