Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.

Well, eventually.

When Steam was first released, the running joke was “steaming pile of shit”. It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of “always online” games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.

It’s not exactly unassailable now either. It’s my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.

It’s ahead of the rest but I think “good will, good prices and good features” might be an overly romantic take on “it’s where all my games already are”.

If I can still see the wealth than I can still see the blood.

Why is it acceptable to you that the wealth is handed down but ludicrous that the blood is handed down with it?

If someone became an overnight billionaire for murdering your children, how many generations of their kids driving around in Bugattis would it take for you to consider that fortune washed of its sins?

Apparently demanding a wealthy person part with wealth is more upsetting to some people than cutting off people’s hands to acquire it.

You ever heard the phrase “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”?

Well some people love being abusive pieces of shit.

Other people’s dead kids. They never think it will happen to their kids because they’re kept safe by daddy’s hero fantasies or robotic devotion to statistics.

Of course, it does happen to their kids.

Occasionally it happens to their kids because they indiscriminately arm the far-right, who then get upset nobody will give them hand jobs, so decide to indiscriminately fire in to crowds of people.

But mostly it happens because their children kill themselves with daddy’s guns, that they were probably taught at an early age how to load and fire because that’s what “responsible gun owners” crow about doing.

That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.

If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.

But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.

Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.

Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.

The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.