That post is pure hysteria. First no one knows when Gabe is going to die, and even if he live very long he may step down due to old age still.
- also worrying so much about something that may happen 14 years later according to op is unnecessary and distorted thinking.
- why assume there is going to be a power vacuum? can’t he and his leadership make pans of succession?
- then believing a whole made-up story going down the rabbit hole of the worst case scenario is again unnecessary and distorted thinking. Is okay to think of worst case scenarios but to take them as if they were real is gifting ourselves anxiety for free.
- in any case, the mental exercise of thinking of some undesirable possibilities allow us to take precautions and prepare to the extend that is appropriate and reachable. Which would be the most efficient behavior that thwarts “actual fear” as OP writes it.
Anyone who thinks their steam libraries will be safe forever is delusional.
Eventually a for-profit motivated individual will gain control and they will use all their MBA learnings to maximize subscriptions, per play revenue, per download revenue and overall provide a cheaper platform.
There isn’t an mba on the planet that doesn’t recognize that advertising is highly lucrative and being the company that sells the most pc games means you have metrics no one else has. They’ll instantly monetize advertising and the popups we get when we log in today will turn into mandatory non-skippable ads on the free tier to start a game, and they’ll add their wrapper on top of games in their store, especially games that do not currently need steam to play today.
It’ll only get way worse. Expect everything to be pay to play… once gaben is gone. They have a monopoly and any leader would think they are too big to fail. No one can just take their games elsewhere… we’re locked in. We’re committed. We can’t escape. They’ve got us by the balls.
Proton is open source. Anyone can pull it together and integrate it. Gog have been doing DRM free games for a while, they’ll be quite keen to fill this niche. Epic probably won’t care. If none do, someone will want to.
Gabe is helping, sure, but he isn’t holding up gaming. People were gaming on Linux before Proton even existed, myself included. Also, even if Valve went away completely, Proton is open-source and there are people like GloriousEggroll who work on Proton entirely as a community member. Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source. All the progress made on Proton won’t suddenly disappear, all the games that were previously playable on Proton will still be playable on Proton.
It’s a somewhat reasonable fear but it’s not a realistic fear. Proton isn’t going anywhere.
Additionally, if Steam would start to morph into what is posted here, it would simply be integrated into Heroic and / or lutris just as Epic is right now. There would be no need to actually launch steam anymore but just use it as a background service to pipe your games into something else.
Obviously his death will trigger a worldwide AR Easter egg hunt, where the Steam user worthy enough to find the three keys first will become the new Gaben and Master Of Steam.
