1 - I refuse to click anything from Polygon, these guys proved to be idiots often enough by now...

2 - I am no big fan of Steam, but as far as DRM system and digital storefront goes this is the only one I use (along the Android and Ios stores, on their respective platforms, maybe eventually the windows store, IF and only IF I have no choice one day... )

3 - Complaining about the sales is counter productive, sure you pay much less for the games - however I, along many many people, bought games on the cheap I would never have considered otherwise... the point is, the money get spent, and the big titles get their early adopters $$$ (look at their best selling list, there are plenty of full price games in there)

4 - Who are you to complain about low prices? you're an investor? how is this the gamer's problem? I mean, there is enough back catalog, freeware titles, etc. that if there is some bubble and people sell their games "too cheap" (which is the publisher's prerogative to do it or not, believe me, they would not do it if it made no sense) and a couple of studios are forced into closing, we get less new stuff for a couple of years/months, we still have plenty of the old stuff to play with! yay!

5 - The rest is more or less blowing smoke to try to get people to consider the other storefronts, now they may have some benefit here and there, however, Steam is also the only one I can use as an interface for an HTPC! and it has its own features and benefits that no one else has... what can we do, trade one evil overlord for another? get all our games on the windows 10 store? or the EA/Ubisoft variants?

The only way to get out of this spiral is to buy only indie games from the studio, refuse to deal with publishers and commercial storefronts, adopt Linux or FreeBSD and use only open source software as well as creative common assets! - EVERYTHING else is a compromise in therms of retaining control of your software library (also, refuse to use "cloud" services, even the free ones, if you need that kind of thing, buy or build your own NAS, otherwise you are not in control of your data).

Well, there's a reason why most of my PC games are either old physical discs or from GOG

Just for comparision's sake, I have 367 games at GOG but only 65 on Steam - and that number got inflated due to Kickstarter (early Access betas) and Humble Bundle (often only Steam keys, not GOG keys)

There are only a handful of games I actually prefer on Steam because of their very active Workshop community, like Shadowrun and Xenonauts. But these are few and very far between.

Take gaming advice from Polygon?, yeah no, fuck that, i'd rather take fucking medical advice from a chimpanzee.

What an obnoxious writer. Maybe he has a point somewhere but I cant bring myself to read something so emotionally charged from a gaming website.

I think a lot of people realized years ago that Valve is a corporation dedicated to their own self-interest, just like Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo.

That being said, it is rather odd how many people see Value as "the good guys".

The big difference with Valve is that they don't really care about the details of pleasing the consumer. They have no real competition so they don't need to bother with things people would complain about elsewhere. Customer service? Pff, who cares. There are mini-games to make for the next sale. Features customers ask for over and over? Not unless they're features that can be used to leverage more profit.

Valve is a company with so much power over the market that they can do what they want without any real repercussions, kind of like Google or Microsoft with Windows. It doesn't actually matter if people complain and they know that so they just do what they want when they want.

I mean, this is a company that has bragged before that they make more per employee than Apple. They could afford things like quality customer service if they wanted to do so or felt the need to stay ahead of the competition.

Of course, they should also get credit for not fucking up so badly that people carried grudges for years--hi there, GFWL. I'll take Valve over Microsoft any day of the week.

Well, the same can be said for every corporation! People put too must trust into them. It's fine to like their products or services, but just remember that they have no idea who you are or that you even exist.

Guess you havent seen the xbox one store....

In other news, water is wet.

Anyway, I sure think Valve is one of the smallest evils in the market right now. Sure, Valve isn't all that great, but at least it's better than most of the competition. Personally, I think I like only GOG more than Valve. Well, I really like only GOG. I'm kind of OK with Steam, and I dislike the rest of the platforms. I don't other stores though, it's just the stupid applications I have to install to play my games that I dislike.

Well, they don't need an SDK, their PCs are enough for that.

Also, updates (which happen relatively often with indies) cost extra on consoles. I think I remember something like 5000$ for every Update on Xbox ONE, which is punishingly high for such small developers

Difference is there are no licensing fees for Steam. Devs still have to pay a licence fee to bring games to consoles from what i know of.