News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful. Parent comment

Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by maccard on Saturday April 15, 2023 @06:14AM (#35579202)
Steam itself is optional, it's up to a developer to require steam to be running. Steam does some things like make the default shortcuts launch Appa via steam, but honestly that's probably less confusing for the games that do enforce steam running. Without steam running, there's no access to any of the steam SDK features. Steam running also handled things like authentication, so games don't need to prompt for credentials.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by Wowfunhappy on Saturday April 15, 2023 @06:36AM (#35579331)
However, there's no reliable way for as a user to tell if Steam will be optional for a particular game. I've tried checking pcgamingwiki but it's not always right.

And it's usually not optional.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by maccard on Saturday April 15, 2023 @06:53AM (#35579412)
Ok but that's a very different problem to what you said about not being able to launch a game without launching steam.

> And it's usually not optional.

That's not Steam's fault.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by usrusr on Saturday April 15, 2023 @07:57AM (#35579788)
They might offer a small block of metadata indicating which parts of the API the change uses in its current incarnation. Would fit in nicely with the details about which platforms it can run on.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by Wowfunhappy on Saturday April 15, 2023 @10:25AM (#35580889)
Valve's own games can't be played without Steam. If Steam isn't running when you open Portal 2, Steam will be launched automatically. If you uninstall Steam, Portal 2 just won't start.

It would be one thing if Valve was setting an example that publishers were choosing to ignore, but that's not what's happening.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by JKCalhoun on Saturday April 15, 2023 @08:51AM (#35580192)
That's true. I call the Steam API when my game launches and it replies with whether the Steam app is running or not.

If the Steam client is not available you simply lose Steam's Input API (customizable controller support) in the game. As a developer I would avoid requiring the Steam client to be running. That's just bad for users.

[ Parent | on HN ]