I think they may have remedied this eventually, but for a long time they were in violation of consumer law. They went a long time misleadingly displaying prices to Australians in USD despite having Australia-specific prices, and once they finally fixed that they still continued imposing international transaction fees on purchases.
I think they’ve mostly, if not completely, gotten rid of this recently, but they used to do some really gross exploitative psychological tactics during their sales. Then there’s the DRM inherent in the platform requiring you to run their client in order to play your game—yes, other platforms apart from GOG all do this too, but that’s the point: Steam is bad, but others are even worse. This becomes especially bad when you consider the risk of losing access to all your games just because Steam decides you should, or because you disagree with a changed terms of service.
Then there’s just the ways that it’s bad for the gaming industry. Steam acts as a monopsony as game developers are basically doomed to fail if they’re not on Steam. Steam’s strong emphasis on its regular sales cycle might appear good to consumers at first, but like the net neutrality violations in “unlimited bandwidth to [our partner website]” coming from your ISP, this creates a short-term benefit to consumers in exchange for causing longer-term harm.
Oh and also I’m salty about their recent in-game overlay redesign, and the fact that it took away the ability to “ctrl-f” to help me find the achievement I’m working on.
Oh yeah for sure. But it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is, what matters is that it’s bad for developers and consumers, and it’s a reason to want competitors to succeed, and to be frustrated that they’re not.
The developers can choose. Many games are “DRM” in scare quotes, it’s not that developers are enabling this but they’re hooking into features such as cloud saves or the workshop and to get them running outside of steam you need to provide a steam.dll with stubs for some functions so the game doesn’t get confused.
DRM, at least from a programmer’s perspective, only starts once you actually a) check for integrity of game files etc. and b) check for integrity of that integrity checking code. The bulk of steam games will throw some error when you try to run them outside of steam, but they’re not taking any measures to prevent you from making them think that steam is running.
From a developer’s perspective – honestly, I don’t care. If a game gets published on multiple stores I’d generally try and make all of them the exact same version so the game will check whether steam.dll is available, use it if it’s there, and not if it’s not. If it’s only published on steam I may blindly assume that steam.dll is there and error out if it’s not because I didn’t bother to make a version of the main menu that doesn’t have a “workshop” menu item.
I don’t really mind whether you pirate my game, unless you’re a millionaire that is at that point I will judge your character quite harshly. But I’m also not going to spend time and effort on making the game easier to pirate.
I think they may have remedied this eventually, but for a long time they were in violation of consumer law. They went a long time misleadingly displaying prices to Australians in USD despite having Australia-specific prices, and once they finally fixed that they still continued imposing international transaction fees on purchases.
I think they’ve mostly, if not completely, gotten rid of this recently, but they used to do some really gross exploitative psychological tactics during their sales. Then there’s the DRM inherent in the platform requiring you to run their client in order to play your game—yes, other platforms apart from GOG all do this too, but that’s the point: Steam is bad, but others are even worse. This becomes especially bad when you consider the risk of losing access to all your games just because Steam decides you should, or because you disagree with a changed terms of service.
Then there’s just the ways that it’s bad for the gaming industry. Steam acts as a monopsony as game developers are basically doomed to fail if they’re not on Steam. Steam’s strong emphasis on its regular sales cycle might appear good to consumers at first, but like the net neutrality violations in “unlimited bandwidth to [our partner website]” coming from your ISP, this creates a short-term benefit to consumers in exchange for causing longer-term harm.
Oh and also I’m salty about their recent in-game overlay redesign, and the fact that it took away the ability to “ctrl-f” to help me find the achievement I’m working on.
Removed by mod
Oh yeah for sure. But it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is, what matters is that it’s bad for developers and consumers, and it’s a reason to want competitors to succeed, and to be frustrated that they’re not.
Just asking out of genuine curiosity, what do you mean by steam DRM being opt-in?
The developers can choose. Many games are “DRM” in scare quotes, it’s not that developers are enabling this but they’re hooking into features such as cloud saves or the workshop and to get them running outside of steam you need to provide a
steam.dllwith stubs for some functions so the game doesn’t get confused.DRM, at least from a programmer’s perspective, only starts once you actually a) check for integrity of game files etc. and b) check for integrity of that integrity checking code. The bulk of steam games will throw some error when you try to run them outside of steam, but they’re not taking any measures to prevent you from making them think that steam is running.
From a developer’s perspective – honestly, I don’t care. If a game gets published on multiple stores I’d generally try and make all of them the exact same version so the game will check whether steam.dll is available, use it if it’s there, and not if it’s not. If it’s only published on steam I may blindly assume that steam.dll is there and error out if it’s not because I didn’t bother to make a version of the main menu that doesn’t have a “workshop” menu item.
I don’t really mind whether you pirate my game, unless you’re a millionaire that is at that point I will judge your character quite harshly. But I’m also not going to spend time and effort on making the game easier to pirate.
They probably mean publishers can choose not to include DRM on Steam