this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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I'll give my own experience as a Steam customer and aspiring game dev:
I've never had a problem with Steam that wasn't quickly and satisfactorily resolved. Usually, in ways that go above and beyond Valve's stated responsibilities. They have been quick to respond to the two hardware tickets I've raised over the years of owning a Steam controller, two Steam Links, a Valve Index, and my own Steam Deck.
In the many years that I've used all flavors of Linux and installed all manner of native games and non-native games, it has only been in the last 4 or 5 years that the process has become, in my own experience, painless enough for me to not only consider suggesting other less technical people I know to try Linux, but to enthusiastically recommend it. They were the strongest single driving force I am aware of in bringing day-one mass-market release games to Linux.
I have, over the years of my dealing with them, come to believe that money spent towards Valve is materially making my life better in ways that just playing games through Steam doesn't fully encapsulate.
They provide development assistance and funds for open source projects in a way that truly gives back to the projects they work with, their company is run in a way that I find personally satisfying and aspirational, their leadership feels like they're maintaining their relevance in the industry instead of being disconnected money-men...
I respect their decisions enough to consider their cut reasonable as compared to the services they provide both directly and indirectly to the PC gaming industry as a whole.
I see why you have a positive view on Valve / Steam. However, while this can be the case for many people, it still doesn't adress what is typically criticised.
One is that they take 30% of the money, which can be described as incredibly high, compared to other paltforms like Epic Games (12%). Is it justified just because they have the same service as any big company has? I don't know.
I think there is much room for discussion about this, however, I won't discuss it any further here, because brainless people just downvote my comment.
I understand that you aren't interested in responding, the only point I felt I wanted to clarify my own thinking about "is it justified just because they have the same service as any big company has?"
I would happily and readily say that I don't know of any other single *gaming company that provides the same amount of services to the general population and to, if we follow the tenets of OSS, humanity as a whole. They provide code and money to KDE, Arch, the Linux kernel, they work directly with AMD on Linux drivers, they are working on accelerating what I believe are common-sense additions to Wayland, they've pushed VR on PC from being a futuristic wishlist item to having a section dedicated to games for their headsets and the countless others (including Metas, whom they also directly support) on their store and helping maintain and develop the open source frameworks needed to make them.
In my mind, Steam the storefront is how Valve does everything else that they're doing, and I haven't heard of anything that they do that I find reasonably objectable. I mean, maybe the TF2 stuff could count against them, and also given that there are 17 year old people who weren't alive when that game came out any amount of work they keep putting into it is just wild from my perspective.