Steam keeps on winning
Steam keeps on winning
Last year, they all came crawlin' back to Steam, and this year was another strong one for Valve.
From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin' back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
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It's rare that I wholeheartedly back a billion dollar company, but I do with Valve. Until Gabe is no longer CEO and their business model changes to something more nefarious, I will stick with them for years to come. No battle.net, No epic, just Steam.
Valve has done scummy things even recently but the scummy things they've done have never personally affected me negatively so I don't care.
Source for the scummies?
Replacing csgo with counterstrike 2 so its broken launch could be covered up with a decade of positive reviews for a different game and guaranteeing people won't be able to play the previous after an indefinite amount of time was pretty scummy, for one.
CS2 is fine and it feels like CSGO, except the nades were updated. If you want to go nostalgic you can go play the other CS games.
I understand preserving a game is important, but this isn't a single-player game, this is a game that they have to continuously host and manage, which costs money. Valve wanted to update the game, and they probably didn't want to have 2 games fighting each other. You can be mad at their strategy, but CSGO was a free multiplayer game (yes yes it was $15 or $20 dollars years ago), and they decided to change it into an updated free multiplayer game.
If you want to call them scummy because they slightly changed a game you paid for, go for it. Never buy another Valve product and go exclusively GOG.
Having said all that, I would be on your side if and only if we were talking about a single-player game that does not need to be managed 24/7.
Replacing csgo with counterstrike 2 so its broken launch could be covered up with a decade of positive reviews for a different game and guaranteeing people won’t be able to play the previous after an indefinite amount of time was pretty scummy, for one.
People would be way more up in arms had it been a completely new game where none of the inventory transfers over. Recent reviews are still "mostly positive" and traditional CSGO is still available, just unsupported. I dislike it myself that practice with bots and a friend currently no longer works in CS2 but enabling csgo_legacy wan't that much of a deal for me.
Source for the scummies?
I like what Valve does and I sound like a fanboy sometimes because they just keep doing great stuff… But I don’t fucking trust them long term. I hope they prove me wrong, of course! I also don’t really trust anybody else.