It's Not a Cult If the Store Keeps Its Promises

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series and the Insert Coin gaming arc. GamesRadar ran a piece on Monday with a headline that's doing a lot of heavy lifting: Valve "played capitalism so well they broke it" and now Steam can never be replaced. The quote comes from Kiaran Ritchie, a former principal animation engineer at Epic, who spent the past week and a half arguing that Steam's 30% cut is a tax siphoned out of the industry, that you could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week, and — the part that got my attention — that the real problem is us. Steam users. Even if a better store showed up, he says, we wouldn't care. We actively root against competition. It's unfixable. It's just sad. When the replies piled up, his response was I made everyone big mad 😂. So that's the level of discourse we're working with. Tim Sweeney, naturally, jumped in to agree, adding that Valve has held gaming back for years by locking games into Steamworks' "social walled garden." This is the same Tim…

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