Why Does The Internet Worship Valve/steam/gabe?

Continuation from the discussion over in the random thoughts thread because pantafernando raised concerns that our 4 page long discussion could derail that 23k page long thread filled with random thoughts. It started on this page.
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That's a statement. Now it'd be nice to follow up with some reasons why steam is a worship worthy degree more consumer friendly than their competition.

Don't get it twisted. Initially I mentioned gog and humble bundle, both occasionally have better prices than steam. Then you Nynja narrowed it down to new games only and started cherry picking titles.

I followed you on those new arbitrary rules instead of calling you out on your ***. I proceeded to demonstrate, with your list of cherry picked titles, that steam doesn't have the price advantage by default. Instead of acknowledging that you're changing the rules again.

Remember, You guys chose to argue in favor of steam and gabe being your one and only lord and saviour. My side of the argument is perfectly in line with choosing a different store if their offer is better. And for the 3rd time:
The bold part clearly indicates that the list isn't comprehensive, stop selectively reading over things that don't fit your narrative.


Fact is that they sell them cheaper than steam does.


I noticed, like a broken record, pretending those quotes debunk arguments while most of them only talk past valid points like the one above.

I hope we can stop with the quote fest from here on out and advance the discussion cause it's going to suck having to cross reference a different thread even more than it already did in the original thread.

Initialy, they made great games that you could only get there (half life etc) and that dragged gamers in.

Then they built their brand / fanbase around Gabe being pro gamer and he has a similar kind of fanboy cult base as Elon Musk does, to a bunch of young guys who were hierarchy/tribal minded. This along with Steam being an originally very masculine social media site where you could be toxic asf and enjoy it, allowed it to almost turn into a kind of clubhouse for gamer guys with a lot of disposable money. Gabe has long since retired and has next to nothing to do with Steam or Valve now other than being the owner and keeping it private, but you would never know that from the community / marketing around the company. Valve is also now run like a hippy commune with next to no leadership structure at all, which is why they struggle to do very much in terms of games.

At this point in 2026 it's mainly simply that peoples game library / collection is attached to Steam and they want to keep their games in one place, but also Steam Sales are a good thing (even if you will never play most of the games you buy and it boils down to fomo and buying stuff you don't want cause it's cheap) and things like Steamdeck are cool since you can carry over your library.

Ultimately Steam is still great now, but it's only a matter of time till some other company buys them out (I doubt there is a good strategy to carry it on as it is after Gabe pops). When they do they will become crap and anti gamer/ consumer and it won't matter at all, cause people are very easily manipulated by psychology and having a huge library will keep them locked to the company no matter how bad it gets.

Ultimately at this point it's:

>muh collection

Even though you don't own any of those games at all, and in reality you actually only own a licence to play the games.

The thing that will really kill Steam dominance in the long run are two things:

A) when Amazon or whatever sets up a a proper Netflix type system for gaming / cloud gaming, where you get every single game ever made as part of the subscription (making your library redundant)

B) when governments destroy the social media aspect of the site and undermine thet tribal/clubhouse feel of it to many male gamers, with strong censorship (it's already going that way, with very heavy censorship / banning) and strict age verification etc

Alteraively, games will go full AI mode and they will all become fully custom things made on the fly anyway.

FFXI was the only thing that was keeping me from moving to Linux as my full time OS. Steam's contribution to Linux has now enabled me to use my favorite linux distro (btw, it's arch) and I am so much happier to move away from windows permanently.

I also run in a 9-box sortie group and one of the members is running on Steam Deck. If it wasn't for Steam Deck he wouldn't be playing with us.

I even got a Steam Deck recently and briefly got addicted to another RPG and it felt like when I was a kid playing pokemon blue.

I'm a big fan of what Valve/Steam is doing.

Valve saw the Windows monopoly coming, put their money where their mouth was, and funded Proton to the point it will run almost all Windows games seamlessly on Linux.

Then branded it as a mobile pc-compatible platform, now doing console-lite.

Haters hate success the most.

You mentioned GOG and Humble Bundle

I immediately ruled out GOG (because its niche is Good Old Games, literally what GOG stands for) and looked at Humble Bundle's prices compared to steam. Every NEW game was the same price and the games I listed were AAA titles released in 2026. If you're calling it cherry picking because I missed a title, so be it.

what arbitrary rules?? You listed two sites and I used both sites. Did I cherry pick by not listing prices from GoG? Ok, here we go

There we go, I added GOG.

If you introduce a different site after the fact to try to get a gotcha, thats not my problem. Am I supposed to shop around through every e-shop out there?? How about Kinguin and GreenManGaming? Well I already debunked why I'm not doing that, for the third time:
The fact you CAN shop at multiple different e-shops to find the best price means Steam doesnt have a monopoly, which is one of the things they are currently / were being sued for (idk and idc about the current status of that one).


Wait, I just realized I have gg.deals bookmarked and I remember why: it isnt even a *** vendor, its an aggregator that indexes all the e-shops. Completely disingenuous and pathetic to introduce that into this discussion.

That explain why I have Ubisoft Connect and Epic Games Launcher on my system, right?

