Yesterday I bought something on Steam for the first time in many years. (I have a large Steam library, but in recent years I’ve been getting games from gog and itch instead.)
Since I hadn’t bought from Steam in a long time I figured I should read the “Steam Subscriber agreement” that you have to click to accept when you buy something. Let me just say now, the agreement is a very very bad deal for customers.
It goes to great lengths to make it very clear that you don’t own anything. You aren’t buying anything, you have no essentially rights. You are simply paying for a license subscription to use software with various conditions. Valve is able to end your subscription with no refund if you break the agreement. And the best bit:
Furthermore, Valve may amend this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use) unilaterally at any time in its sole discretion.
So by using Steam we’re putting a lot of trust in Valve; because the ‘agreement’ basically says they can do whatever they want, any time they want, for any reason they want.
Steam is quite good. I particularly appreciate their Linux support. But they are clearly using their position of dominance to make people agree to unfavourable terms. At the moment, things are fine. But make no mistake - when you use Steam, Valve has all the power. They can screw people over whenever they choose to.
With all that in mind, buying DRM free is better if you want to still have access to the software when a company decides to change direction for whatever reason.
Doesn’t matter, Steam offers DRM free games. Steam DRM is opt-in and can be broken by anyone in seconds, and games with other DRM have a big glowing warning on their store page. You give money to Steam for their servers that support multiplayer, their workshop, seamless patching, user forums, image hosting, controller support, Proton for Linux, SteamDB, easy multiplayer via the friends interface, achievement tracking, and a large majority cut to the developers. Your complaints apply to basically every storefront, the only way you’ll own data is by having it on your own disk which Steam lets you do.
Depends on the game, sometimes you can just delete the steam dll next to the executable, others require a steam emulator which amounts to just dropping in a spoofed steam dll. I think the preferred emulator these days is Goldberg steam emu on gitlab.
It’s to keep people from doing stuff like requiring refunds or court cases for being banned, VAC or otherwise. To make some things not technically gambling, etc.
Valve is the paragon of gamers. They offer a great portal, free no bs family shares, pressure companies into sales on legacy software. Push VR from meme status (the oculus is even originally stolen valve tech look it up). Steam stream, steam controller, steam deck emulation of Nintendo switch, Jesus it’s endless.
And still there are people like you out here who have to lead with complaints about a bunch of text which everyone knows is exclusively for legal piss matches against companies and troublemakers.
I don’t know how you can be pleased by anything. Isn’t your life tiring living the life of a zealot? Or do you have just an unsatisfiable need to complain?
The company may be nice now and it’s okay to be happy with them, but that doesn’t mean you attack the personality of someone for pointing out factual information written in your beloved companies agreements.
I will never ever understand how a normal person can ever worship / love a corporation… It has to be some kind of mental illness.
Corporations DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU! Sooner or later they will fuck you unless you are constantly pushing back against them and keeping them on their toes. Relaxing, just becuase Steam is good right now, is not a option.
I don’t know how you can be pleased by anything. Isn’t your life tiring living the life of a zealot? Or do you have just an unsatisfiable need to complain?
wtf man. Did someone shit in your breakfast cereal or something?
You’re the one getting mad at steam for things they could “maybe” do in the future. Stop incepting yourself with fantasy and then posting about it. “Hey guys you won’t BELIEVE what’s in this EULA” “Did you know TECHNICALLY valve could just do whatever they want?!?”
From your post history you’re older, you know EULAs are so ignored across the board that they’re there for entirely legal reasons. Oh yeah a company that has done all this good, (for you especially, without valve it’s safe to say there would be ZERO Linux gaming support like there is now.) But we better be ready for something that’s just completely antithetical to their history of actions because of some creative writing episode you’ve dreamed up. Corporations are bad capitalism is bad, open software and Linux gaming only please. No rights, no AAA just indie titles and slow burn, artistically crafted projects of love.
You’re like the vegans of computer science you’re insufferable.
People probably felt the same way Unity’s relatively fair licensing terms, or D&D’s license. They’ve rolled back now, but it’s common for companies to push this sort of thing, roll back, and then slowly introduce the same thing.
The point is not to avoid Steam, but to keep an eye out for scummy moves because no entity operating for profit is immune to temptation. Be ready to abandon ship should the time come or you’ll be the one left holding the bag.
NoOoOoO. You’re not allowed to bad mouth Steam here. Everything steam does is amazing. Steam is nothing like those filthy console companies. Steam good guys. Steam forever friend
To be fair, if you would own it, they would have a very different legal framework to be working in. Would they be legally allowed to shut down their servers? Or would they have to run the company until bankruptcy, so maybe decades after steam stopped being profitable? Their product is a service based on. They want the service to be able to be ended. If you buy the games like you do on steam and you own them, can they end it?
