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 dps 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.