Technology

Never feel bad about stealing back what was stolen from you.

Convenience is a huge factor, Valve has clearly gotten that.

I still pirate a lot of media, even though I pay for streaming simply because my own "service" isn't as crap. Many people will happily pay for good service, not for the constant enshittification they throw at us.

Valve have a long history of ensuring that games purchased are still downloadable for customers who purchased them even after publishers have pulled their game off the store, or of providing refunds.

Sony has done neither and that’s a core part of the problem.

Part of this is Valve’s agreements with the publishers.

Sony could easily do this but they’re poisoned by the music and movie industries.

I have games on steam that are not sold anymore and are supported by valve, I can download them, I can discuss with people about thrm, they work flawlessly, but they are not sold anymore.

I can also share ALL of my games with a lot of people as in friends and family, forever!

Not the same.

As far as my account goes, even when publishers remove games, I still have access to my files.

This is crucial for community led projects that revive game servers, like The Crew, Hawken or Blacklight Retribution.

Sony is remotely deleting stuff (or more accurately, threatening to do so)

Just to clarify: I still prefer buying on GOG but the catalog there is slimmer. Steam so far has been more aligned with their users' rights.

The fact that a company loses a license to something in a game disallows them to keep selling them, not stealing them back from their customers.

Nah Sonys is significantly worse. Microsoft was going to have digital trade-in/re-selling and loaning.

I used to pirate, don't anymore.

1. I was young, it was convenient, and satisfying. Eventually, I relented to the idea that I was doing it more for personal reward than for any kind of "fuck the establishment" message.
2. I got a good-paying job, and felt the satisfaction of buying a good game on sale with my own money.
3. I still maintain, as do most people, that tons of publishers are scummy and anti-consumer, but I also built more positivity towards developers that don't exhibit such behaviors.

Even if Steam were to somehow go down for a month, by now I've learned about other storefronts and methods of purchase that provide a place to move to. There's a devoted centrism to the way people consume most media franchises that basically guarantees they can flip prices to infinity, control purchases, and never suffer consequences, and piracy absolutely feeds into that; helping them to paint themselves as victims to policymakers while they rake it in.

I was traveling across the us without a car about a year ago. Long story. Was stranded, pulling a long night til the next bus instead of sleeping rough. Only place to get fluids nearby was a McDonalds.

It was painfully expensive, and genuinely felt like I was being fucked with and screwed over when I ordered. I just wanted a cup full of caffeinated sugar-water and someplace warm to sit. It sucked so fucking much. It was fucking unpleasant. Eventually I hydrated, pissed, and just left to wait outside for the last few hours.

I looked through food. I couldn't justify paying those prices for that shit. It genuinely didn't seem like food prices. I couldn't. The next day I found a more reasonably priced 7/11.

I hate to be that guy but did you try changing which version of proton its using? I know for some games you gotta change it for it to boot properly.

I do agree though it should just work, but you gotta remember unlike consoles PCs are made of many different parts and not all agree with eachother. Developers can only test so many configurations.

I remember when no man's sky came out, so many people had issues while mine booted and worked properly. Thankfully steam does offer refunds.

In a sense you're correct but in reality it's slightly different because Valve has competition with other digital storefronts as well as the rare physical PC release. Even though Sony are also the ones manufacturing PlayStation discs, they were sold by third parties, and even had the used market for their digital storefront to compete with, keeping prices and sales comparatively in check. If you can only get PlayStation games from a single place, price fixing is going to be easy because customers have nowhere else to go.

Because they didn't even wait a week since they showed that they can take away your purchases from you library. At least Valve to my knowledge never pulled a gane from libraries, even if the game was pulled from the store.

People who cared about physical games haven’t been PC gamers for 20 years. You could still care about physical games on consoles until about last week.

Valve is also good to gamers with consumer friendly pricing and their client extends the gaming experience rather than running in the background, mostly useless like the console features and the other store fronts.

I also don’t care for steam but I’m not upset about it because I just stopped playing on PC for years. The games I do play, still came out on disc. I remember that CoD MW2 was the game that broke the camels back, even though you installed it off the disc, it still wouldn’t launch without steam. (Same with HL2 but I knew that going into it and didn’t buy it)

There was a reason people bought consoles. One of those was physical media and the fact you actually owned your copy, could resell it and lend it out. So this has nothing to do with Valve who has almost always been digital. If you want to compare it, you'd need a hypothetical like "Valve always sold digital games but will now switch to disk only games."