Yarr harr fiddledeedee
I feel like the often unspoken rebuttal to any defense of Playstation doing what Steam already does is how much easier it is to pirate your Steam library if they go too far off the rails. I suspect that part of the reason Steam has been slow to enshittify is their recognition that piracy is a competitor.
Publicly-held corporations are legally obligated to think only of line go up. Valve (Steam) is privately held, and as such is not forced to maximize profit every quarter.
This is one of those almost correct things that people love saying, but it’s not the whole story. Publicly held corporations are obligated to serve their shareholders’ best interests, but executives are given tons of leeway and the benefit of the doubt in both how that goal is defined and how they choose to pursue it.
The Dodge v Ford case that established the idea of shareholder primacy was back in 1919. America’s entire Golden Age of manufacturing came after that decision. If companies were charged with only providing quarterly profits, then there wouldn’t have been decades of corporate reinvestment and expansion, employee training and education, narrower exec-to-employee pay gaps, or any of the other things people seemed to love about pre-Reagan America.
None of these companies have a legal obligation to be shitty. They’re just incentivized because nobody says or does anything.
It’s even more depressing that it’s a conscious choice, and the exception is a company that wanted didn’t want to pay for birth control for their employees. But thank you for the correction.
Hasn’t Gabe explicitly said this?
Great. So maybe have your (required) client not use more RAM than half of the games on there? It’s why i prefer to not buy on Steam anymore.
Only in every single piracy thread known to man in the last 2 years.
No hate, im just tired of seeing the quote
But while its normal on PC
You can shop ANYWHERE
you can buy completely drm free games off GOG, download the installer and keep it forever
Shop around on multiple sites, steam, gog, uplay, greenmangaming etc, get good prices
On PlayStation sonys store is your only option… a monopoly (wonder what EU will say?) and while they sometimes have ok discounts, they suck compared to physical games, the used market, trading etc. and being able to play your old games in 20 years is just awesome… not possible when they shut down the ps5 servers, or whatever.
On pc you got emulation, backwards compatibility layers etc. so you can play anything (almost)
And … most people need a computer anyway. Why not just get one that can do gaming too, skip the console?
I buy a lot of games from Steam sales. I re-buy my favourite games from GoG. I get to sample on cheap, get to really own my favourite games, and the developers of those games get more sales. Everybody wins.
And … most people need a computer anyway.
This hasn’t been true for for several years now. For “most people”, a smart phone is all they need for their daily computing tasks.
A smartphone is still a computer, and emulation on arm (including android) is still an option. Just look at things like https://gamenative.app/
Yep, normies dont have computers, can confirm IRL. Phonebrains.
Its crazy to us nerds.
Stop all the downloadin’
My entirte 1300 title Steam library is cracked and backed up to local media, not a single game isn’t able to be played if Valve decides to cut me off, though I have to crack and run an emulator instead of just saving a local installer like I do with my equally large GOG games library. Added bonus, once cracked they don’t need the Steam client running, so it shaves a bit off the resources demanded of your system to run the game you gut when cracking it.
Which is why the GOG one is growing, and all I buy on Steam anymore is the occasional DLC for a game I already own.
hypervisor bypassed games ≢cracks.
To be fair, even when I still used Steam I cracked Denuvo, the “First Run, please connect to verify license” that poped up again and again no matter how many times I verified the game finally put anything with third party DRM not in a “Crack it” box but in a “Put on your eyepatch” one.
Steamstub is at least functional, I’d not mind it if they didn’t force you to run the full Steam clinet rather than a low resource daemon like they could do. I mean there’s a project to do Galaxy (which is already optional) with Comet, works cross platform and doesn’t need a giant spammy client giving me horrible “For you!” recommendations when I want to play a game.
MS went full AI slop and cant be bothered to invest its other departments, the xbox ceo was put there to eventually slowly burn xbox to the ground.
