CannibalCorpses said:
My heart says EA but my head says Valve because at some point they are going to turn and it will totally destroy everything the PC market has to offer.
Pure speculation based on nothing but a gut feeling? Yeah, that totally makes Valve evil.
Their cheap offers on games are generating a lot of cash but almost everyone i know who uses Steam has a large collection of games they will never play.
So let me get this straight; you know people buying more games than they can play and this means Valve is evil? Sounds more like friends with no self control, not to mention being completely anecdotal and having no relevance to the question asked by the OP.
I would also say that they are detracting from the creation of new games since they promote (through offers) much older games and probably make much better profit as a result.
This statement doesn't even make sense. First off, they don't just promote old games. They also frequently promote games which are releasing soon and pre-orders with things like pre-order discounts and bonuses.
Second, most games make the majority of their profit in the first 3 months. If you release a retail title, odds are your sales are negligible after that point as stores aren't really promoting those titles anymore, and prices rarely fall much after such a short time period. Valve promoting these older titles and giving them massive boosts in revenue which continue even after the promotion ends is giving those developers and publishers more money from older titles than they would otherwise get from any other distribution channel.
But these bumps in revenue from older titles are absolutely not going to allow you make more profit in that short sale period than you would from actually releasing a new title. You can't ride a wave of success on one game for a decade and make enough money from it to run a company without making more games. Even suggesting that helping companies squeeze a bit more profit out of older titles removes incentive to make new games might just be the most ludicrous thing I've heard on these forums recently, and demonstrates that you don't seem to understand even the basics of economics or running a business, and just kind of highlights how silly your entire post was.
They are an accident waiting to happen and as such much more damaging in my eyes than EA.
So an accident waiting to happen, based on perceived dangers which don't actually exist, is worse than a company which is, at this very moment, an accident in progress? Excuse me while I try to stop laughing long enough to fill out this capthca and hit post.
As to the topic question, a few years ago I honestly didn't think EA could take Activision's place at the top of the pile of anti-competitive, anti-consumer, idiotic douchebaggery, but I think they've managed it. Though I think I should be forgiven for not seeing it coming when just four years ago they were investing heavily in new IP's and seemed to be actively trying to not suck. Since then they've pretty much stopped that while Activision at least seems to have kept a muzzle on Bobby Kotick.