Steam is a ticking time bomb

Epic Games has been clear about seeing Steam as a direct competitor, and has done everything from giving away free games to paying for timed exclusives to entice players.

Yup, that's everything. Those are their only options. Yup. Nothing else to be done. It's an unsolvable problem if those things don't work.

This is supposed to be how competition in the marketplace works

In case the above sarcasm wasn't clear, no, this is not how competition in the marketplace is supposed to work.

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company's efforts on Mac.

This is an example of Apple making life difficult for its customers, not Valve.

There's no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.

There is, because Apple wanted to control their entire hardware pipeline, which meant breaking compatibility with the entire history of PC gaming when they did so. If this is your smoking gun, author, try harder.

Eventually, the bomb will go off, and the full 'enshittification' of Steam will commence.

I hate this enshittification term so much, because all it means is that they got complacent, and competitors can pick up the slack. You just spend your money elsewhere, whether it's Xbox vs. PlayStation or Steam vs. GOG. It is a problem that Steam has so much control of the marketplace, but they got there because their competitors aren't truly competing. I finally found a reason to shop on GOG again, despite the fact that they don't support their Linux customers as well as their Windows customers, and definitely not as well as Valve treats them, but DRM-free is a compelling argument for me. Epic does not make a compelling argument for the consumer, which is why that meme, pasted in the middle of the article, exists.

There's a difference between Valve deciding to not make Mac games anymore and Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs. The former only affects people who want to play Valve games, the latter affects a lot more people.
- Is it perhaps a slow, laggy mess because Apple decided to break from the same convention that everyone else uses and has used for decades and now has to emulate a different processor architecture? Apple is the one who made gaming shittier on Macs, and they're going to point to Death Stranding and Resident Evil 4, expecting the flood gates to be open, and now everyone's going to port their games to Mac. Except they're not. Apple won't understand why not, but once again, as they've always done, breaking from convention and establishing your own standard that doesn't play nice with what everyone else is building around is bad for developers. Before this, they were still making developers' lives harder by not supporting certain graphics APIs. Valve made a Vulkan translation layer to Apple's Metal, since Apple wouldn't officially allow for Vulkan, and that was shortly before the architecture change.
- Your argument's logical fallacies are as transparent as the author's... That's uncanny.
- Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs.
  What happened to the Apple fanboys who claimed that the Apple M processors were so fast, x86 applications emulated on Apple M would run much faster than natively on x86 because x86 is supposedly so bad and slow...?
- Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs.
  Apple decided Macs are for playing iPhone games on bigger screens.

This article is essentially written by an Epic fan boy that’s “hoping” Steam will eventually succumb to capitalism and commence the enshittification that is happening elsewhere.

Plot twist! OP is actually the "author", Corbin Davenport. 😱🤫
(Judging by their replies here, you're 100% spot on.)
If anything, it's Epic that will succumb to capitalism because they've been failing to innovate on their platform since the beginning. EGS is still a glorified game launcher without any platform features. Where's the equivalent to Steam Input, Remote Play and Remote Play Together, Family Sharing, Chat, Discussion Boards, Proton, Steam Deck, etc.?
Maybe spend some of that Fortnite money on your platform instead of buying up exclusives...
All of OP posts coincide with that blog. Another user for the blacklist.
- Are there rules here regarding self-promotion? Seems like OP is just posting his content.
I don't think the author is an Epic fan per se. The Epic argument appears to be a distraction from their main point, which appears to be their dissatisfaction with Valve's support of Steam on Mac. As an example, even though Epic game store ( by a quick google search) seems to support Mac, they make no mention as to why they didn't exercise consumer choice and simply use Epic game store for their Mac gaming needs.
- I agree with your basic assessment.
  As a mac user I’d love to see more mac games. I think it’s a relatively underutilized platform. Im not a game developer but it seems like one of the main issues of game development is the complete mishmash of supported hardware and different components and trying to optimize and support all of them. In that respect, macs seem more like consoles in their limited number of configurations and hardware variance so optimizations SHOULD be easier. Or at the very least not as complex. But macs are expensive and there is not a lot of overlap between gamers and mac. So therefore not a lot of mac games. It was easier when you could bootcamp and also play games on windows but that’s not really possible anymore.
I mean, it will. Such is the fate of platforms.
After Gabe retires what’s going to happen with Valve?

I skimmed the article but I'm still not sure what the "bomb" is supposed to be.

Just clickbait posted by a user with same name as the author/site owner.

