𝘼 𝘾𝙤𝙢𝙥𝙧𝙚𝙝𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝘼𝙪𝙩𝙤𝙥𝙨𝙮 𝙤𝙛

𝙑𝙖𝙡𝙫𝙚 & 𝙎𝙩𝙚𝙖𝙢

 2010-2025 SUMMARY:

More things and sources can be found in the Corporate Shitlist.

Long Version:

After watching the platform of Steam and Valve – the company behind it which I’ve had nothing but respect and admiration for throughout my childhood slowly but surely sink themselves to the bottom of the sea for an now-ongoing decade, I’ve decided to write this comprehensive retrospecting examination on where this once daring and spear-heading leader of the gaming industry found itself falling down a bottomless pit of lawsuits, inaction, hypocrisy, idiocy, corporate high-school anarchy and failure. For any proper contrast and reflection however, you need a thorough history.

If you want a TL;DR on the history, just read the takeaways.

The Inception – 1996

Two men – Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington both now former employees of Microsoft decide to band together after splitting from their corporate overlords in frustration due to Microsoft refusal & hesitation to enter the risky business of being a distributor (and video games in general). While their motivations were different –

(Gabe sought the social interaction that came with creating video-games and the impact it would have on others while Mike wanted to try making games but was hesitant on solo-starting a company to do so)

They had a colliding goal and decided to take the huge financial and reputation risks of not only being a video-game developer, but one that only did large high-quality releases. Back then, Steam didn’t exist yet so like any other random bunch of yahoos, they had to find someone willing to haul their junk from point A to B – this mad-man company being Sierra (that would later split and fragment into a thousand pieces with dozens of huge layoffs, unsurprisingly in retrospect) which helped with typical stuff like advertising, something that would later come to bite them in the arse due to Valve Time being a thing, especially back then.. The game nonetheless eventually released 2 years later after the company had been formed and it was a huge success, yadda yadda.

𝕋𝔸𝕂𝔼𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐:

+++ You had the balls, wisdom and superB self-observational skills to not only realize the stuff you made was nowhere near optimal or finished (as a newbie, no less) but you also decided to act upon this and scrap what others would call progress. Kudos!

– You both literally just took all of your money (probably your future kid(s) and wife’s money, as well) and crammed it into what was basically a high-school project/dream conjured up by two newbies with no experience while mostly being helped by basement dwelling nerd modders. What were you thinking?

The risk paid off?.. Well then.. Let’s take some more risks! – 1998-2000~

Half Life became a cult classic and the company soon realized they would need more time to make an adequate sequel that wouldn’t end with their office being filled to the brink with angrily thrown bricks. To fill this gap, they cleverly outsourced another company to “make more” of Half-Life without touching their existing or future narratives. These outsourced projects are called: Opposing Force & Blue Shift. Due to the restrictions and the fact that it was outsourced, they saw little success (comparatively) in terms of fan reception and sales. Mike stayed at the company for another 2 years before saying “Fuck it, HL1 was good enough.” and jumped ship. Being on a risk-taking streak, they took another one and released the HL1 source code which modders ran wild with.. Alá Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 1, arguably the company's most well known titles today.

𝕋𝔸𝕂𝔼𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐:

+++ You didn’t take the money and run after the big bang. (Except Mike)

+++ You realized the severe negatives with having a publisher that isn’t yourself and took steps to resolve the situation.

+++ You didn’t quit after your long-time co-worker and close friend threw in the towel.

+++ You continued and built upon your previously learned lessons of hiring “risk talent”, AKA modders and benefiting greatly by developing your own engine instead of relying on heavily modified third party stuff that was quickly growing obsolete.

+++ You opted to play the intelligent long game instead of devolving down into short-sighted, fast-money, low-risk garbage mentalities that most large companies rely on even today.

+++ You open-sourced your game, earning yourself admiration from the gaming community as a whole for years to come.

/// You lost your only equal in the company and the inspiration, motivation, perspective and equal-footing dialogue & discussions that come with it without immediately realizing it and the repercussions***… Sorta can’t be blamed for this since Mike was and is his own person. (It’s my belief that this is the first, real seed of discord that would grow and eventually begin to bring Valve down to what it is today along with…)

— You willingly choose to shy away from almost all contact with your community for 5~ years straight, an idiotic trend you continue to this day.

Man. Making video games n’ stuff is hard work. – 1999-2002~

Due to the pressure of what would seem like the entire world impatiently yelling at them non-stop, Valve would work itself to the bone leading up to 2002-2003’ish and seemingly out of nowhere, the company would face a historical donkey punch of epic proportions as a kid named Axel would steal and leak most of the unreleased Half-Life 2 soup for the world to suck up.. And then immediately spit back out as it was a rushed piece of crap brought on by, unsurprisingly, employees doing excessive overtime 24/7, having their progress be scrapped often – much like the first game and all of the associated stress from the risk the company was gobbling up on a regular basis. 