Apparently you like to read. Open the EULA for basically any commercial software (not FOSS or open source, costs money, isn’t made by some small company, basically the same criteria as >90% of the games on Steam) and you are going to learn 2 things very quickly. First, all of them are just a license to use, and second, if there are patches or an online component you will have at least as many caveats and restrictions as what is included in the Steam TOS.
Now, I’m not saying you’re wrong or that I’m okay with this situation (I look for open source, free, then paid for all the software that lets me do whatever it is I’m trying to do), but the situation with Steam is very typical.
Terms like that matters more for some services than for others. For something like Spotify or Netflix, if they terminate the agreement it doesn’t matter much. You lose access, but there was no accumulated value. So you can just go somewhere with only minor inconvenience. Whereas on Steam, if they terminate the agreement then you could lose decades worth of accumulated games from your library - which could be very valuable. So that’s a big difference.
Now, it’s unlikely that Steam will just press delete on everyone’s account. But we can imagine a very profit-hungry leader taking over Steam and deciding to put the squeeze on their vast user-base. There are many things they could do; such as adding ads, requiring ‘consent’ to include spyware on your computer, or charging additional fees. Long term users would not be in a position to refuse these things, because their Steam library is being held as collateral.
If you trust that Steam is never going to give you up, and never going to let you down, etc. Then there is no problem. Things are currently going fine, and they may continue to be fine for a very long time. It’s just a matter of trust, and power, and hedging.
The thing here is, people will talk and if there are any serious issues, a lot of people, myself included, will have no moral objection to pirating the games they already paid for access to. And in some jurisdictions, it won’t even be illegal. Like with most enshittification situations, it isn’t going to be there one day and gone the next, so liberating your games won’t be overly difficult.
The big gotcha will be online multi-player games. If you don’t have a server, the client doesn’t matter.
Amazon has an audiobook monopoly and takes 87% cut of audible sales unless the author agrees to exclusively sell through audible. If you agree to exclusively sell through audible, Amazon only takes 79% cut of the sale. Officially they claim to take 75% and 60% cuts (for non-exclusive and exclusive), but they actually pay out considerably less than they promise.
That’s what a monopoly abusing it’s power to steal from creators looks like. Valve’s 30% is literally market standard, and is so much lower than they could get away with.
You know, when I worked in retail, the store would obviously buy up stock from suppliers for a price and then sell it for profit. I don’t know all the technical terms in English, but in order for the stores to actually make money at the end of the day we had a goal of reaching that exact amount of profit, 30% of the retail price. So how exactly is this different from retail stores? Sure, they don’t have to actually buy up stock, but the game companies don’t have to make physical copies either. It’s not like the game companies would make 100% of the money if they sold them elsewhere.
they would get really close to 100% as selling themselves would only have the cost of running a website. But on the other hand steam makes it easy for people to actually discover indie games so if an indie studio sold their game only on their own website will lose on a lot of potential customers.
I have listened to a ton of game developer talks over the years. Some of the old indie devs that have given talks basically all welcomed steam because it meant that they didn’t have to deal with all of the stuff that steam does themselves. Before people started buying games through steam, doing an acceptable level of DRM, distribution, payments, refunds, etc. was all hand-rolled, for each company.
You can still do that yourself. Why do people stick with steam with the supposedly onerous 30% cut? It’s because steam provides a valuable service. Now the people that build games don’t have to deal as much with the things that aren’t building games.
In my opinion, a platform like Steam was bound to emerge at some point. Let’s thank our fucking stars that the company that “won” is not beholden to any shareholder and is run by a gamer that understands what people who love video games needed.
If you think that the 30% cut is too high, there’s nothing stopping you from building all the infrastructure yourself. And there are plenty of companies that have done so, like Epic and, until recently, Sony.
But I would say unless you are a team building AAA games and making millions and millions a year, where the savings you can realize outweigh the cost of rolling your own infrastructure, steam is kind of a good deal.
Which is totally fair in the case of steam. They actually provide a valuable service in comparison to the app stores, both to users and publishers. You are free from publishing outside of steam.
So he’s going to stay in his position way past when he reasonably should because of pride and not take advice from his friends and family to step down so he could transfer power to a worthy successor?
Let’s not place all the blame on her Republicans were going to let Obama place anyone on the supreme Court. They rejected all his nominations. It was wait for Democrats to have full control or hang on cause Republicans wouldn’t let anyone but a Republican get nominated.
She was damned if she did damned if she didn’t. But cause see hanged on we all blamed her instead of rightful raging at McConnell
Republicans seem to throw their weight around all the time and never need this excuse. Dems have no teeth, they never have. They had 2 years of full control during Obama’s first term and couldn’t get anything done and let the GOP carve up Affordable Care just so they could take pretend it was bipartisan. The excuses just get old, I’ve been hearing them since they let bush steal the election
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