Ben Kuchera was shown the door after only two years of ruining the Penny Arcade Report and landed at Polygon. About that time, not due to him alone, the writers of Polygon had a change. Less games and more politics and culture. Then they started turning into the equivalent of The Watchtower instead of a gaming blog. I don't want my gaming websites full of idiots that wanted to write about politics and instead ended up in games because of the low cost of entry. Kuchera has always been a cunt, even in the days of a forum mod at penny-arcade.com and if you want to see what a joke this retard is, go find his Doom review. Then go play the new Doom because it is fucking amazing, and for a Bethesda game at that.

Now, Steam has issues. Most of those are due to customer service and end user support, which they are fixing. The Refund system is working to help consumers, and they have invested millions into working on a better support ticket system. They are even trying to clean the sewer that is Greenlight. The main issue with Steam is Valve. Valve has a culture of no hierarchy where people can work on what they want, this leads to nobody doing the hard shit and dysfunction in coming up with a forward plan and a long term "This is where we are going and how we are going to get there" of progress as a company. Their VR stuff is now being treated as an afterthought, at least publicly. Greenlight opened the floods to shit, crap, shovel-ware and asset flips. The Steam sales were amazing, game-ified and actually worth participating in, as my backlog can attest but after two-three steam sales all the stuff worth owning is in your catalog and not played.

What Steam did that needs to really be given credit for is that they made DRM easy. They made a front end that protected the publishers and helped tank games piracy. It became easier to fill a steam wallet and buy something on sale than to go to TPB and roll the malware and virus wheel. Making the purchase and protection easy opened the floodgates to audience capture. That is why Steam got popular. The only service as good or better is Good Old Games. gog.com No DRM and mostly old games. I've bought stuff from them while looking at the box with the game on the shelf because they fix the DOSBOX issues and now I got a file that will play on any PC I decide to upgrade to. I own all the City Building games, NOX, the Settlers games etc because I can dump the files on my laptop and run them on lower spec hardware and not have to fuck with dual booting and DOSBOX config fuckery. Oh, And CD Projekt Red still makes games that are amazing, mostly bug free and hella worth playing.

The guy who wrote this article is not a gamer. He does not give a fuck about video games. Google his post history if you don't believe me; he's a politics and culture hack. Somewhere in Redmond a Microsoft exec is reading this shit and crying over the $750,00 mill they gave to get Polygon to rave about the XBox instead of spending that money on hookers and cocaine.