this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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If you haven't experienced enshitification with a company, you just haven't quite waited long enough.
Yeah, the problem with enshittification is not that it is something that some companies do but that all companies are heavily incentivized to do under a lot of circumstances (enough that circumstances will come up for practically any company regularly).
Steam comes to mind. But for stock market ones yeah 100%
Anticompetitive practices with their marketshare and pricing exclusivity. Fearful of what a post Gabe steam looks like too
Based on their current management model of "desks on wheels" they'd probably be most comfortable becoming a worker-owned coop. I know I'm in dreamland, but it would be amazing if they could go that direction when Gabe is gone.
The one thing to criticise about steam (and that they're slowly, but surely, losing a EU court case over) is inability for customers to sell their games.
Their marketshare is organic, based on being the choice of store both from the customer and developer POV. As a customer you get the usual painless returns, great interface, community features and whatnot, as a developer you get plenty of store features which make life and customer acquisition and gamedev a lot easier (things like playtesting, next fests) and most of all you get customers because steam has lots of customers and a real, I mean real good, recommendation algorithm. Sure, Epic wants a smaller cut but you're also not going to sell much, there, which is why they had to lure devs in with advances, guaranteed sales, etc. Larger publisher might not like steam so much because they have gigantic marketing budgets in the first place so all the discoverability/recommendation stuff is not as relevant but, well, fuck EA, Ubi, etc IDGAF, I don't want to hear it, cry silently.
As to the "can't sell games for lower prices elsewhere" myth: That applies to when you're selling steam keys in places that are not steam. Which is fair, if you're selling steam keys then that's incurring costs for them (if nothing else, bandwidth) and they don't even get their usual cut when you sell a steam key off-steam, least you can do is not undercut them.
What anticompetitive practices? This normally refers to things like selling at a loss long enough to destroy fledgling competition and the like. As far as I'm aware, steam just... provides good services that other stores don't?
I’m just hoping a VC firm doesn’t come along and hostile takeover them at some point, because that would be the death knell.
They aren't publicly traded so put those fears to rest until Gaben dies (may that be FAR in the future), then we have to hope his successor has a similar mindset.
Forcing you to use a service when you have bought an unrelated service is anticompetitive. For example, bundling a particular browser with an OS, or forcing you to use a vendor's store because you've bought a vendor's product.
How is this relevant
Not to mention being an early adopter of loot boxes, microtransactions and gambling gamification.
Doesn’t need to be publicly traded; just about anything with investors looking for a return