I haven't had much sleep today so maybe its just me, but I'm a bit confused here:

Valve isn't obligated to continue supporting all its games and software features on Mac, especially when Apple's reluctance to natively support Vulkan and other cross-platform technologies makes game development more complex.

Then the next sentence:

There's no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.

As others have mentioned, Apple was the one who chose to abandon x86 and go with ARM - and anyways are there any games that are on Steam that actually are ARM native? You would still end up having to launch a game that is x86 as far as I understand correctly (I haven't used a Mac since the Apple Silicon transition)?

are there any games that are on Steam that actually are ARM native
Yes. Not a game in this case but still from Steam:
Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/Krita/krita.app/Contents/MacOS/krita: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64] [arm64]
The Steam launcher's architecture is irrelevant to the games and applications on the Steam store.
Porting games to run on ARM is apparently a pain so a lot of devs aren't doing it. Instead they just use some kind of translation program so that ARM can understand x86 instructions rather than recoding the game to support it directly. Resulting in inferior performance but at least it does sort of work which is better than it was before.
I would not be surprised at all if Steam did something very similar.

Although I disagree with some of the points (which have been mentioned in other comments), I do wish Steam had less of a monopoly. That's not to say I blame Valve, I just think there is a lack of good competitors and people willing to budge. Epic launcher is just a joke. I only use it for the free games, which is why I assume they are giving away the games for free in the first place. Not enough people use GOG. Thankful to Valve for making proton, Linux gaming would be a lot worse than it is if it weren't for proton. But damn, make a 64 bit client already, I have to use the multilib repo because it is the only 32 bit application on my system XD. EDIT: not to mention the terrible performance on some older systems.

I saw this posted a couple days ago which pretty succinctly summarizes the current state of the market.
That said, worth noting that these launchers and complex storefronts aren't really needed either, which is part of why I don't have an issue with Steam. If you have a good game, you can just sell it on your own website like Minecraft, League of Legends, or Tarkov. Steam's biggest (or at least most universal) utility for developers is just that it provides very cheap, very effective marketing.
- Yes. The problem is that a lot of devs release their games primarily for steam, or the dreaded Microsoft Store.
Insofar as your point is a call to action for Steam's competitors to do better with their own services, I completely agree with you. Epic & OP are whiny bitches with half-assed output that expect to be taken seriously without putting in the work. 🤌🏽
- Exactly.
You could try the Flatpak version. At least your OS will be clean, and the only 32-bits parts will be inside the flatpak runtimes.
- True, although correct me if I'm wrong, people have issues with the flatpak version? I apologise if I'm talking out my ass, I couldn't tell you what these "problems" are. It may just be a baseless claim. XD

I've kind of drifted away from Steam around the Greenlight/Direct debacle, when it quickly went from too tightly curated to an unexplorable paradise for thousands of fake games. Steam is not the inescapable monopoly this weird editorial makes it to be.

Nowadays, I need a good reason to buy on Steam, like decent workshop integration. And even then, I don't even have to buy on Steam to have that. I bought Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress DRM-free from Ludeon's site and itch.io and that included Steam key activations too.

Centralised library may have been an argument once, but it has not been for a long time. Stuff like Playnite obfuscates all that launcher explosion crap.

Also, every game launcher on Windows still puts games in the start menu.
- Honestly, it's been a very long time since I last used start/windows menu as a... menu I guess. I don't think I've tried to explore it since early XP. Back then I'd even try to organise it a bit by categories and such.
  Now I have way too many games to make it readable, with a lot of these not currently installed but available. The only way I'm using the windows menu is with the search bar.
  Having a dedicated game library (with everything in it) makes sense to me.

When I block OP and his trash articles from my feed, it'll be his fault for not going out of his way to deliver content to me anyway. And when I block his next attempt too, it just means he's being anti-consumer in not catering to me anyway.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but enshitification seems like a problem entirely contained to publicly traded companies. Valve is a privately owned company and doesn't need to grow, thus they can just enjoy the millions if not billions of dollar revenue.

