Buy European

It does.

Private companies are - often - not driven by pure greed. The people work hard for their company to be successful and they are much less likely to fuck it all over with a stupid move.

Public companies, however, are controlled by a bunch of money motivated monkeys that couldn't give a rats ass about a company's future. They'll bleed it all dry and go to the next company.

Third party key market places are kinda iffy, and there have been numerous cases of the keys being offered on there having been bought with stolen credit cards, or otherwise generated in ways that aren't quite above board.

I remember one interview with an indy dev in which they said they prefer people pirating, because chargebacks from stolen cards are actively costing them money.

For people who feel they need the entertainment games provide, but can't afford current prices, I feel pirating games from conglomerates, and buying from smaller studios and indies is the most socially responsible way to do it, but I'm not your mum.

Edit: Huh, looks like greenmangaming gets their keys directly from the publishers. Didn't know that was a thing. Guess I was a bit quick on the trigger there, should have checked first. Sorry about that.

isthereanydeal.com

No grey market key sellers, only legit.

Huge plus that they aren't publicly traded and forced to chase profits above all. Plus their employees are far and wide the best paid in the industry, and they never do mass lay offs.

I don't believe gog will ever have a full library. They require all their games to be DRM free. Until corporate gaming changes GOG won't.

Yep, if you want a reason why Valve are "less evil" than other companies, one big thing to point to is the huge investment they've made into the Linux ecosystem. Even though it's in their own interests (Microsoft locking out steam would cripple their income), we can see with Epic suing Google/Apple that there are other, shittier ways that they could have attempted the same thing. The investment they've made into Linux, Proton, KDE etc benefit everyone and can't be taken away on a whim.

I realised that those who censor themselves on the Internet, grew up on the Internet when YouTube started demonitising profanities and thus picked up the habit.

We are getting old.

Looks like it was baked into the image template they used

i mean, out of all things a company can do that are bad, underage gambling is probably one of the better ones, and the argument in favor of it is that it's on games like csgo and cs2, where the age range is obviously higher than an actual child.

Realistically, i think you have to be kind of stupid to get caught in gambling, but it is also definitely predatory, and there's a reason it's a heavily regulated industry. There's definitely a better solution than we currently have, but it's not as bad as it could be either.

Most important of all they compensate their employees like they are actual humans.

I dont think a single more based company has ever existed.

Hyperbole much? I like Steam as much as the next guy but lets not pretend the guy that owns 6 yachts is a good person just because he's better than the next worst. Steam DRMs the shit out of games sold on their platform and if you're an indie dev that wants to sell your game Steam is THE place to do it.

Steam made $10bn last year, they have about 100 employees (their parent company Valve has about 400). I used to be a bigger fan of GabeN but more recently really started considering him and looking into it and realized he's just another unethical billionaire. This video by Coffeezilla is a good jumping off point. regarding the intentional targeting of youth with addictive gambling mechanics in loot crates and circumventing gambling laws. It's all very purposeful and continues to this day.

Both things are currently true, they are a monopoly which is not good, but they are also acting nicely for the most part and not fucking people over despite their position

On the other hand, Valve wishing to seek an alternative to Microsoft's poor decision^[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)#cite_note-cvg_newell_linux-2%3A%7E%3Atext=upon+the+release+of+Windows+8+in+2012] making has been a great boon to the Linux community. Valve was also there at the start of Vulkan^[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan#History]. But is "funny" that Gabe Newell started off as a Microsoft employee, in fact the one that led the team that ported Doom to Windows with Doom95 and in turn also helped launch Windows (95) as the gaming OS for decades to come.

As much as I distrust and hate corporations, Valve isn't in it for the shareholders, you can't buy Valve stocks and that means they at least have a bit more soul than a lot of other corporations - even though they are profit seeking.

What I don't like about them is how they sell you a service, not an actual game. You technically buy a lifelong lease on each game, never ownership. Your shit can be gone in minutes with nothing to prove for it, except for bank statements saying Valve took your money.

Which is why I'll always buy on GOG^[https://www.gog.com/en/about_gog] if possible. DRM free and European.