On top of this, Valve (and the now-hired modders that created CS & TF) would face significant logistical and technical issues trying to update their games via retailers while also having no sustainable foundation to implement new features, Valve did the only logical thing and created a digital platform whereas games and other stuff could be distributed seamlessly using an active internet connection - Steam.

That wouldn’t be the only issue to pop up for Valve however, as they also took Vivendi (subsidiary of Sierra, their prior publisher – starting to see why Valve hates not publishing their stuff themselves, yet?) to court by spraying their games out with a fire-hose over every cyber café they could get their hands on which their new publishing agreement made in 2001, something Valve did not include the rights for them to do.

𝕋𝔸𝕂𝔼𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐:

+++ You preemptively and aggressively contended yourself up against a publisher in order to secure your own distribution rights, something that would have royally screwed Steam as a whole if you didn’t. Good job!

+++ You created Steam with the intent of creating a better service for your fans and customers. Way to go!

+++ You created one of the first, real anti-cheats known as VAC that actually worked quite well for a few years. (Unlike today where it’s a laughing stock along with VACnet. I’ve tried cheats myself to truly confirm the state and it is incredibly sad and depressing how easy it is to bypass right now.)

/// You unintentionally coined the disgusting “mainstream AAA” modern practices of today with Always-Online DRM. Can’t really be blamed for this, though.

— You failed to identify the short-comings, lack of polish and overall quality of HL2 internally inside of your company as you have done before, instead requiring the fans to do it for you and having you try to lure a kid that helped you avoid an on-release company ending disaster to the US for legal action. *** This is a side effect of Mike leaving the company, of you trying to do way too much stuff at once, overworking your employees and not holding any sort of dialog with the community & fanbase.

Valve running out of STEAM? I think not. – 2003-2005

Steam was and still is many things. A “transparent”, sterile alternative to blood-sucking, game-ruining greedy publishers. A convenient distribution platform that benefit both gamers and developers. A shoe-horned, forced push for mandatory updates and DRM.. The negatives back then were literally invisible and nonexistent compared to the retail alternatives. 

It was and still is a convenient store-front on the internet (and later, a place for communities to gather and for you to talk to all of your gaming friends with the click of a button) that also initially had nothing but decent games in it due to Valve actually having and enforcing an actual standard back then for what was put on the store page – on top of them being the ones contacting other publishers & developers to try and sell their games on said store-front, complimenting their own, high-quality titles.

Perhaps most unbelievably compared to now, Steam also had each and every one of their updates be rigorously tested in-house before being released to the public, ensuring supreme stability, performance and security.

𝕋𝔸𝕂𝔼𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐:

+++ You managed to not only establish the first real golden age for video gaming that we, after a decade + have not even come close to re-creating but you also enhanced and extended it to ridiculous degrees for years to come. God bless.

+++ You ran the Steam service extraordinarily well stability and security wise while other online-esque services like AOL crashed and burned.

I hope you like oranges because I got a whole box of them. – 2005-2008

Following the wide-branching success of Steam, Valve’s openness to modders (that for some reason never spread to other companies) and the “good word” of them now starting to spread like a wild-fire after managing to deliver on the massive HL2 hype, they kept the ball rolling by releasing HL2: Lost Coast (more or less just an advertisement for their source engine) and abandoning their previous method of releasing huge games with several years apart where they tried pushing innovation and technology every time to instead try and deliver smaller chunks faster using mostly existing assets, also known as “episodic content” with HL2: Episode One and HL2: Episode Two.

 What the fans didn’t see coming, however, was them complimenting all of this HL2 content that they barely could keep up playing fast enough with even more games that rivaled the established franchise’s excellence in the form of Team Fortress 2 and Portal 1 – A combo that was delivered in one package at October 10, 2007 named by Valve as The Orange Box that made the Steam community collectively climax – just to have it be followed up with yet another superbly made game known as Left 4 Dead 1 which had it’s sequel, Left 4 Dead 2 be released the very next year. This time period is the de-facto climax of Valve & Steam’s golden age.

𝕋𝔸𝕂𝔼𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐:

+++ You spewed out good, original quality (polished) games with a fire-hose like it was Christmas – without it being Christmas and bundled a bunch of them together for a disgustingly low price just to lower said price even more just a year later. What the f*ck.

+++ You continued being you.

