| Valve has gotten lazy and incompetent from their rent seeking on the Steam monopoly. I will try to list some of the reasons. The service goes down for 15-30 minutes every single Tuesday during peak hours. Can you imagine if your internet, TV, or cellphone did this? There is also an absurd amount of unplanned downtime as well https://twitter.com/steamstatus there's a major outage every 2 months on average where you cannot even open Steam. The trading system is down A LOT. I don't know of any website like steamstatus that logs it, but it seems like it is down every other week. I also can't seem to trade more than 15 items at a time or the page will just hang, and this system is at least 6 years old already. Before EA released Origin, there were no refunds on Steam. I've emailed Valve exploits and they don't respond, not a single reply after years when 10 years ago they would have at least replied maybe 2-3 months later. They took HALF A YEAR to even acknowledge my exploit on hackerone.com and did not even fix it yet. Their password system is also a huge sign of incompetence. They use RSA encryption on your plaintext password instead of just hashing the password. If someone hacked Valve, they will have your plaintext password. And if you're going to argue that someone can middleman an https server, I'm going to tell you the attacker could just serve up javascript to make the user send the plaintext password. They also killed 3rd party servers in TF2 by putting them in a button at the bottom of the screen. It is similar to Apple putting all 3rd party apps in a link at the bottom of the app store. They also killed 3rd party servers in CS:GO by banning servers that were giving people default items and then being too lazy to ban servers that gave people items from their online store. 30% is standard? Why is it a standard and why can't it be lowered to 12% if Epic Games can do it? Why does Valve get to use the same standard as brick and mortar retailers when digital stores are way cheaper to maintain and more profitable because of forced online DRM and no reselling? This is about all I care to ramble off right now, but there's more. It is time for Valve to get a rude awakening from their comfortable monopoly. The Epic store is a good thing that will result in better service for consumers. And the only price you pay is to install another launcher that costs you nothing. |
Yeah, no. I'm not going to install another launcher that wastes RAM, bandwidth etc. and begs for my attention. Having games spread across multiple launchers is horrible UX too.
The Steam monopoly is a good thing for customers. What's bad is that it's private property and run for profit rather than to be useful.