Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming (opens in new tab)

Every other alternative: Epic, Origin, Microsoft's shop, etc... is far far worse. Valve reinvests in core technology and open source development. Privately held companies (such as Valve) will always have hit pieces thrown at them, in the same way famous (but independently minded) celebrities will. Meanwhile publicly traded companies role out the PR campaigns (I recall an article posted here with Bill Gates talking about his dead dad, and so many users here lapped that propaganda fluff piece up).

I support Valve because they offer a great consumer experience and have made (and continue to make) PC gaming (on window, mac, and linux) a better experience. I certainly trust them more than EA or Blizzard in that regard. I vote with my dollar and they will continue to get it, so long as they continue to do good things deserving of my business.

The article is an emotionally charged hit piece and I think the language and delivery unfortunately diminishes some pretty valid criticisms of Valve. It’s also fair to acknowledge that Valve has done a lot for the gaming community as well - for example, the fact gaming on Linux is even remotely viable in the general sense is due to efforts from Valve.

The primary reason I don’t use Steam for almost anything is due to its DRM policies. But it’s pretty easy to concede that Steam still does a lot of things better than the competition. One example is mod management through Steam Workshop - I eventually switched from my DRM free copy of Rimworld into Steam because running and updating 30+ mods for a game is just hundreds of times easier in Workshop.

However, it’s mostly easy to enjoy PC gaming outside of Steam these days with a little effort. GOG is a favorite platform of mine due to its history of anti-DRM policies and is viable for most of the stuff that I play (single player games). I personally am not a huge gamer and am only launching 2-3 games from Steam - the mod heavy games mentioned above as well as exclusives like Tabletop Simulator. The situation is a lot better than 10 years ago when Steam was really the primary and only choice for a PC gaming library.

This is a opinion piece from 2017, shouldn't that be reflected in the title ?

Without reading the article, I guessed that this was some idiotic hit piece with an extreme leftist slant. Polygon used to be one of my favorite video game review sites, but once Trump burst onto the scene they went super woke super fast. I haven't been there in years. Judging from what other comments are saying, it seems my guess was right.