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Not really, one of the most egregious cases gets surprisingly little attention: Overwatch 1. I never played it myself because I prefer to get headshotted by the sweats in CounterStrike, but Overwatch 1 had a massive playerbase that was forced onto (the in many ways inferior) Overwatch 2. And that's a game from a massive company that absolutely has the resources to keep Overwatch 1 playable (or to release some sort of offline patch or a private server binary).
Yeah Blizzard is notorious for this sort of anti-consumer stuff. It's frustrating that the crappy gaming companies that pull stuff like this continue to rake in billions.
It really only took off after they were acquired by Activision. It was all downhill after that.
Valve is the single guardrail keeping the entire industry from tumbling head over heels down the slippery slope.
Their ability to sort of 'impose' pro-consumer rules for those who want to use their marketplace is like the one and only place where the incentives are finally aligned towards gamer's preferences.
They’re the only ones who can even remotely make the appeal to both sides in a way that’s somewhat satisfying, but I still hesitate going all in on them. You let me download a fully open executable with no licensing requirements, I’ll save developers all the overhead costs of physically distributing their media. Only way I’d do it.
Of course that won’t prevent piracy, but it keeps honest people honest and stops legitimate buyers from defecting. “The suits” don’t understand that actual buyers have a direct incentive to reward developers and because if you like their work you want to continue to consume their content and keep turning it out. In all the times I’ve pirated games or movies I almost never did it was a way to give the parent studio a finger, I did it because it was easier to use and less punitive.
I'm just saying. If Gabe ever sells, we're seeing $100-$120 games being standard, DRM out the wazoo, and a complete lockdown on the user review system. Just to start.
Hence why I would like Steam to add a little button at checkout to let you donate to Gaben's immortality fund.
Except there are like five other companies champing at the bit to run what is basically a free money printer that Gabe has set up. Valve basically does nothing as a company and gets paid for it because of steam. The only reason it has no real competition is because they know they have to keep their customers happy. This isn't something "Valve is a particularly moral upstanding company" thing, it's a plain market incentives thing. If anything, it might be better if they had some real competition.
All of those are publicly traded and subject to different incentives/pressures.
Namely, the incentive to gobble up 100% of any consumer surplus that might exist in a product.
Gabe could maybe double his own net worth if he was willing to be less consumer-friendly. There's certainly ways he could exploit the access the Steam platform gives him to various valuable demographics.
At a bare minimum, they could serve targeted ads (for things other than Vidya) on the platform.
But he has no legal obligation to do so since 'shareholder value' is not his primary concern.
Just take a quick assessment of ANY other comparable industry and see if there's any exceptions to the general rule that publicly-traded companies enshittify their product once they've achieved market dominance.
This seems like a pretty personal feeling that you have and I'm going to require significant evidence (not just feelings, actual economic data of some sort) to accept the claim.
Just a few points here--first of all, market dominance isn't very common. Second, it usually ceases to exist once a company starts making bad products. That's kind of how markets work after all. Exceptions are usually products which aren't very susceptible to market forces like cable/internet companies that own infrastructure with high barriers to entry or government regulation keeping out competitors, which indeed often suck. Valve's business model is basically the opposite of high barrier to entry. It costs almost nothing to run and you just need the money to spin up some servers. Market dominance is completely held together by keeping their customers happy.
Beyond that, the idea that Valve is just magically more kind because its leader is some nerd saint strikes me as unbelievable. Of course different leaders create different results, but guess what, Gabe wants money too.
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