Technology

Yeah it's just unfortunate market timing with the hardware shortages

The Navy has people too!

Its because most people have a childish understanding of complex issues that basically boils down to 'thing either bad or good', 'thing either perfect or evil'.

Fanboy/girlism applies to sociopolitical idologies too.

Its easier to perform purity testing to establish yourself as a morally/logically consistent person, its easier to criticize flaws...

... than it is to realize the fundamental strategy that has to be involved in achieving any kind of change from the world as it is, to the world as you'd prefer it to be.... than it is to think about broad patterns underlying decision making, as well as what those broad patterns could lead to, in a complex world with other actors who have other ideologies/behavior patterns.

You can argue that this kind of fast-food opinion/judgement formation is itself a personality aspect caused or exacerbated by the instant gratification of modern digital hypercapitalism.

Like, I don't think Valve or Gabe are perfect moral actors, I don't agree with literally everything they do or espouse.

But... on net? In the big picture? Nearly every other major or even notable actor in the space is morally atrocious in comparison to them, and many things that Valve does are effective counter pressures to those much more atrocious things.

I'm certain a lot of bot farms by competitors are involved in spreading Valve hate. And this is happening to other companies, as well. Obviously, this is hard to prove so it's just speculation, but if I were a competitor (and an asshole) I would certainly try to manipulate public opinion using the tools at my disposal. LLMs make this kind of stuff easy enough. And we know that many many bots lurk around everywhere.

Especially since Valve is a major promoter of Linux with Proton, I could see Microsoft not being too happy with them.

Line Khan made incredible headway in actually enforcing the (actually pretty good) antitrust legislation that already exists, but alas, she's not in the role anymore (since Trump entered office, I think)

Despite this, I have no doubt that we'd see some pretty efficient antitrust stuff against Steam if they did subsidise the Steam machine, due to the efforts of the competitors to Steam.

The thing is, I do think that Steam has a monopoly, in that if they suddenly turned evil, it would have a disproportionately large impact on the overall gaming ecosystem. However, they only got to this position because they understood that piracy was a service issue, and did legitimately better than most of their competitors

I bet they would be (against Valve) if a competitor donated to Republicans. I mean, they're keeping a finished bridge they paid $0 for closed because the owner of a competing, tolled bridge donated to them. Of course they'll open an investigation into a smallish leftish leaning company if a large donor asked them to.

It’s a closed system that doesn’t allow owners on other platforms to access the mods (Valve actively shuts down anyone attempting to make it possible). Many mods are only uploaded to Workshop.