I also wanted to add on a recent experience I had that highlights this even more so.
I was going through old archive drives and found a digital copy of “The Club” that I had purchased from Direct2Drive. I don’t know if anybody remembers them or not but, they were one of the early digital storefronts that focused on PC digital downloads.
Anyways, I had the installer and my provided key in the directory so I installed the game and attempted to launch it only to be met with an activation screen. When I attempted to activate those servers had long since been decommissioned so I was dead in the water. Feeling that sting that one gets when they can no longer play something they legally purchased I started searching around for information on workarounds before I grabbed a crack. I found a thread from the company that had purchased the rights to all direct2drive purchases that had a workaround for doing the authentication through an alternate method.
I tried all the steps listed including performing a recovery process for an account that I had long since lost the login information for only to be met with a failed authentication once again. By this point I had invested close to an hour maybe an hour and a half of my time trying to get some shitty old game to work and decided it wasn’t worth it.
I hopped over to Steam and saw that I was able to purchase the game directly from them for $5 and download it immediately without any need for additional authentication steps or trying to track down who had purchased the rights to give me access rights to the thing that I had purchased 15 years ago.
Sure, my one experience may be anecdotal but I think it highlights some of the greater issues people might not take into consideration when talking about what valve’s cut is and what that represents to us as the users of the services they provide.
If their revenues were close to their running costs Gaben wouldn’t own multiple yachts, stop defending a company that made a billionaire out of its owner while you’re making less a year than he burns in a day on his boat.
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I also wanted to add on a recent experience I had that highlights this even more so.
I was going through old archive drives and found a digital copy of “The Club” that I had purchased from Direct2Drive. I don’t know if anybody remembers them or not but, they were one of the early digital storefronts that focused on PC digital downloads.
Anyways, I had the installer and my provided key in the directory so I installed the game and attempted to launch it only to be met with an activation screen. When I attempted to activate those servers had long since been decommissioned so I was dead in the water. Feeling that sting that one gets when they can no longer play something they legally purchased I started searching around for information on workarounds before I grabbed a crack. I found a thread from the company that had purchased the rights to all direct2drive purchases that had a workaround for doing the authentication through an alternate method.
I tried all the steps listed including performing a recovery process for an account that I had long since lost the login information for only to be met with a failed authentication once again. By this point I had invested close to an hour maybe an hour and a half of my time trying to get some shitty old game to work and decided it wasn’t worth it.
I hopped over to Steam and saw that I was able to purchase the game directly from them for $5 and download it immediately without any need for additional authentication steps or trying to track down who had purchased the rights to give me access rights to the thing that I had purchased 15 years ago.
Sure, my one experience may be anecdotal but I think it highlights some of the greater issues people might not take into consideration when talking about what valve’s cut is and what that represents to us as the users of the services they provide.
If their revenues were close to their running costs Gaben wouldn’t own multiple yachts, stop defending a company that made a billionaire out of its owner while you’re making less a year than he burns in a day on his boat.
I don’t begrudge him running a successful business. And I didn’t give a shit about who you feel I can or cannot defend. Lol.
If people can become billionaires from selling you stuff it means you got ripped off and overpaid, so yeah, you should be pissed.
Funny how you look at people’s history and they all have anti rich comments in there, but when it’s Gabe Newell? Oh he doesn’t count.