I don't think it's 100% fair to say that the Steam platform is not, or at least has previously not been healthy for the gaming industry. While greenlight is not a perfect system, or even a good system, it and Xbox Live Arcade have exposed thousands of games and the people who made them to a huge, receptive audience. Steam is one of the biggest engines that moved the indie game market forward to become what it is now. All I buy, for the most part, are "Indie" games, from little "i" indie like Night in the Woods to the occasional "Triple I" indie like the Binding of Isaac. Yeah, Valve is not your friend. No shit. they're a corporation and their goal is to suck you dry just like every other corporation and company. But credit where it's due, their attempts at expanding their market and profit margins inadvertently created an environment that helped indie games thrive, and also helped expand games outside of the PC space into Mac and Linux (because SteamOS is a unix based system and they require support for a lot of their games).
I've long had a hard time taking Polygon seriously, and this isn't doing a whole lot to change that. The author seems hellbent on ignoring context. A lot of us did resist Steam when it first came out. I didn't install it until 2006, and that was only to play CS Source. To this day, I always check to see if a game is available from GoG, then from Humble, and only then from Steam. Meanwhile things have improved -- offline mode is now actually a thing, and they're doing refunds. Sure it took longer than it should have, but I'm not sure it deserves the article's level of criticism. Plus, there's a lot to like about Steam: I like not having to keep track of 800 CDs that I will invariably lose. I like cloud saves so that I don't lose progress switching computers or if I uninstall the game for a time. GoG, Humble, Origin, all of those platforms only came along once Valve showed that they could be viable. For the rest, it's basically the author saying "I wish a corporation were beneficent," while ignoring the fact that corporations exist for profit and nothing else. Is this really news for anyone?
I personally like Steam. I don't think it is as bad as the author of the article was trying to show. But it's another point of view. I mean, there's a point or two worth thinking. And yeah, corporations exist for profit. He's just trying to row against the tide.
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.
The only thing you need to read from Polygon to see what they're about is their preview of Rock Band 4.
i have to hand it to the guy, his opinion is far from the one who is shared across the internet and it takes a lot of courage to express such an unpopular opinion so publicly. I remember the first couple of years of steam where everyone were pissed at having to install this software to play Counter Strike, how the tides have turned. I agree with the fact that Steam helped PC gaming become what it is now but i don't understand why we don't hear more criticism about Steam while it's all we hear for platforms like Origin or UPlay. Steam is great, but criticism is always healthy!
The only issue I have with the article is the author doesn't provide research on alternatives. He sort of creates this narrative of how far reaching, intrusive, and evil Valve is without providing the reader with "another way." You can say Value (and to some extent Origins) is evil, but I think its beneficial to show where on the internet you can go to clear your conscience so to speak. Beyond that the article is pretty spot on about everything. Valve is definitely in this for exploitative amounts of profit.
What do you recommend? Humble Store and GOG.com? Or physical resealable disks?
Gotcha. I agree with johnnyFive on this one. Steam isn't perfect, maybe not even moral, but they did bring a lot to PC gaming. I doubt those better options would exist without Steam.