Alright, we just made every gamer on the planet jizz their pants.. Now what? – 2008-2010~

To many of us 20+ year veterans on Steam, this time-frame is the critical turning-point for where Valve’s golden age would come to an abrupt halt – having L4D2 get pushed out followed by some comparatively obscure pet projects like DOD:S and Alien Swarm (something that was used as a Frankenstein experiment mix of:

  1. Testing the integration & flexibility capabilities of the Source Engine.
  2. Non-standard “hard” difficulty in games.
  3. Observation to the reaction & cause n’ effect of releasing free games with full SDK’s.
  4. Valve dipping their toes into the Free-To-Play market.. ʍɐʞǝ nd ɐnd sɯǝןן ʇɥǝ ɐsɥǝs )

The real nightmare cloud would only form later in the year – on the faithful day of 30th September – Valve would release..

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐍𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐎𝐌𝐘 𝐔𝐏𝐃𝐀𝐓𝐄

Why is this update so bad? Well..

𝕋𝔸𝕂𝔼𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐:

++ You finally broke away to listen to your community for once in your history.. At least partially. Baby steps.

+ You added more stuff into an already awesome game, including a plethora of bug-fixes and tweaks. Awesome!

+ You began allowing people to trade the stuff! Double awesome!

++ You started giving TF2 more and more history with cool comic books and more.. Triple awesome!

+++ You added community-created content into the game and begun a trade to do so regularly.. Quadruple awesome!

— You turned a game where you previously had to earn stuff into a literal pay-2-win fiasco where (amongst other stuff) the Scout would get +25 HP for putting on a milkman’s cap and the three associated weapons. This was an actual thing for 3+ years.

— You introduced what is basically a free-to-play economy that gave you tangible advantages over other players into a game that already costs 20$.

— You mutated a first-person-shooter game that was about outwitting your opponents, teamwork and being skillful into a hat simulator.

— You broke the previously, fundamentally carefully crafted yet subtle game design choices and nuances (such as player silhouettes).. Because of muh virtual hat store.

— You broke the game’s balance into a thousand pieces so hard, it still hasn’t recovered from it today – over 8 years later as can be seen by the ridiculous amount of weapon restrictions in competitive play.

— You shattered the community into an equally messy thousand pieces of controversy so hard, they up and left their childhood and life-time hobby where they’ve met most of their close n’ personal friends in favor of real life or half-baked replacements like Overwatch.

— You made the game begin to run like shit down from a previously, pleasant optimized jewel and had to completely butcher the entire, original aesthetic because of it.

— You were one of the biggest introducers of loot boxes into the video-game industry which Overwatch would a few years later pick up and make main-stream.

Holy free-to-play, Batman. – 2009-2013~

Valve would at this point feel the biggest cash tsunami that would ever slam itself into the company from the Mannconomy update and their associated Steam platform. Not only were they already making a killing by selling other people’s games, but they were still also creating their own – AND hiring any up-n-comer talent they could get their hands on.. Including a certain Icefrog as several developers at the company were becoming huge fans of the popular WC3 mod known as Defenders of the Ancients (along with the release of League of Legends).

Behind the scenes however, the inside workings of Valve would go from a passionate and self-knit community of talented people that love making video-games to a corporate money printing machine with a high-school hierarchy structure. While Portal 2 and CS:GO would go on to be released as continuations on cult-classics, they would be the last semblances of Valve that the world would ever see with the company now pouring all of it’s manpower, resources and money to develop their latest game known as Dota 2 a name and continued title they don’t really own – Same with Icefrog.

𝕋𝔸𝕂𝔼𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐:

+ You were making a profit and keeping both your company, Steam and employees afloat. Neat.

++ You kept hiring obscure modding-esque people to work for you. Super!

— You either realized what Mannconomy did and what it’s consequences would be but didn’t care or you didn’t realize it. Both of these are catastrophically awful.

— You allowed a control freak – who is also a compulsive liar with half of his resume being made up and having no social skills to speak of – take complete and total control of a huge game project at your company.

— You decided to jump on a growing DOTA genre fad, taking enormous risks doing so instead of continuing to develop your own COUGHl3COUGH IP.. In fact:

— You let multiple, incredibly talented and gifted people that were veterans of your once great company TWIDDLE THEIR THUMBS UP THEIR ASSES FOR OVER A DECADE before forcing them to quit out of disgust of what a political, misguided swamp-pit Valve was becoming instead of letting them do what they love – creating great video games.

— You didn’t bother ever giving any of your loyal HL fans closure of any kind, instead luring them about with false hope, vague promises and misdirection.

In Greed, We Trust. – 2011-2017~

While all of that was happening, Steam was getting explosively popular.. And as such, more publishers and developers wanted a piece of the pie & sent their products to be reviewed by Valve & Steam employees before being put on the store – making sure they were real, not complete garbage or had illegal/political nonsense, being clean of malware and other malicious code & spywares..

