Treating your customers decently can lead to profits in the long run. What an insight. They should teach that at business schools.

Being customer friendly. What a novel idea.

In case anyone’s not clear as to why: Sony has announced that they’ll stop producing discs and that they can take your content at any time for any reason.

Historically, Steam has promised they will never do that and will offer DRM-free (clarification: they’ll remove the Steam DRM) downloads.

Also, all of them have jacked prices up. Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam have raised hardware prices around 35-40%. However, Steam runs on PCs they don’t sell, as well as Macs, and they have a Linux distribution they provide for free called Steam OS.

Remember when PC gaming was dead according to every outlet for two solid years?

The key is being consistent and transparent. We got gut punched by the Steam Machine price, but it was an expected and transparent outcome. XBOX and Sony are so volatile that it's making Steam look like a saint. From laying people off, to constant price increases, to the disc situation. Both these companies need to chill tf out.

Fuck yeah, love you Valve.

Love your contributions to Linux more though.

Valve's main advantage is they don't have to make up heinous policies in the quarterly game of "tug off the shareholders".

It's all been fucked by AI RAM and SSD (and still GPU) prices. If anyone tries for a next gen £1000 console, they'll be going the same way as Sega.

Valve is the only only one supporting Linux!. The rest are greedy fucks.

I mean...on one hand, it's pretty easy for Steam Valve to be doing well. They're the only major platform that's released a new console this year (except for Nintendo), they're the hardware manufacturer with the biggest recent success (except for Nintendo) in the Steam Deck, and they're the only major platform without any well-publicized egg on their face (except for Nintendo). It also helps that they basically own the entire PC space outright, where the other platforms are fighting amongst themselves (except for Nintendo).

But that brings up the Italian-plumber-with-a-powerup-that-turns-him-into-an-elephant in the room. Nintendo has been doing really well, too; and while, since the Wii, they've largely abandoned the power gamer space to the three players mentioned in this headline, the Switch 2 was a crazy release.

Obviously, Steam has made a lot of great bets that have paid off, they've managed to keep up customer goodwill by limiting anti-competitive behavior and focusing on good product and service over vendor lock-in, and they're clearly the least anti-consumer player in the space right now. But Nintendo's strategy of "make the games so compelling and polished that people won't care about the lock-in" is basically the polar opposite, and it's working too; so I don't know how well we can draw conclusions about the industry from this.

I hear this every time: CEOs and Exec management of companies telling their employees that costs of production or whatever have gone up, there is need for layoffs in order for the company to stay afloat. At the end of the fiscal year: champagne bottles popping because record profits have been made… and we all play along in this circus show

Post it. You know which meme.