I'm a bit concerned what happens when Gabe Newell dies
Nothing stops a private company from becoming shitty. They still enjoy profit. Valve isn't your friend, despite whatever image they try to project.
Approaching this from a developer point of view, let's talk about how Valve has changed and what they do.
Many people will point to how Steam removed Greenlight and made it easy for indie developer to just put out whatever they wanted. The problem is Valve tends to treat indie developers like the dirt on their shoe and let well known devs skate on their requirements and policies. A lot of people don't know that one of Valve's requirements for screenshots is that they be of actual gameplay. I can't count the number of store pages I've seen for unreleased games from well known studios that contain screenshots, or are entirely made up of screenshots, that clearly aren't gameplay. Things that are either cinematic shots, or simply from angles that wouldn't allow any gameplay at all, etc.
Meanwhile indie devs get their pages and games rejected for absolutely trivial reasons. A couple of great things I can highlight is them rejecting some library assets because 'the UI can be seen'. The library assets were generated from screenshots using Unreal's Hires screenshot tool. It's incapable of capturing the UI. That's kind of its thing. Another rejection came from them saying 'You claimed the game has full gamepad support, but when we tried it in local multiplayer the first player had to use the keyboard and mouse while the second player used a gamepad'. I sent them back a screenshot of the start button which had a checkbox beside it which said: "First player uses keyboard and mouse", because I wanted people to be able to play local multiplayer even if they only had a single gamepad. I could give a dozen more examples of absolute nonsense from Steam support in getting that game released, but it was was all of that type. Their support is inconsistent and abysmal.
Most recently trying to get taxes figured out with them because I moved from one country to another. I went back and forth with them went through a bunch of steps only to be finally told 'oh we can't actually update your account fully to the new country, you'll have to make a new account for the new country with the new business information'. So I did that, but oh.. the only way to do that was to buy an app credit. And I'd already bought the app credit on the original account because it was supposed to work. Took 2 more days of back and forth before they'd let me transfer that to the other account.
Steams in-game purchase support is laughable. Yes they technically have it. But as a developer, it makes no sense to use it. They take 30% to do nothing more than maintain a transaction record. You still need to keep a server on your own that matches that transaction to unlocked content the user has. Looking at that, we questioned why even use Steam for that? We now have a system set up on our own website where players can purchase things, we use a payment processor that only costs like 3%, and now players have a completely portable DLC account. When we release on other platforms later, players can just use the same content they've already bought.
From a consumer point of view. There are things they do, that I don't particularly like. The trashy meme 'curators' they tried to shove down our throat for the longest time. Trying to label any concentrated negative reviews a 'review bomb' regardless of whether or not it was related to legitimate criticism of the game, the march towards mediocrity with the sales.
But they gave us refunds! Only because it started as a legal issue in one place and it was just easier for them to just roll that out worldwide with the absolute bare minimum of effort.
There is no way you could look at the state of Valve sales in the early 2010s, compare them to now and think that they haven't gotten shittier. They used to be an event. The flash sales kept people coming back all the time, they had things going on on the website, the scavenger hunts, the mini games, etc. But they can't have refunds and flash sales at the same time! Sure they can. You're entitled to a refund. There is no law requiring they sell you a game over and over again. Absolutely nothing prevents them from saying 'If you refund a game during this sale, you can't buy it again until the sale is over'.
People were engaged. now the Steam sale is just 'meh'. This hurts developers as well. Especially smaller developers. People flood the website the first hour of the sale, check what's on sale, and then put the sale out of their mind for the next 2 weeks until its over. Because it never changes. Smaller devs greatly benefited from the high engagement and the 'event' of the sale. Users kept coming back. The more they come back the greater the chance there was that some of them might come across your game.
- You're right, nothing stops them from becoming shitty. However, unlike public companies, a private company isn't encouraged to prioritize short term profit over long term profit. Doing something blatantly stupid to bolster your short term profit only makes sense for your shareholders or if you want to extract as much money before jumping ship - neither should happen anytime soon with steam.
  Your pain points from the developer side all seems valid, and they should absolutely be improved. They probably treat unknown indie devs like dirt because for every good game they get thousands of submissions with blatant lies in them. E.g. your typical asset flips. Of course, that's no excuse, but at least I can kinda get where that could be coming from. Have you experienced the old system? I simply cannot tell whether they have truly become worse for indie devs or just traded some problems for others.
  Regarding the sales, I have mixed feelings. Sales were a lot more exciting, that's just true. However, because of flash sales, I mostly never bought anything but those, at least until the very end of the sale. While it is boring in comparison, as a consumer, I also quite enjoy the ability to only check the sale once, get what I want, and be done with it. Seems way more convenient.

I see we have a contrarian in our midst.

Oof, what a shit take.

Which take? The headline that barely has anything to do with the title or the venting about the poor Steam support of Mac that OP eventually gets to?
Oh who am I kidding, they're both shit takes.