They’re a monopoly because they’re the best in town and it isn’t close. Steam has a(n easily circumventable and long, long-beaten) DRM available, but it’s hardly the selling point of the platform nor a requirement. Steam provides automatic game updates, social and community help features, a built-in mod uploader/downloader, image hosting and a screenshot button, cloud saves, excellent network implementation (holy shit I do not miss the days of trying to get Gamespy and GFWL to let me connect to my friends), the Community Market and cross-game trading, built-in control remapping support, Twitch-style drops and giveaways from livestreams, recommendation features like Discovery Queue to find new and interesting titles, a community reviews and tags system that while imperfect is definitely the best I’ve seen thus far, an in-game overlay that has semi-recently gained some excellent features like game recording and the ability to pin a clock or notepad on top of the game, and one of the most recent updates reworked family sharing so that any five accounts can basically just merge their libraries and all play each other’s games at the same time, an extremely convenient feature that far and away beats out consoles’ digital sharing or traditional “pass the disc” borrowing.

Additionally, huge proponents of non-Windows gaming. Initially trying to do Mac ports, but moving onto perpetually pushing Linux as Apple continued to not care about gaming at all until like five minutes ago when they started paying Capcom and Ubisoft for ports.

Quality of life gameplay changes ≠ cosmetic changes.

People generally want to play videogames that look interesting.

40-45.

There are a lot of games at 30 I’ve played through just fine, but for FPS games that extra 10-15 is about my minimum unless it’s on console with aim assist. I grew up playing Saints Row 2 at single-digit framerates, but I just can’t do that anymore.

Divinity: Original Sin

Also “a bit too long and some noticeable jank” but damn if I don’t get really into it sometimes. Had to switch to the easier difficulty after something like 25 hours of playtime because I’m not very experienced in these types of RPGs but it’s okay because there’s still some challenge there, just not enough to really actually worry.

Great way to lose all of the traffic. This would require two things:

1. Accounts, which is automatic friction. Whether that’s people who have no account and only come to browse, whether that’s people having to make a second account or choose to be horny on main, this is definitely going to cause some user loss.
2. Willingness to pay reddit for porn, which like, no. They’d be better off giving paid user pages and simply taking a cut so OnlyFans creators can treat reddit similarly. I don’t think many people are gonna want to pay for what amounts to teasers for other paid options.

Additionally, this would mean reddit is acknowledging the porn on their site and taking responsibility for it by profiting off of it. Therefore, because reddit is an American company, this will kill off their audience in Texas and Oklahoma where, effectively, American-hosted porn websites are banned.