𝓣𝓗𝓘𝓢 𝓦𝓐𝓢 𝓐𝓝 𝓐𝓒𝓣𝓤𝓐𝓛 𝓣𝓗𝓘𝓝𝓖.

Realizing at some point the potential of not having to actually pay people actual salaries for doing this, Valve quickly proceeded to try and bury any and all responsibility they had as a corporation by introducing..

STEAM GREENLIGHT & STEAM DIRECT

Ontop of this, Valve would also – without resistance – allow the now quite widespread use of one of the most aggressive anti-consumer DRM’s ever made known as Denuvo while later on-top of this supporting and NOT enforcing or acting upon a sudden wide-spread used blatant spyware designed for Steam games known as Red Shell that gathers your personal information outside games and sells it off.. It took a massive public backlash before they bothered to have one of the lawyers to send an email out to stop it.

𝕋𝔸𝕂𝔼𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐:

— You had a really solid store-front going, even when you began to grow more popular due to the solid quality control.. Then you realized you had to pay people a salary and said "fuck that" and begun trying to automate everything with catastrophically bad results for everyone involved.

— You began the process of trying to overwhelmingly automatize everything about Steam, ranging from quality control to customer support which is today one of the worst rated ones on this scale… – in human history.

— You have gone out of your way to be hypocritical idiots on how you handle adult or “games with sexual content” in them like idiots for a good 5-6+ years – Only stopping this trend due to massive public back-lash from having you mass-threatening developers on your platform for offering free uncensor patches for things as little as 2d boobs being present.. Something you did whilst not batting an eye at games like Outlast 2 having bloody, visible male genitalia complete with bouncing balls.

— You had this slightly faulty community-driven quality control method known as Steam Greenlight flooding extraordinarily amounts of crap onto your store due to bots and instead of solving the botting issue (that has now spread to TF2), your response was to instead nuke it and replace it with a 100$ flat fee system to make it even easier to flood your store but with the caveat that they have to give you money to do so. Starting to see a trend where your priorities lie.

— Despite knowing intimately yourself DRM being a pointless scam and serving only to de-value the service that can be offered to legit customers, you put on the thickest blindfold you could find and begun allowing Denuvo to be slabbered on anything and any game on your store despite massive community backlash, plummeting game performance and publishers intentionally withholding the fact they use Denuvo until the last second to trick more users.

— Red Shell is a by-the-book definition of spyware that blatantly breaks just about every single European Union General Data Protection Regulation Act notion and despite being the administrator for your store-front, it took you YEARS to even begin trying to do something about it that came about only after multiple massive public outcries.. And all you had to do was to send a few emails.

Who needs PR or communication with your paying customers, anyways? – 2012-2015~

Amidst developing and testing Dota 2 – not realizing they were condensing and creating the most toxic cesspit known to man, Valve also decided to partake in an extremely disturbing trend that other giant organizations such as Microsoft was dipping their toes into known as trying to legally snake yourself out of class-action lawsuits by adding some scribbles to their subscriber agreement to try and take away people’s right to sue them. Needless to say, Valve was beginning to run pretty low on their previously acquired public approval as they were on-top of bad morale in the company structure, unsurprisingly also going out of their way to exploit tax loop-holes.

There was also a period back in 2013 where the significant amount of people that played Dota 2 was waiting for an annual event to occur in the game just to be told the day before said annual Halloween event was supposed to happen that there wouldn’t be any. A management fluke or mistake, perhaps?.. Nope. Valve would proceed by insulting the fanbase, not fire the insulting employee (including now, years later) and then proceed by having one of Valve’s lawyers later defend their shocking lack of communication (and general dysfunctional company structure that’s been admitted to be crap by the people working there themselves). Mind you, this situation was so huge to the point where the car manufacturer Volvo (a nickname Valve would get from the meme being created around the situation) would respond before Valve or the Dota 2 team, prompting them multiple times to ‘actually’ communicate with their customers.

As luck would have it however, their extremely benevolent-filled, employee laxness & friendly handbook would “””leak””” out, giving them some much needed PR with incredibly embarrassing things such as them being caught by their pants down, operating an illegal business in Australia (and many other countries that have basic consumer rights) by completely failing to adhere to even the most basic responsibilities as an organization and trying to shun people’s right to not be completely ripped off – something they tried to appeal like children and lost… You didn’t think them finally adding refunds to Steam was for the consumers benefit or an act of good will now, did you? And now i’m not even mentioning on how badly they have been trying to hide just how much money they make.

