Some examples

• You need to pay a lot of lawyers on both sides
• You can get fired for not having kids, being young or not married
• People who are bad at their job are hard to lay off (this can include well payed managers)
• Companies find other creative ways to lay you off (if you charge your phone at work, you are stealing electricity)

Come to Germany and see for yourself :)

That‘s how it is in Germany. You can only get laid off without a negotiated severance package, when the employer is in financial trouble. Even then you need start laying people off the employer needs to do it according to the social contract (e.g. single mothers last). Both is really hard to proof (in court) so usually everyone gets a severance package anyway. This means when you hear about big layoffs in Germany usually all of them get a severance package or agree to something else. These layoffs are not comparable to the USA. This is the shortened and positive descriptions of the process, but of course there are also (justifiable) downsides of doing it this way.

I believe this is something to be aware of and if this is something you don’t want use GOG instead. But in reality as long as Steam exists you will be able to download and play your games. If Steam ceases to exists then you will not be able to download them, but there will be ways to still play them, if you previously downloaded them. It is not like “owning” movies on Amazon (or just recently on the Playstation Store), where you always need to stream the movies.

Valve, by a far stretch. Also they support their games for a long time. Sadly they don’t make as much games as they could, because of the money printing machine that is Steam.

Definitely check out OpenGOAL. It is the best version to play right now (even better than the remasters for PS3/4). It is basically a native port for Windows and Linux.

https://opengoal.dev

Half life 1 also! May be the graphics are a bit dated, but for that is the Black Mesa verdion