Stadia?

They don't seem to get much hate and when they do it seems to be less than what other companies would face for doing the same thing.

I gotta ask, because I was on Linux running FFXI and WOW fine through Steam, but could never get 3p tools working well. There was a Windower version on Lutris that worked well, but I'm a filthy cheater and couldn't figure out how to get anything that hooked into memory to work. Any idea if such a thing is possible? Don't need specifics here.

Clearly you've forgotten how this all started. PCGamer put out an article going "LOOK GABE BOUGHT A YACHT PEASANT, HOW DO YOU FEEL THAT GABE HAS A YACHT, LOOK AT HIS YACHT, HES RICH AND YOURE POOR PEASANT. YOU NEED TO HATE GABE FOR THIS."

Why is Shishishishishishishsito picking on Gabe's yacht?

Mine is way better.

Seeing as microsoft pretty much had a monopoly at DOS 4.0 that was a sure bet. The genius part was in figuring out how to take advantage of it without the big M squashing you like a bug.

I would rather hate Bezos and his yacht. Its way bigger and he is an ***. But hating takes too much energy and costs too much karma.

Your post is all over the place. You continue to selectively read over stuff that I've explained meticulously multiple times by now. You can't have a healthy discussion like that so I'm not going to go deeper into any of that.



I haven't forgotten, in my first post on that topic I specifically mentioned that I didn't read the article but that I never understood why he's worshiped by the internet as much as he is.

I don't have the impression that gabe historically got a lot of bad press so I view this as more of a anomaly. I'd also heavily distinguish between backlash from news outlets and his customers, the later doesn't seem to be very critical about his yacht purchase from what I can tell.

Worship is a strong word, but I like steam because (at least in their current iteration) they seem to be doing and saying the right things in defense of gamers. They seem to be fighting for our right to own our libraries, and they seem to be standing up to other entities that just seem to want to screw gamers over.

My approval is not fanatical though, they have to continue to earn it.

I personally do not hate if Gabe buys 50 yachts. He can do what he wants with his money. What I do not understand is individual people who will *only* buy from Steam when a game can be bought cheaper elsewhere. I personally use http://isthereanydeal.com to check prices as it shows approved resellers of Steam keys and not grey markets. But also, it shows pricing from Ubisoft, EA, Newegg, etc which is a huge bonus.

If you look into it, one of the Rothschils have been taking regular legal actions againts Valve for some time. They recently lost a big legal case, and the troll legal cases (moms against w/e type things) and PR smears have started to intensify since then.

They often originate from the UK, where the Rothschils have a lot of connections. These media outlets are almost all owned by billionaires, they are in effect propoganda at this point.

Again, billionaires hate private companies cause they cannot personally profit form the success of others.

I think this thing needs to be split in two separate aspects:

1) Buying a Steam code from other sources (like the one you mentioned)
2) Buying a code for a shop/app other than steam (Epic Launcher, Ubisoft, EA, you get it)

If we're talking about #2 honestly a lot of people simply don't want to install and manage 2000 different "gaming apps" on their PCs. Some people care, some don't, whatever you think about it I don't think it's hard to understand this point, since you were talking about "understanding".

If we're talking about #1 instead I sort of agree with you, altough I can provide some reasons I've seen over the years with people I know.
Most of them simply don't know the possibility even exists (boomers? lol), some do not trust those shops making it sort of an ethical issue? I guess. Sort of like "boycott" them for reasons like that.
But to my experience people who do that are a large minority.
People who don't buy from "alternative" shops most of the time don't do it simply because they don't know the possibility exists or are afraid to get tricked into buying fake codes and stuff like that.

1. He and his company made a lot of beloved games.
2. He and his company made a great storefront that doesn't have all the *** other stores had. You could download games and turn off the internet and they would still work, modding was easy and intrinsic, refunds were painless, frequent sales, a gigantic catalog, ect.
3. He and his company made some pretty cool hardware like the steamdeck and controller.

It's literally that. He was pro consumer when the rest of the industry was not.

I'd rather install a virus than any software from EA, Ubisoft or Epic.

It's what it means to have competition. Only reason anyone uses those stores is their game exclusives. Which I simply do not play because they are locked behind their companie's stores.

Steam is just convenient. They did a good job of seeding it early on with games people liked, then adding community around it and making it easy to play games with people. It's easier to track your library in one place and, although idgaf about achievements, some people like that sort of thing. If I want to play with friends then I know we will all have Steam and it eliminates any weirdness around making that work. It's not super intrusive and it just works without being overbearing. It also hasn't undergone major changes in a long time, if ever. It just works.

It was mainly a right vision at the right time sortof thing. I think Gabe gets more affection than other people because he doesn't act like an outright *** and seems to understand his target market.

GOG started out only selling older games, then realized after a few years that was going to be too limiting and started adding indie titles, then AAA titles. I still remember the survey they sent out to see what people would accept. Their thing now is being DRM free, which draws a ...certain... type of crowd that are insanely obsessed with that idea to the point of being annoying about it not unlike Linux fanboys and Crossfitters. OTOH their client was a flunk for a while and there was 0 chance they'd come close to displacing Steam even though they kinda tried. They deserve a lot of credit for reviving old titles that otherwise would not be available or even running today, but I only buy stuff that's exclusive there otherwise I get it on Steam.

