Steam got so much flak when it first came out because it supported DRM, facilitated the death of physical media, and was generally kind of clunky and buggy. However, looking back, I'm thankful. I think Gabe did truly care about gamers/gaming and was worried about Microsoft's growing interest in gaming. I think he knew that that the transition to digital distribution was inevitable and made it his mission to get a platform out there before Microsoft did, because they would ultimately create something that was not gamer friendly.

Perhaps this is all wishful thinking, but history has proven that Valve was perhaps the best steward we could have asked for in supporting the transition to online distribution. If we look at the alternatives be it Microsoft, Epic, or even GOG, no one has done it better. And, when tested, Valve continues to show they strive to do the right thing. For example look at returns. I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process. On top of this, when the policy doesn't work (e.g. games which are broken outside of the return window), Valve again does the right thing and creates exceptions.

steam was terrible when it came out

however it was still miles better than "Games for Windows Live", which was so bad I don't even try replaying the games that still require it

Just to clarify, Steam came out in 2003 and GFWL in 2007.

Initial Steam was a horrible horrible experience, it also didn't have a store, and it was mainly just something you had for Counter Strike. Now, CS was MASSIVE, it still is, but that was enough to get a whole lot of people experience Steam.

It didn't help the internet connection back then was, to put it mildly, shit for most people, so a constantly disconnecting program wasn't a shocking outcome in hindsight, remember, this is 2003-2004.

It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware?

And then things have changed. It's my go-to shop, and their contributions to the Linux ecosystem is much welcome. There's self interest, since operating a shop on Windows comes with inherent risks, but I don't see the same interest in other parties, so I'll take it over anything else today.

It's odd seeing Counterstrike because I haven't really done gaming (and certainly not FPS) since Counterstrike was a free mod to Half Life.

Wikipedia tells me that "window" of time was a year or two

It's crazy that it came out before the bulk of its professional players were born. It is truly a timeless game.

One nice thing about Steam (back then, maybe still now?) was after the mod status left.

One copy of the Half Life box set (with Blue Force, Opposing Forces, etc) could basically become as many copies as the whole thing.

I turned that one box set into several Steam accounts for my friends/I to share. Each 'mod' (turned game) basically granted a new Half Life license and cloned the derivatives

I still have my 6 (7?) digit ID from those days as my steamID. It got rolled into a larger one but still kept the old digits. Pretty cool of them.

You get a special badge now too. I waited a month or 2 from release to install Steam because I only cared about Half-Life 2 and that was the first game from Valve that required Steam. You didn't even get a CD in the box, just a Steam redemption code.

There was also a separate release of counterstrike called condition zero that included a single player campaign and a tweaked version of counterstrike multiplayer.

That was not included as part of that bundle.. but if you used the dedicated server tool to download the czero mod and copied it to your halflife folder you could play both the single player and multiplayer version on steam

This was how my brother played it. He was too dumb to know the difference because the box art literally looked like CS’s splash screen. CS != CZ but nevertheless, a steam account was a steam account, and technically CZ was HL so he downloaded CS off FilePlanet and was getting destroyed by me and my friends for weeks until he learned the strafe-run hack.

>It also felt unnecessary, you bought the game off Steam, Steam didn't let you buy anything and then anything not-made-by-valve, so why couldn't you just play CS directly, why did you have to install an additional app on your limited hardware?

My understanding was they were solving the update problem:

Back in the day, every CS update broke the community - not everyone updated at the same time, and if you update then you can only join a server that's updated. Most people don't update immediately, and servers want to only update when most users have updated, so as a result the servers don't update. But now users don't want to update because their favourite server hasn't updated yet.

This happens every time the CS devs ship a bugfix.

Solution: force updates. Servers now have no reason not to update. The community stays unified, updates aren't inherently socially painful. That's what Steam accomplished for CS.

And downloading patches often meant waiting in a queue at places like FilePlanet for an hour or two, then downloading it at a snails pace

Haha I totally forgot about that aspect of the Internet

Yep. That's essentially why "the cloud" became a thing.

And then manually applying them. If the game was old enough you might need to apply multiple patches, something you'd have to figure out. I definitely had mixed feelings about Steam at first, and my internet connection at the time was such I'd hoard some larger patches and didn't like the idea of re-downloading them on reinstall but there is no doubt now that where Valve was going with this was the future.

