steam really is the windows of games.
practically a monopoly on supported content but it really fucking sucks apart from the tiny corner where they support linux
mOOOOM there’s people defending monopolies in the notes 😭
I can’t say much as I have a Steam Deck and drop money on Steam games during more or less every sale but yeah their aggressive DRM sucks, the CS/TF2 crate situation is sketchy as hell, and their “great linux support” is just a Windows compatibility layer.
Which leads us to “is this a necessary evil?”
I mean, monopolies generally are bad, but steam is like the only game platform that doesn’t completely suck (itch and the like don’t count as they are stores not platforms). Steam lets devs just sell steam keys on their own without taking any money for instance. Their linux support isn’t just the really good compatibility layer, but their native support is really good too, letting devs just target one linux platform instead of one for each distro. I’ve never played any Valve games so I can’t speak on any of that though.
I’d love it if there was another comparable platform but there really isn’t right now, especially for linux