Are we the baddies?

What the open web did for discoverability of businesses, we need to invent again for actual engagement with the businesses.

Uber, Booking.com, AirBnB, ClassPass, Steam, DoorDash - these winner take all middle-men rent seeking tech behemoths are bad for society and are hostile to consumers and the businesses that rely on them.

Let's decentralise this shit.

It's not the centralization that's the main problem. Centralization of those services can make sense. It's how and why those centralized services are run. They're run like dictatorships, for the purpose of making the dictator and his friends richer. They should be run democratically, for the purpose of making the lives of the users better. Breaking up monopolies is just a temporary solution, because the systems of capitalism will always create them again. The underlying system, the how and why, needs to change.

Everything except for steam, one of the few to do it right. Of course they arent perfect as nobody is, but in general they treat developers right, they treat customers right. Theres no personalized surge prices or other AI BS, and they dont ban randomly like google. If you buy a game on steam, you own it for real.

True, Steam is better - I think it helps they aren't a public company. They still take a huge margin though.

No, Steam is still in its (unusually long) first phase of enshittification, where it delivers surplus value to consumers.

Probably as long as gaben is alive, it will be so. But don't expect it to last. There's nothing special about Steam the platform.

You definitely don't own Steam games for real, and they don't ban randomly but for example, if you're caught cheating in a game, or talking about illegal things with your friends, you will find out how much you don't own those games.

> If you buy a game on steam, you own it for real.

How so? If Steam goes away, then so does your game. That's not ownership.

Just because they have carefully and honestly fostered a lot of trust in their game rental service, doesn't make it not a game rental service.

If Steam itself goes bankrupt, Gabe himself said you'll still retain access to your games.1 Yes its a non-legally binding promise, but Steam has earned that trust.

Also Steam isn't going away, so for these reasons that is "how so".

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20100605062932/http://forums.ste...

If you cheat in a game, you'll get VAC banned but still retain access offline.

If Steam itself goes bankrupt, that decision is not up to Steam, it's up to its creditors and the bankruptcy court. It's not a credible promise for any US corporation to make, regardless of its trustworthiness.

Steam doesn't do it right, they are just slightly friendlier than the competition. And that can change at a moments notice and you will be locked in because your friend Gaben has been working on making it hard to leave all along.

Ah cool, so an alleged promise made to one user makes it all OK and we should stop worrying and just buy more.

Even if Gaben "money drives the community" Newell did make that promise and was sincere, he's going to be gone in a couple of decades at most and likely not in control of Valve before that.