Steam

“Steam client is also a store (with lots of personalizations), a social network (forums, text and voice chat, personal profiles etc)”

“my experience with Steam is, "click on the Steam icon", pair the Xbox controller, use the controller to pick a game, and sit back”

“Costs money and is centralized with a for-profit entity, probably best to stay far away when it comes to day-to-day software.”

“It's doable if you have a suitable GPU to pass through to a Steam Qube, but it's still far from simple or even viable for most users”

“The lack of right of first sale, that your many thousands of dollar catalog of beloved games & your saves kicks the bucket with you is going to be a not great look for Steam some day.”

“Steam is one of the better example in the current moment because among other things it has some Family Sharing support”

“Steam has issues, and you certainly can't (legally) trade or sell your library, but nearly no single player games on the platform have DRM.”

“I've found that running the "Discovery Queue" a few times once or twice a week brings up an interesting game or two every month.”

“they aren't Steam, and I feel like the only unique thing they have is the Windows + PC gaming (that Valve are working hard to erode)”

“Steam got to where it is by keeping all its costs lean and developing a service around taking a cut from premium digital goods.”

“Until Steam starts telling me before I buy which games have their DRM and which doesn't, they belong in the same category as Sony and Microsoft.”

“Its not like we can sell or even lend the games from Steam that we have, not without breaking the licence terms and hacking around the DRM.”

“currently its reasonably customer friendly but as we have seen these big tech companies can turn on their customer base at any moment”

“Steam has been (mostly) a good citizen. But there's not much in the way of legal or technical hurdles to them going down the same path.”

“At least with a PC you have control over the system. You're even freer with Valve because now have the ease of using Linux.”

“"consistent" and "usually choosing the side of the customer over the side of the publisher" is maybe the better framing”

“Valve forced players to install it, force an online activation, and permanently bind their retail copies of Half-Life 2 to a Steam account”

“Steam handles the management of pulling whatever the most recent version of Proton-GE is for me and everything pretty much works.”

“Steam pioneered remote DRM attestations for PC gaming, remote product key validation, always-online dependencies on Steamworks and more.”

“One of the things I like about Steam is that your email address, username, display name and id slug aren't required to be the same.”

“All steam games I tried (mostly indie but I did play Cyberpunk 2077 beginning to end and Satisfactory) all with 0 issues”

“they have invested a lot of effort into the compatibility layers, which allows gamedevs to support Steam Devices with no extra effort”

“Steam regional pricing and game passes have demolished piracy in countries where people wouldn't have dreamed of paying for a game”

“Steam has a lot of capacity. They can have millions of players all downloading the same game on the same day at gigabit speeds.”

“Steam sets like eight or sixteen of my logical CPUs at roughly half utilization and absolutely saturates my download bandwidth”

“It's definitely not about lock-in for me. It's everything from local streaming, to linux support, to cloud saving working properly”

“it was pretty meh back then, so people had pretty understandable reasons. it made LAN parties harder for example :) but it got a lot better.”

“Steam with thousands of games, that regularly has (or had) massively deep sales that let you get games for cheap, barely uses resources”

“I open Steam, and feel the strong sense of rejection, like eww this is well and truly a disgusting selection of repackaged Unity assets”

“Steam tackling the gaming side of things has basically unlocked the entire Windows consumer software ecosystem for linux.”

“Have you looked at daily Steam releases lately? It's 90% AI-generated hentai games, asset flips, or AI-generated hentai asset flip games.”

“I don't like being locked into steam and "Gabe the goodest billionaire" propaganda exists to keep people from engaging in competitor products.”

“With Steam, she can easily have the Steam Client open on both her laptop and her user account on my gaming rig simultaneously”

“They are managing their market position well by not abusing their customers or giving customers a reason to complain to lawmakers.”

“Valve, who offers perpetual licenses exclusively, offers steep discounts often, and is worth 10s of billions of dollars.”

“Steam with cloud saves, auto-updates, built-in workshop, and the many sales is overall a much better user experience.”

“The fact is that Steam has an incredibly loyal _userbase_ and you won't convince them to leave unless steam betrays their trust, which they haven't.”

“Over time, the Steam DRM has also been more permissive than before, as I can now play my "family's" games and they can play mine.”

“Valve/Steam tends to take a hands-off approach, let devs publish how they want and allow users to bring non-Steam games into their fold.”

“I've seen no signs of steam actually abusing their standing in the market. If anything they seem to be nicer than they have to be.”