memes

Steam also provides value by acting as an intermediary.

There were 21,503 games released on Steam last year. How the hell is a consumer supposed tk make informed purchasing decisions with all that? Steam is a discovery platform which connects a game with the individuals most likely to buy that game.

It is also a central launcher to organize and manage libraries, including non-steam games. It's easy to move games between drives, and to use the various library tools to pick out what I want to play.

Then there's Proton, a completely free comlatability layer for Linux that has allowed me to mostly stop using Windows.

There's the Steam Workshop, which is far and away my preferred method to mod games. It's so much easier to click a button to add a mod tk Cities Skylines or Civ 6 than it is to fuck around with Nexus Mods and a mod manager for Skyrim.

Steam is a centralized location for support from developers. It also is convenient tk keep track of updates.

Steam Remote Play is probably the single most umpactful thing to my gaming in the past decade. I just need my 1 gaming desktop and I find myself playing on my Shield in my living room, my phone in bed, my tablet on my exercise bike, my Steam Deck on the porch, or even over at my friend's house on an old laptop. All for free, when I've never even be able to get Moonlight or Sunshine to work at all in my desktop.

Steam has social features like friends lists, chat, and even voice, which is relevant with how shitty Discord has been as a company lately. Support for family sharing and multiplayer is phenomenal.

It is not like Steam is just pocketing a bunch of money and not doing anything. They beat out not just their legitimate competitors, but even piracy, because they provide better value for the consumer. They do a lot of tasks that publishers otherwise would have to handle themselves, saving them costs.

And I'm sure there are more features that I'm forgetting kr that I don't bother with, but other people find valuable.

I do think they should be heavily regulated, but there hasn't really been much to regulate with them. They had a minor lawsuit in Australia early on relating to the verbiage displayed about refund policy. I don't like loot boxes, but my solution is... I don't buy them, and usually I don't even buy games with them.