Valve has also had their chaotic inner workings continued to get verified with significant purges not being discluded to the point where Gabe himself apparently being aware of at least some of the childish chaos transpiring within the ranks.

𝕋𝔸𝕂𝔼𝔸𝕎𝔸𝕐:

— You’ve done so much horribly awful, disgusting anti-consumer shit during this time, a takeaway wouldn’t begin to do a fraction of it any justice, even if it was 5 miles long..

Unfortunately, this trend keeps going onward so takeaways will be absent until there’s actual positives to be had.

It gets worse. Somehow. – 2012-2017~

Amidst having Gabe Newell say some really stupid shit in regards to the paid mod push for Skyrim while gladly taking 75% of the profits, there was a random revelation: “Software is for losers.. Let’s try and flip the hardware industry on it’s head!”

This singular decision is financially speaking the worst they have ever made in their entire history and it speaks volumes on just how disconnected they are with reality at this point. Let me tell you why:

The Steam Machine

Intended goal: Infiltrating the console “living room” space with the usual great streamlined yet flexible development platform that PC’s have, both hardware and software-wise.

Result:

An overpriced product that was already hated before it came out due to Steam for whatever reason, deciding to partner up with one of the most controversial PC builders on the web known as Alienware whom are notorious for grotesquely overcharging for glowing boxes with alien logos on them.

Ontop of that, Valve insisted on launching the machines using their SteamOS which still, to this day has overwhelmingly bad compatibility problems with a majority of games on Steam while also being incompatible with anything outside of Steam. While it can be jury-rigged like many similar devices, the entire idea for the Steambox was to streamline things for people who had little to no such technical knowledge. The product proved to be extremely unstable with crashes, freezes, unintentional behavior, glitches, god-awful performance and much more.

Continuing on what can only be described as having a bunch of screaming chimpanzee on your board of directors making all the calls is:

The Steam Link.

Intended goal: A distribution platform to take input from your PC or Steam Machine and have it accessible elsewhere – such as in the living room.

Result:

A product that should never have existed. A product so bad that had it’s price crash down to 2.50$ shortly after it's debut. A product absolutely no one asked for: The Steam Link.

Essentially a HDMI Hub (that already existed for half the price and 10 times the quality) that had such a massive delay, it was immediately made unusable in any remotely competitive MP game.

Much like the Steam Machine, it also proved incompatible with anything that wasn't on Steam and was additionally plagued with serious visual degradation issues that got greatly amplified depending on your cable length, cable quality, other electronic devices nearby.

Which begs the question: Why would ANYONE want to buy and use this thing (that requires setup with codes and shit) over say.. A 2£ HDMI extension cord? The answer is no one.. Unless you’re buying a Steam Machine in which case, you’d save 450$+ bucks. 

Well done punching yourself in the balls, Valve.

The Steam Controller.

Intended goal: A controller for your.. PC. ???

Result:

Imagine a product ‘so’ bad, it didn’t work half of the time for any of the games it was intended for.. Imagine that a very small, die-hard community revolving around said product would have to work full-time without getting paid in order to develop, tune, tweak and release configuration packs so that this thing could see some actual use by it's intended audience (Casual console gamers).

Like the SteamLink, this thing tries to give you the “tools” to play PC games while in the couch by having ginormous sensor pads that can make your fingers perform the functions of a KB&M combo, but unfortunately, real life is real and you can’t just copy-paste things from one place to another, expecting sunshine and rainbows. 

 PC games more often than not have intricate things such as small-scale user interfaces and a plethora of carefully designed keybinds that you just cannot completely take use of with a single, relatively button-free handheld controller and any sane person would have been able to tell you this before it's conception but it's clear such people left Valve (or got fired for using their brain) a long time ago.

HTC Vive & Valve Index

Intended goal: Woah, dude! You can be like, in the game and stuff!

Result:

The current VR Headset market is probably the biggest hype-driven flop I’ve seen in my life.

You need to spend around 1200$+ to strap a nausea-inducing paperweight on your head that needs to be inside a sizable empty room that has no obstructions of any kind and surround it with wired sensors, all requiring precise placement, calibration and alignment with sprawling power cords needing to be attached to them AND your VR headset which has easily caused the most dangerous rooms to go from the kitchen & bathroom to VR areas.

Once you have done all this and made sure you have one of the most powerful PC's available on the consumer market (probably another 2000$~ otherwise you will puke from the smallest of stutters), you can finally begin to enjoy the vast world of VR game-... Oh no wait, there aren't any.

Yet again as any sane person would have predicted, a 3000$~ investment to play some gimmicky video games does not a large pool of customers make. Accordingly, there have been little to no developers creating tools, much less actual video games for the VR industry and so much like certain Playstation consoles, you had a gaming machine with no games to play.