Oh god! Fileplanet. That also reminds me of "Download managers". They were literally apps that would search for the same file from multiple places so that it could try to part the download up and then combine the file at the end. It was like BitTorrent before BitTorrent.

I absolutely do not miss "download button roulette" on cnet or whatever site it was where it you had the joy of playing "which of these 3 banners saying 'DOWNLOAD NOW' is actually the download button and not a sketchy ad that will ruin your day"

I remember getting game patches from CDs that came with the game magazines.

At the expense of Valve exerting more control over what CS version that server admins and players run

This was it 100%. I lived through this and that was exactly why Steam continued to be used in our LAN groups. Even for LAN parties, it made it super easy for everyone to make sure they were on the same version of everything. Extending that to online play is the reason it persisted to this day.

Do you remember before Steam won, there was also Stardock. They're still around now because they make Galactic Civilizations, but back in the day, they were also one of the early innovators in having their own store launcher for distributing their and others' games.

I still use stardock fences on my windows pc.

I also... Fondly?... Recall the time everybody was excited to have Xmas or star trek themes desktop with windowblinds.... Funny how not just fashion changes, but even need for fashion - virtually nobody customizes their windows desktop anymore :)

I remember that. It was a really good store, the first of its kind IIRC. Every so often I think about what happened to the games I owned on there?

Oh child, Stardock was originally a windows shell… Dressing to be modded like your Winamp skins.

It's kinda funny that there's a company out there that does both game publishing and popular desktop utilities

Before steam won there was also _WON_, and I'm still grumpy about losing their nice UI ;).

This is giving me a flashback to the time when I was still on dialup (the off-campus dorm I lived at had a shitty shared cable connection that was often slower or less reliable than dialup) and spent about three days downloading Half Life 2 on launch.

It wasn't until a few weeks later that I realized I could take my laptop to campus, download it over their incredibly fast WiFi, and then transfer the files to my desktop that had a decent GPU.

It wasn’t just CS, Team Fortress had a huge player base. Natural-Selection as well. There were like 7 or 8 mods for HL1 that were “on-par” with the quality of HL1, which says something about Hammer Editor and the toolkit they had at the time. GTkRadiant is great but Hammer Editor (formerly WorldCraft) was excellent.

The popularity of the mods, CS included, is what drove Steam to become the store that it is.

I still maintain that GldSrc was the golden age of game modding.

We are, admittedly, in a pretty sweet spot right now with games running the genre gamut from Rimworld to Minecraft to Cities: Skylines to Starsector to the Bethesda RPGs having vibrant mod scenes but man, I have serious nostalgia for CS, NS, and DoD, oh and Tribes.

Tribes! The OG of “yeah, we’re gonna open source this”. Torque Engine was awesome.

It did feel unnecessary at the time, but I was obsessed with all things half-life so I was there mashing the refresh button the night when it launched. The launch itself was kind of a shit show, but IIRC it didn’t take more than a few months for everyone to realize that it was massively improved compared to the old ways of distribution.

It seems like any product named "X for Y" is terrible enterprise-y drivel. It means the project is part of some umbrella corp, which ofc means they can't possibly actually care about anything by profit, move slow, and are un-responsive.

I have heard nothing but good things about skype for business!

Hearing nothing was a pretty widespread feature of that product!

suppose no news is good news, I think I see the mouth moving but the picture froze.

> "Games for Windows Live", which was so bad I don't even try replaying the games that still require it

If it's even still possible to install/activate them. Whenever any of them became available on Steam I would rebuy them there just for the convenience.

I remember using Steam for the games library and using Xfire for the ingame chat features. At some point steam because the only survivor there.

Xfire is something that died a sad death. Used it to chat with many people I met playing Star Wars Galaxies and Empire at War - think it was actually bundled with that one.

The profile pages and screenshot uploads were fun too.

Another online community lost to the sands of time, alas.

Don't forget GameSpy. Many, many rounds of multiplayer C&C: Renegade played through that back in the day.

