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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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I'm sure Gabe has a lot of wonderful traits, but pro-consumer ain't one of them.
Eh... Valve isn't a publicly traded company. I'm not sure I'm aware of anything Gabe has said or done to imply he's anti-consumer.
And he is the one who said that piracy is a service issue, and if you give people convenient access and fair prices, they'll pay. And he was right.
And Steam is proof of that. Their refund policy is also far more generous than, at the very least, Sony and Nintendo.
Any sources to show I'm wrong?
Killed physical ownership of PC games. (Half Life 2 required Steam to work, locking your key to a single account)
Pioneered lootboxes. (Team Fortress 2)
Has price parity rules. (Prevent keys being sold cheaper elsewhere so gamers can't avoid giving 30% of their money to Valve)
Those aren't particularly pro-consumer.
Honestly saying that Steam killed physical ownership of games and citing HL2 is a poor example. Just off the top of my head Blizzard beat Valve to this with World of Warcraft. You could buy a physical copy but you couldn't play it without their servers. Keys were locked to a single account as far as I'm aware.
Ultimately physical size constraints lead to the demise of physical purchases. That said, Valve in theory has a set-up to allow us to retain our games even if they disappear one day. How that works or how long it would take to happen is a different story, but they do apparently have something like a kill-switch in place.
TF2 was certainly the first major western game to have loot boxes, but extremely similar gacha systems already existed before this. It would be disingenuous to blame Valve for this, they just hopped on the train.
MFN clause is really only an issue if it can be proven that it is in place for anticompetitive reasons, and Steam's rule is not completely inflexible. Also, if the copy is being sold without Steam integration, fine, I can totally see why you shouldn't need price parity — but if you were to sell a Steam key price parity is entirely fair since the end user is getting access to Valve's servers. Also if a developer sold a game for the same price with no Steam integration on somewhere like GOG, Valve wouldn't be getting any cut, the developer would just be making more money (though ironically with less feature integration, it's not like Steam doesn't add value).
On the flip side instead of acting like we said all of Valve's decisions were pro-consumer and cherry picking a few decisions that aren't, I can cite:
It's really not like they do literally nothing that is pro-consumer.