I'm not at that point yet, but this one's huge for me. Windows is a trainwreck and only gets worse over time. Valve's contributions have the potential to make Linux a true long-term alternative for gamers. You don't even have to use Steam or pay a cent to anyone to benefit.

(Save me the nonsense about not wanting to pay Windows license fees on the Steam Deck/Box. I don't care, still good.)

steam has one of the worst UIs of modern day applications.

no idea why people worship it other than just the typical circle jerk ***

I've been on linux since around last august thanks to them. They're basically the only company that I feel safe buying a digital game from. I know the games could still vanish, but my trust is just higher with them. I don't know what will happen when Gabe is gone, but they make so much money. I hope the next person will maintain the trust.

The fact that they treat their employees so well is a bonus too.

https://steamdb.info/app/230330/charts/#12y

just for funsies. obviously the numbers don't mean much but the trends are cool to look at.

I'm a huge Far Cry fan so even if I bought the games on Steam, I'd still have to go thru the Ubisoft launcher. I guess I'm lucky because I honestly can't recall the last time Ubisoft's launcher messed up on me. Same with Epic. EA though, whoo boy that's another story. I just bought Madden 26 and it took a few tries to get that one running correctly.

We have a friend in our Discord group who only will buy games thru Steam. He's of the thought process that if the game isn't purchased thru Steam it could be revoked at any time, even from white listed resellers. When bringing up (at the time of release) Cyberpunk 2077 could've been bought thru GOG being DRM free he still insisted it was "better" on Steam. For those that think similar, I just don't think you can change their mind regardless of how much evidence provided a reseller is safe or DRM free is good.

Steam has a ton of great games available in a centralized location. They update their library constantly with the latest releases, and offer the ability to get early access on a lot of titles when the situation arises. The prices are very reasonable and the games frequently go on sale. There are a lot of pros to steam.

I'm aware of the downsides. There is no ownership to any title, and if your account was revoked you'd lose the ability to play your titles. The digital game era we live in is very different from the console era of yesteryear. Even now consoles often make you buy into a game, and there are documented incidents where physical copies just stop working when the company that makes them goes under.

In the end it boils down to convenience. I value my leisure time, and it's easy and simple to just use steam to get what I want. The games load up without issue and the only bugs are game related, so hopefully the developers have made a good product. It's self explanatory why gamers enjoy using the platform. We're aware of the risks, but until something actually happens most of us are willing to accept them for ease of access and ease of use.

most "physical" copies barely function now a days and require at least the first patch to be playable.

One can choose to believe this is incompetence rather than malice but after happening enough time and there being an incentive to make the physical copy nothing more than a keepsake it feels more likely for the action to be intentional.

and it has already been taken to the extreme in the case of pokopia the "physical" copy was literally just a game-key card no playable content at all just the ability to download the game.

Quite some good reasons to like steam so far, although a few of them seem to be credit for things they did in the past and not so much in more recent days.


I want to add a few things were I think they didn't route for consumers and instead chose enshittification.

1. Like bethesda they tried to push for paid mods and only dropped that idea when backlash got to big although one could argue they still have a form of paid mods, at least for some of their own games like CS2.

2. The steam's community market that ties into the gambling system, you can trade ingame items for real money there.
Now some might think "what's wrong with being able to trade my ingame items, that's a clear pro for steam".

A problem I see here is that it's framed as investing, also marketed at minors and the market is completely unregulated. That entails stuff like market manipulation or pump and dumps. A lot of those items go for hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

Recently valve pushed a update that directly caused prices of rare items to drop around 50% in value and it still only partially recovered.

3. They force things on their customers. A more recent example was when they forced the update from CS:GO to CS2 while CS2 was still in a desolate state. At the same time they removed CS:GO from their store. 2 years later and CS2 is still in a worse state than CS:GO was back then.

4. They are a billion dollar company that behaves like they are still a small indie dev team. That reflects in cutting costs to a degree that it has to be considered stingy. They also start things and then leave them unfinished for years.

Examples for stinginess are size limits of 2 MB/image and loading times equal to the 56kb era in their workshop. 64 tic instead of 128 tic servers, the later were already common over 20 years ago back in CS and CSS days where servers were community financed.

A example for unfinished business is the new netcode/sub tic system or what ever causes the inconsistent hit registration of CS2. Another one is their almost useless anti cheat engine or the poor implementation of the community server browser.

Valves main competitor to Counter Strike, riot games/Valorant, provides 128 tic servers and a much more effective but also intrusive anti cheat.


Valve imho only gets away with this stuff because of the leverage the community market creates over it's player base in form of sunken cost fallacy.


I have more but the post is already long enough so I leave it here for now.

More than everyone else having an irrational love of Gabe, you seem to have an irrational hatred of him. That's fine, no one is telling you how you should feel, but at the same time, you VASTLY overestimate how much we give a ***about how you feel.