If you still think this was a good idea or if you are thinking about buying it, I'm pleased to report – videos – that – should – convince – you – otherwise.

Where are they now. 2016 – 2018~

As the sunken cost fallacy dictates, Valve tried to zealously ensure everyone that the pieces of crap they were making are just on a short break yet they are still nowhere to be seen in 2024. Continuing on doing the opposite of whatever sanity dictates, they continue to ignore the biggest issue facing Steam right now (quality control) by blatantly ignoring the people that outline and can help with the issues – Curators like myself – while the amount of “games” being uncontrollably pumped out on the store just keeps explosively increasing every single day and there's unfortunately no end in sight. Especially not with their current treatment of one of their flagship competitive games.

Ending 2018 with another spectacularly bad fuck-up, Valve went out of their way to force a controversial, dysfunctional, slow, unwanted, unstable UI overhaul down the throat to all of it’s users. 

Understandably, a lot of people wanted nothing to do with the Chinese bootleg Discord ripoff and sought & found ways to revert back to the old, much more functional UI that didn’t have one’s entire friendlist & chat function hinge on the unstable steamwebhelper service..

Something Valve sought to be a #1 priority to remove.. Because of uh, reasons i guess?

It’s just gonna keep going downhill from here, isn’t it? – 2019

Extending itself out of 2018, Valve’s latest “IP” release Artifact has managed to somehow – against all odds to impress absolutely no one with the player base being nothing but a downwards slope. This is thanks to Valve’s newfound affinity for expressing and bringing their exceedingly greedy behavior out into the open and injecting such grotesque mentalities into games they create & own, having this game in particular be a strong pay-2-win experiment trying to rip off similar, existing games.

Building on their existing mindsets of integrating predatory monetization tactics & techniques into basically all of their games in the form of loot boxes and subsequently avoiding any consequence for breaking the law, Valve has ignored the recent series of huge CS:GO gambling scandals and proceeded to continue to push the patience and good will of it’s fan-base even further by yet again copy-posting whatever is currently popular into their own games – also known as following trends instead of creating them.

They’ve also continued to keep selling disgusting, zero customer value “viewer passes” for 9€ where you get the privilege to watch some people play the game for a while. Mind you, buying this to somehow support the players in question is rendered almost completely moot due to Valve taking 50% of all the proceeds and having the rest be split between said players and the organizations involved.

In 2019-03-15, Valve had the idea that following the explosive rise of their competitors to blatantly begin hiding and sweeping negative user reviews under the rug which fits the very definition of censorship like a glove.. Why, do you ask? Well.. Because developers felt they were being treated unfairly, of course!.. That is an answer you’ll get if you ask some of the many scummy developers that fully deserve what they’ve got coming by doing extremely greedy, stupid shit. If you ask other developers that have some level of reasoning however, many of them never liked this new system to begin with.

And keeping with tradition, they got sued yet again.

In 2019-08-10 following endless waves of scamming taking place in workshop submissions, Valve had the genius stroke idea of introducing.. Hold your breath now: HUMAN MODERATORS that need to CHECK WHAT’S BEING UPLOADED 

Naturally, this drastic change that contradicts their line of thinking where all quality control needs to be automated was released with zero announcements or notices, most likely to avoid any sort of well-deserved irony that would occur from their fans screaming at them for over a decade to add this exact sort of human-powered moderation for EVERYONE, not just their products.

Christmas being not too far away, Valve thought it would be appropriate to get into the holiday spirit by completely slashing people’s ability to purchase their VR headset in the Steam storefront by using the most appropriate method of payment, their Steam Wallet. 

That’s right. Put real money into your Steam wallet? Spent YEARS selling things on the community market (of which every purchase, they get a hefty cut from) or a combination of the two? Sorry, they can't let you spend your Steam Bucks to buy a Steam Product. 

The worst part of this? It's a direct violation of their own STEAM EULA.

Please make it stop. – 2020

It’s now been over a year since they decided to throw the time-proven, functional and not outdated UI into the trash and you can bet all your steam wallet funds that they still haven’t even come close to partially fixing or stabilizing the new one that is so fucking dysfunctional and broken, one cannot help but to draw the conclusion that it is being entirely maintained and developed by a few interns chained in a basement somewhere. Can a single individual fix it if they actually try? Of course. Can a 7.7 billion dollar company over the span of several years? Hell no, stop being unreasonable.

On the hardware front, the VR gimmick industry was in it’s year long prolonged continued decline with a big contributor being all the cash-grabs and failing scam games on Steam, so Valve decided to do the only logical thing.. 

