I dislike Valve more and more with every day

I totally agreed with you, OP. My largest concern is how incompetent Steam support is and the half-functioning broken Steam market & badge interface. Valve is multi-billion company and does not even care about enhancing their platform! This fact wary me.

At least Steam has a very good support. xD

GOG

Go to GOG, they deserve it

These arguments aren't well backed up by anything, at least not all, but it's weird to see how many people are willing to defend Steam without a reason, listing and denying every point in the main post.
Offering your blind trust is never a good idea...

The language you use and the "kys" at the end makes any argument you might make invalid. But then again I have you blacklisted for a reason, that's just the kind of person you are.

Totally agreed, Gaben is a piece of fat shit earning money he doesn't deserve.

I love how it took a decade and a half for people to start realising this. It seems I am like one of the three people on the entire planet who still remembers what Steam originally was: the absolute fucking worst DRM ever designed by anyone, making Tagés or Denuvo look like mild inconveniences.

Steam revolutionised the video game distribution system and for a short while, it managed to build itself to be a credible store with a notoriously buggy and broken client. That was almost a decade ago by now, but just like how people cannot get the notion of using WinRAR as an archive manager out of their collective heads despite it being outdated before the turn of this decade, many also refuse to look at Steam differently than they did 10 years ago.

Still, the problem is not that, but that Steam is a monopoly, and like all monopolies, it simply does not give a fuck. They can just use a few programmers to use algorithms on the entire Steam system for everything and even though there are mountains of evidence that it does not work, people do not have an alternative. Some even convinced themselves that this is how it always was and should nothing be done about it.

Oh, and many people like to skim over an important fact: Valve was the one who popularised and spread the idea of loot boxes and in-game gambling for real money. The same shit everyone wanted to burn down EA for? They not only let Activision do the same thing with only a few grumbles, but they are actually grateful for Valve for making it up and keep doing it.

(Also, frankly, I think they were never good game developers. Their only worthwhile game was Half-Life. And this is an opinion I had long before registering my current Steam account.)

View attached image.

Banning a lot of Linux users because of false assumptions?
Yes

dumbest statement I've seen in SG.

I'm always surprised when people get mad at companies and their rant includes "they only care about money".

Like that's a bad or shocking thing, they exist to make money, you shouldn't expect anything else. Every company provides goods or services to make money, Valve are no different and steam exists to provide a platform to make Valve money.

That being said in recent years they seem to have made more changes which pushes consumers away, like gift killing, flash sale killing, region locking, etc etc. I'm not mad though, it makes sense from a business standpoint just don't ever think that a huge company cares about you and you'll not suffer brand loyalty or be shocked when they squeeze your pocket. There will come a point when the tech is obsolete or they don't keep up and they'll offer the consumer more but I don't expect that soon.

Move platforms if you don't like it is pretty much your only choice. Tbh I've never found valve as bad as people make out but I can see the frustrations.

I want a poll with an option that says "I told you so a decade ago" 👀

Yeah, some things you said are true but some I disagree with, I don't mind steam and will continue using it. As you said, however, there are some things that definitely need to be fixed.

There's a reason I boycot their store...

If only more would do the same.

Stop creating giveaways if you dont want support valve.

Here's a list of what Valve updated in the Steam client. That doesn't include site and store algorithm changes.

So sure, your particular pet peeves might not have been fixed, but it's not like Valve isn't continually fixing and tweaking stuff.

I thought Valve where just too busy working on HL3. So disappointed, I haven't felt this sad since I found out Santa isn't real :/

Same with rockstar, activision, EA... It's the new era of the videogame industry!!!

When skins and 'online stuff' gives you more money than making games or optimizing your resources.... Well.

PS: im sleepy and just now realized what i wrote is full of typos, but im too sleepy to correct then. But its readable XD

The truth about Valve?
They were lucky - and mr Gabe didn't adapted as he should have.

Valve had pretentions to be the lead amongst cyber cafes and grow as a storefront, something it was slowly but steadily growing towards with ease and keeping it small (on their end- headquarters, workforce). They didn't scale everything to be big in preparation for flying high and wild.
Then all of sudden they(as we) realized - oh god, we're dominating the market.

Gabe then hired more and more and had to increase their assets quickly and he did made new plans and ambitions as a bigger shot...
...but the truth? They kept much of the same culture, mentality and so on. Gabe was and is a dev first before being a businesmen. Im sure he made plans and now have a bunch of people making projections and giiving advice but everything points and shows how Gabe favored taking it 'slow' - he only expands as needed. Is the actual size working, keeping it up? Then next year we go back to expand or not. This was jarringly obvious years ago as slowdowns, servers being offline and tons of bugs were so frequent.
Things only got slight better because he had to expand.

Couple that with how development of games were, developed and reached the actual point and it shows struggle and no huryy. Gabe and some there seem to have some ambitious ideas, as they pursue things that may result in nothing in a culture similar Google previously, but in Valve its even more strong- your team want to try something? Go for it. Its less about business plans and more about pursuing some next bing thing or really cool thing. Even their bigger business plans like steam box and such previously were odd in comparison to pretty much any other company - small shipping for start, no pushs... it was more 'testing the waters' then an actual launch like microsoft or sony would do.

