Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful

Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by seanhunter on Saturday April 15, 2023 @06:31AM (#35579307)

Very much untrue. Steam even makes it pretty easy to start a game without starting steam.

1. Install the game through steam the normal way

2. in your steam client, go to the game, hit the cog icon

3. go to "properties" -> "local files" -> "browse". This will open a file picker in the location it has installed the game.

4. Make a note of this location then close the picker

5. Go to "general" and see if there is anything under "launch options".

6. You're all set. If you want to shut your steam client down you can still run the game directly by using the path you saw in the file picker at step 4 and (optionally) passing the launch options from step 5

(I know this because I'm currently running "Song of Syx" directly using this option because it's an early access game and is broken when launching via steam for some reason).

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Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by Wowfunhappy on Saturday April 15, 2023 @06:34AM (#35579325)

This only works for a tiny numbers of games if the Steam client is not installed.

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Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by seanhunter on Saturday April 15, 2023 @06:41AM (#35579354)

Way to move the goalposts buddy. The post said "without starting steam" so I replied with how you can do that, not how you can run games without the steam client installed at all. That said if you don't like steam just don't use it. I don't see what would be the point in installing steam, buying games using it and then trying to play them with it uninstalled. At that point you would already have paid valve and literally only be hurting yourself.

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Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by Wowfunhappy on Saturday April 15, 2023 @07:12AM (#35579518)

The problem is that most games are only available on Steam.

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Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by arka2147483647 on Saturday April 15, 2023 @07:43AM (#35579711)

Most steam games use the steam api, and do something along the lines of: If steam not running, show error popup.

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Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by jeroenhd on Saturday April 15, 2023 @10:18AM (#35580837)

Often with good reason, the Steam API provides some very nice APIs (cloud saves, mods, controller input mapping, multiplayer sessions, etc.) that can be assumed to be available if you're only selling your game through Steam anyway.

You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though. All you need to do is build (or download, if you've for faith in your antivirus software) a few DLLs and drop them into the game folder: https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

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Re:Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negat... by Wowfunhappy on Saturday April 15, 2023 @10:20AM (#35580853)

> You can use common Steam piracy tools to work around this problem, though.

I have actually tried to use these on purchased games. They sometimes work, they sometimes obviously don't work, and they sometimes appear to work and then cause weird bugs far into the game.

Somehow when I buy games on GOG I never have to worry about this.

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