Make and sell HL3 which people have been asking for over a decade! Except not because it's like a prequel due to our key staff leaving in droves. All you’ll need is the aforementioned 1200$+ (shipping not included, 2000$ PC not included) headset and powerful enough computer hardware that only a fraction of all users on Steam have, together with the giant empty room riddled with carefully calibrated sensors.

It seemed like quite the weird thing to do right after mass-firing our hardware department and having a lot of steam developers begin to get wise on our greedy behavior but what do i know.


Here are the results of Valve releasing their extremely untested VR headset that went through seemingly zero quality control, just like all games on Steam:

  • Button Function Failure & Loss of Tension After Normal Wear & Tear
  • Thumbstick Drifting & Loss of Tension & Failures After Normal Wear & Tear
  • Complete Mechanical Failures of Parts
  • Face Gaskets Are Cloth & Can’t Be Thoroughly Cleaned And Require Replacing After Use, Costing 43€ + Shipping
  • Loss of Surface Coatings & Markings After Normal Wear & Tear
  • Buttons & Mechanics Audibly Scraping From Minor Debris From Normal Wear & Tear
  • Complete and Partial Headphone Failures From Normal Wear & Tear
  • Complete and Partial Cable Failures From Normal Wear & Tear
  • Complete and Partial Station Failures From Normal Wear & Tear

And much more. Coming back from 2024, there's been at least 20 different internal iterations of Valve desperately trying to fix their glaring, numerous design faults and it's been the initial purchasers that have paid the price. Having to refund some of these people, Valve decided to cut some corners and abruptly cut support for one of the operative systems without warning!

Already being a rough year, they also had another incredibly embarrassing code-base leak of not one but for two games.. While it wasn’t as bad as it could have been due to it being outdated, it served to reveal the shocking fact that 90% of our employees are in fact interns who don’t know what the fuck they are doing.

Following something resembling the possibility of us receiving actual competition for Steam, they have decided – effective immediately to – permanently gag any and all developers of ever talking about their games outside of Steam. Forever. Including in future updates. Wanted to perhaps talk or include your development-themed website? Maybe a Patreon / Kickstarter? Nope.

Oh dear god the lawsuits. – 2021

They can't get enough of them.

January 20: Found guilty breaking the law by committing anti-trust & geo-blocking practices and paid extra by refusing to cooperate like children.

January 28: Sued for plagiarism in the design of the Steam Controller and were even warned early on in it’s development, but ignored it. They were found to be willfully guilty short time after. They tried to appeal it and got denied.

January 28 (again): Sued for price fixing & general anti-competitive behavior while forcing developers to do it as well.

Feburary 18: Valve was asked to hand over information in an ongoing Apple lawsuit. Valve said no, so they got forced to hand it over anyways, something they vividly complained about, that it’ll make them actually do some hours of work.

Steam being a massive, uncontrolled monopoly can pay these resulting breadcrumb legal fines like it’s nothing but seeing their zealous behavior to try and avoid doing so, tooting legal defense tactics like “Oh we didn’t actually do business in the place we were selling games” is nothing short of laughable and raises some serious questions in regards to their collective mental health..

At least Valve is taking some of that Billions of Steam dollars and giving their lawyers financial incentives & bonuses for partaking in and winning lawsuits. Carrot is better than the stick, right?

A few weeks following new year, Valve thought it would be a great idea to mainstream and fully integrate an extremely controversial and downright dangerous anti-cheat software into Steamworks. 

The only other case of it being used?.. A single game called Doom Eternal that got such massive backlash, the developers were forced to immediately remove the kernel-level virus software days later amidst it also being widely observed behaving & looking like a rootkit malware by multiple anti-virus applications.

What was so bad about it?.. Well, much akin to it’s cancerous DRM cousin, it was observed wrecking performance, causing blue screens of death, crashing the game, failing to shut itself down as promised by the creators, locking you out from launching the game completely, causing massive stutters and in general just being a HUGE security risk as can be seen by Sony using this exact method for their kernel-level DRM back in 2005, causing a massive scandal.

July 15, Valve came out with a semi-unexpected announcement of releasing yet another hardware device called

The Steam Deck.