The pure, unmitigated nerve Playstation has makes me very curious to see how the PS6 will do. Are they correct that most people are mindless sheep who will slurp up whatever anti-consumer crap they offer? Maybe.
they thought because xbox Was a dying franchise, and think people will accept the only console that isnt enshittfying itself, will keep buying it.
The Nintendo?
I wish but the fake cartridges (game key cards) they’ve introduced with Switch 2 are terrible too.
Also the occasional shitty time-limited FOMO releases, even as downloads (Super Mario 3D All-Stars, the translated version of Fire Emblem 1).
And the shift since Switch 1 from letting us buy legacy games to a subscription model.
I am shocked that people are willing to pay $70 for a digital download when they can buy a used disc for $10. I get that you’re paying for convenience, but it’s too much!
It’s not as convienient as it is loss of control of the media for the consumer.
Wait till the PS5 and 6 are as old as the ps2 is now and watch Sony say, “meh. We don’t license that IP anymore so we’re ripping it off your console and from our stores.”
Which also highlights a problem with the way media licenses, and IP more broadly, work.
I will not buy a console without a disk drive. They might persuade me with a system like the Switch, otherwise I’ll get a steam machine or a similar game pc to use as a console.
Yes, they are but also the next PlayStation will be a handheld like steam deck or switch 2
Yes, most people are sheep. They will not care that it will affect them, because they think it will not.
Internet boycotts to mega corps literally never make a difference.
This wouldn’t be the matter of an internet boycott, but normies just not wanting a $1000+ digital only system.
While I agree, companies have a lot of data on their audience. They probably don’t care about poor people without disposable income for a 1k console. But we’ll see how it turns out.
Xbox, in 2013, was trying to be consumer-friendly with it’s game sharing system. I hate to feel like I am defending Microsoft, but the convoluted game sharing system that they had proposed along with the Xbox One reveal would have ultimately allowed consumers to finally resell digital games.
People keep saying this and forget that the reason that wasn’t well received was because they were going to give the ability to third party publishers to decide if you could sell your game or not.
It wasn’t ever all about just letting you sell digital games to other players it was also about limiting discs you could resell period and only at certain participating retailers.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-clarifies-xbox-one-used-game-policy
The other big downside of that proposed system was the always-online requirement. Your console had to ping the Xbox servers once every 30 days to check what licenses are attached to your account or something. That was another reason why this system was ahead of its time; by assuming that every user had a stable internet connection. For most people, that wasn’t a problem because they prioritize having a decent Internet connection, but plenty of people don’t use the Internet.
Even to this day, an always-online requirement like that wouldn’t be welcomed by many. Sure, most users in 2026 would be unaffected because they are always connected, but there are enough users without an Internet connection that would find that to be a problem. And saying “People without a good Internet connection are just not ready for this next generation, so we’re still supporting the previous generation for a while” was not the best answer for those people.
Yes. And we know Microsoft was drooling over the day when they shut down that server, and everyone’s library stops working 30 days later, allowing Microsoft to re-sell them all the games they previously bought.
Because with this new proposed system, physical games were effectively just download codes. Which introduced several downsides for the many people who rely on discs, most notably the complex system involved in reselling physical discs.
Sure, this system made physical game ownership worse, but it made digital game ownership much better. Which Microsoft assumed would be a welcome tradeoff because consumers largely prefer digital games. But they had overlooked the large segment of consumers who are physical-first and do not care about digital games at all. Sure, gamers are largely gravitating towards digital games, but we are not yet at a point where literally everyone prefers digital. There are still some consumers who rely on physical for some reason or another.
It was just an easy system to attack, and difficult to justify. I thought it sounded good.
It’s sad we have come to the point that doiong the bare minimum is considered consumer friendly…
I’m confused, because I had an Xbox and was definitely buying secondhand games.
Sure they proposed killing that with their always online bs, but they caved to the consumers and “flipped the switch” they said they couldn’t flip.
They didn’t cave until they lost noticable market share to Sony from people switching over the plan.
Playstation still has no games. I will wait 5 years for the emulator to show up and play whatever game is locked to the system if I care.
