Guess I’m throwing my PS5 out the window and going to PC. This war on physical media is ridiculous. Pretty soon they’re going to require us to buy the console but rent the controllers for the very low price of $79.99 a month.
Steam normalized the loss of resale rights on PC long before the consoles caught up. Younger people don't even realize it's a right that prior generations gave up.
Yes, and it's a tragedy that people have given up so much for the shallow convenience of having a shiny launcher and not having to figure out clicking on setup.exe.
If Steam were that shallow you would see competing efforts like Origin, Uplay, Epic Games Store etc take off. In reality Steam is anything but shallow, it's the cumulation of two decades of adding customer focused features. Competing efforts not only can't be bothered to invest as much into features, but they always add features with the goal of benefiting the store owning company, not the customer. That's a key difference that makes them fail.
You have to be very dense to think AAA video game devs have some woke agenda and not just knee-jerk reaction to market changes. There are plenty of games for you to goon to.
Steam has existed for an eternity compared to any console specific game store. It's not great that you can't resell what you have on Steam, but at least you get to 'keep' it.
Steam games exist on physical media that players have some control over: I can copy my Steam data directory across PCs/Steam Deck, I would not be able to do that on a PlayStation.
Sure, I can't resell my Steam games, but the openness of the PC platform has advantages over closed consoles. Valve can't brick old games the way Sony can - a new computer in 2046 will be able to play single-player games backed-up from Steam, not so much for consoles.
Valve have shown themselves to be reasonably trustworthy unlike say, Sony and Microsoft. If there are no disks then there is no point in consoles in my view, they're just worse computers.
Steam only exists because Valve forced players to install it, force an online activation, and permanently bind their retail copies of Half-Life 2 to a Steam account. They also forced patching which meant in an era of dialup you couldn't play your single player game for hours, and needed to be connected every 30 days or your game would stop working.
None of the console manufacturers pulled that shit, that Valve gets a pass is wild to me.
I mean the devices where steam operates are fully open, even the ones valve makes. You can install any OS you wish, any software or competing store front and thus give them 0% cut.
You wouldn't complain that Walmart takes a X% cut when you have a healthy competitive market and can chose other store fronts with better prices.
plus, nothings stopping you from distributing a physical PC game. Heck, iirc steam still supports it. Even if it didn't, you could still buy a physical PC anyway since they can just have an exe, flatpak/snap/appimage, or dmg