It was immediately met with a mixed response due to it having a plethora of serious issues, including:

  • Underpowered CPU. Equivalent to Ryzen 3 3k series budget PC processors – Significantly old games from 2019 recommend at least having a Ryzen 5.
  • Underpowered GPU. While better than the CPU, it is still weaker than the ones found in other consoles, such as the PS5 or Xbox S series.
  • Tiny storage. Base model costing 500$ only nets you 64 GB which is not even enough for 1-2 mediocre sized PC games. The 800$ model at 512GB is equivalent to a single 50-60$ SSD. This issue was made far more prolific due to the device MASSIVELY relying on huge shader caches.
  • Underwhelming battery. It’s duration is listed to be as little as 2 hours.. Worse than the Nintendo Switch at 2.5 hours while being twice the weight and 3-4 times the size. Like other Lithium batteries, it's performance also sharply degrades overtime.
  • Has a Linux-based operating system. Accounts for less than 0.9% of the user base on Steam and Linux Arch specifically (which the OS is based on) is 0.1%. Has catastrophic game compatibility issues to this day in 2023 despite them pouring money into a bonfire trying to tweak all games on Steam.
  • The screen suffers from serious IPS glow.
  • Unorthodox design. All physical buttons are placed on the very top of the device, requiring awkward gripping and incompatibility with individuals that have smaller hands.
  • The cooling fans are obnoxiously loud & whiny.
  • Travel restrictions. There are many games on Steam that have geological restrictions. Accessing these while travelling is a cause for your entire steam account to be banned. “Just change your country often” has recently been made impossible following new restrictions.

People who pointed this out on the Steam forums such as myself saw themselves getting banned with made-up reasons by official Valve employees.

Hope you don’t mind us banning devs from their own forum – 2022

It has now been 6 years since Gabe Newell made public promises to fix the absolute trainwreck that is Steam Support and it remains in an abysmal state, sporting a pathetic 1/5 stars and an F rating at the BBB with Valve customer support staff blatantly ignoring 95%+ all attempts of communication. “At least they don’t do this on Steam.” I hear some people arguing and sadly, they have implemented a system whereas if you are banned/muted for any reason, the one banning you is 100% anonymous. If it’s an invalid ban, you can SOMETIMES get it lifted (which can take days due to slow response times) if you contact Steam Support directly. Any questions to the banning itself and why the banners are completely unresponsive to you messaging them in the ban ticket system are never answered.

“Avoid the official forums.” Unfortunately, even that doesn’t keep you safe since after their 2019 UI update, Valve went out of their way to extend their administrative powers to cover the rest of the platform – including 100% private groups which they recently showed off by banning an indie developer from their own forum under fabricated false pretenses and later from the entirety of Steam.

“Are they at least doing something about all the asset flips like they promised in 2017?” Absolutely not. They’re doing the exact opposite.

Following up on this newfound aggression towards their customers, they recently decided to send out waves of legal threats and subsequently block any sort of third-party use of the Steam Workshop servers without warning or any announcement. Any and all links to workshop esque websites got immediately blacklisted and anyone trying to talk about it seem to get banned as well.

This may not seem like a big deal but once you realize that the Steam workshop is terrible in terms of functionality giving users & server owners no way to reject updating mods & game versions and no way of doing rollbacks or picking past versions to prevent instability/crashing/save corruptions.

The question is then: Why do this?

They are trying to do everything in their power to undermine their competitors such as GOG that relied on services like these and it's some absolutely disgusting behavior coming from a company that's been bragging about being pro-modding for decades.

Liked a review that we didn't like? Get banned. - 2023

 Nothing spells consumer confidence like banning thousands of people for voicing their opinions.

To further cut down on costs amidst having a 75% monopoly in the PC gaming market and 100% automating their store to avoid paying salaries, Valve announced that they will cut support for all operating systems under Windows 10. Their reasoning? Steam's unhealthy reliance on the Chrome browser, owned by Microsoft.. The same company Gabe Newell has been relentlessly criticizing for 10+ years.

 

What do you mean you don't want shitposts in the review section? - 2024

Back in 2015, Valve had the incredibly fucking bad idea to add a [Funny] button to reviews. Everyone begged them not to add this heinous shit for the consequences it would bring but they did it anyways. Why? No one knows.


Now a measly 9 years later alongside adding other bullshit censorship such as hiding """off-topic""" reviews, they finally got the hint that "Oh! People want to know if a game is good when they go to read reviews, not to browse through 30 pages of shitposting. Who would've thought?"


Concerningly, they are calling this a "new system" which is a blatant fucking lie as it's been around since 2018, taking the form of a silent tool that wipes negative reviews off the store page.

They already had serious issues with how reviews are actually handled before this. Namely, reviews who blatantly break the rules and get reported don't actually get any moderation action taken against them (unless it's extreme) due to Steam moderators being nepotistic, incompetent lazy dipshits.

With these new changes, you can now simply vote any given review funny and have it disappear off the store page. You can also report them to have any non-steam links get instantly censorshipped too.

Just be careful to not critique Valve directly when you aren't anonymous or they will engage in abuse of power and discriminatory moderation whenever they can.

Thank you for making the decision to stay informed on Valve. If you wish to support me writing reviews, curation and informative articles like this one, you can buy me a coffee here.