What Gabe might have noticed/come to realize was that they were spending too much time, resources and headache trying to keep up making games while at the same time they were slacking behind. Their tech was slow to improve. It took too many years doing HL2 and TF2. The cash cows were making so much more for less in comparison to previous projects the decision was(thats clear btw) to take their time pursuing things like VR, wild projects and whatnot without deadlines, living off all the passive income they shifted towards to be able to slack off like that. Cards, virtual itens and the cuts from being the behemoth store front of pc world.

Gabe could expand and change things towards a better and bigger team focused on improving the business, the storefront and similar approachs - A Amazon approach. He could also expand the other way as a publisher and dev house, aquiring more teams and hurrying things up. The truth is doing both well isn't easy (if possible)- imagine all the hardships of piloting Amazon and EA at the same time as one whole thing. The alternative would be to hire like hell, branch, owning companies doing different things and then it would become the one thing that history shows Gabe don't want- to loose grasp, to let loose. Would a new HQ with a lead for game development still be Valve, with valve's quality? things like that.

As long as they can keep things runing and growing with what might be the barebones needed for it to work they will. That allows everyone not doing mundane routine jobs to tackle a number of projects and R&D- but frankly i doubt those are many.

And it doesn't seem like things will change. Who comes near competing with Valve?

Fuck their 15% transaction fees,
Fat Gaben is well-fed with Monopoly.

That KYS at the end of your post made me to move away from the thread, but then I realized that for some reason you're on my whitelist so I reconsidered and decided to write an answer.

There are definitely shortcomings with how Valve operates but as others pointed out, some of your answers to your questions are inaccurate or incomplete. They are working on games, including single player games. If you don't believe what Gabe said, you should search for artists working at Valve. The hiring requirement for some of them was "Expert knowledge in 3D Packages such as Maya or Houdini". These, (especially Houdini) are the top 3D programs, which I presume are not used for Dota and for skins and hats. Gabe stated several times they will only announce a game when it's ready to ship, so expect a close release date after something new announced. Now with the HTC Vive Pro news made public at CES, the resolution for VR games is upped, so closer to Valve standards and again, as others pointed out, they made public the news that they are working on multiple VR games. The Linux ban is confirmed to be inaccurate. As for Steam problems... when there are a record concurrent Steam users (over 18 millions), it's hard to be perfect and also to satisfy everyone, not that I'm defending them. As for making money as a company... check Wallister's answer and beside that you can't compare them with EA's practices (Star wars BF II and the canned single player game) or Warner forcing Monolith to intoxicate Shadow of War with loot boxes and... long list with greedy practices. Indeed Valve helped spreading the loot box craze, but until they infest a single player game like others did, there's no concern on my part and for online/multiplayer stuff actually there's request for that stuff. Quality control? I'm pretty sure it would be a total mess there without it, so there is quality control. True, can be better. Most of the fun stuff during the sales were taken out due to overwhelming abuse (multiple accounts for farming, etc). I'm not the biggest fan either, but far from hating.
Obviously there are things to be fixed or evolve, but it's not that bad as you make it to look.
So chill a little and enjoy other things, then have fun with the new Valve games released in 2018 :) (not talking about that card game)

Golden Times are over with Steam. Starting with region locks and not allowing cross-county trading (why is globalisation just for concerns like valve, but not for the customers?), followed by making money with this stupid leveling system, feels like kindergarden with this cards. This has nothing to do with gaming. All this EA (I mean early access, funny how this matches with another cancer in gaming industrie) Crap which flooded the Shop just to bring more money to valve by getting 66% fees for card sellings ( yep, thats right if you're selling a card for 0,01 price will be 0,03). And they make many users defending their practices (aka don't want another client, think about again you just borrow the licences from Steam, look at GOG). No possibility to sell my used games (why not, when I payed 60€, thats no problem with physical console games)

Finaly someone complained here bout them. everything you said, that doesnt even cover everything, is true and reletable. They are not who they once were.

There are a tonne of ways that Steam could and should improve.

However, when you say things like

Well fuck you then, Gaben.
I hate you.
You are nothing but a fat piece of shit enjoying undeserved money.
KYS.

you damage your whole argument. People look at the last paragraph and go "this guy clearly has a chip on his shoulder" and ignore what you have to say. Being abusive and telling people to "kill themselves" is no way to get your point across. It's a shame, because I'm sure many people agree with a lot of what you have mentioned, but no one wants to row in behind someone who talks like that.

Can't blame OP actually, but the point is there is no alternative for steam right now. Unless GoG will finally allow transfer whole my games library at once from steam to gog, then yeah i might move on. But in that case, as i said no alternative exist.

One of the latest bugs for me on steam : False notifications
Like it says that there is a new comment on someone's profile while actually the comment is on my own profile

I envy you people who have time or energy to be mad at a gaming platform.