> steam was terrible when it came out

Do people really think this? I remember applying updates to CS before steam and it was awful. Steam streamlined that and gave us a much needed friends list. I never ever thought steam the application was a bad.

the friends list didn't work for 5 or so years and neither did the download limiter (not a big deal these days, but on dialup... yeah)

the UI was exceptionally slow and it took forever to do anything

this wasn't a meme for no reason: https://imgur.com/a/bpGpe0o

ha, im just forgetful. thank you.

I spent ages looking for that meme recently, thanks!

Internet and DRM back then were absolutely shit. So a company coming along and embracing DRM in a consumer friendly way during a time where DRM was rightfully a major topic of contention put a lot of negativity out there.

Few people then knew that it was way ahead of its time, and even fewer knew how much of a fight valve would be putting up against capitalist regimes trying to kill gaming.

Steam came out almost 5 years before GFWL.

Giving GFWL less excuse for being as bad as it was. They'd witnessed Steam's early problems, yet repeated them (and added more besides).

probably about the same time they managed to get the Friends service to work

The Steam client was always, and is still, a gigantic pile of shit. The massive CPU usage when idle, the crazy game start delays, it's all plain and obvious to anyone who installs it.

But for some reason people will insist on ignoring those problems, or instead compare it to some earlier experience with standalone games or some Microsoft pile of garbage, and will defend Steam in places like this.

Valve's Steam service is super nice for consumers (though developers get squeezed terribly), but the client is just horrible.

Odd. I have no issues with the client and it's miles better than any other client out there.

I wonder if it's going to become even more web based but it has also accomplished things like a sorta unified desktop/web/mobile experience and the steam deck. So there's that.

When I ran Windows 7, I was pretty fastidious about cpu consumption, and never observed Steam consuming more than 1-2 CPU percent on average assuming it was collapsed to the system tray and wasn't downloading game updates in the background.

I don't think there's any grand conspiracy like you make it out to be, perhaps you've had an outlier experience.

Wait, how do developers get squeezed? As a developer I need to know if I’m standing in quicksand.

Having access to so many gamers, at once, without me having to setup a storefront, and pci compliance, and credit card data, is actually good for me. If you live in part of the world where there isn’t a tax treaty with the United States, that’s not exactly Valves fault. Blame your government for the squeeze.

I disagree wholeheartedly here. The Steam client has its problems but it's not shit. I use Big Picture mode exclusively on my gaming PC that's hooked up to my TV and I never have problems with Steam unless some other garbage launcher (I'm looking at you, Ubisoft) crashes and doesn't return focus. That's it. Other than that, all my games stay updated, the client updates on restart, and I never have to mess with it. I'm not sure what more you can ask for.

It was shit for a very long time, but it's actually been improving, slowly but steadily, for years. It's honestly pretty good these days.

> I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process.

In general their policy very good, but it's not quite no questions asked—they're pretty strict about the 2 hour playtime limit, which is quite a short time to decide if a game will actually be fun. In many types of games by the time you get through the tutorial and have access to all the game mechanics you're already past the two hour mark, and they also can't tell the difference between actual play time and time in the menu while you're doing something else.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying it's a bad policy, there are obviously reasons for this. But it's not truly no questions asked.

IIRC, the refund window used to be longer, but was abused.

It still is abused for short indie games, with people buying them with the intention of speed-running through and refunding.

The refund policy is intended more for “crashed repeatedly”, “far too slow despite my machine matching the stated specs”, and “simply wouldn't run”, type problems, rather than not liking the game. There isn't much a service like Steam can do about that, that won't be abused, other than offer demos (enough for you to try out those core mechanics) which is really down to the game creators and out of their power. Other than that you just have to not be first in line, and wait for reviews from sources you trust.

Right, I get that. I've added a note to my comment above clarifying that I'm not critiquing the policy, just trying to clarify that "no questions asked" isn't a good characterization of it. It's a very good return policy for the industry and medium Steam operates in, but it has hard limits that are worth being aware of.

I wish more devs offered shareware/demo releases. Not doing so was unthinkable in the hardware hell of the 90s.

Too much shovelware on Steam these days, and the user has to pay retail price to even try it.

The frequency of the returns probably plays a part. Anecdotally, I've returned a couple of games over the 2h limit and they have refunded, no questions asked.

Was that 2 hours since purchase, or 2 hours play time?

The current limits are 14 days since-purchase as long as you've played the game for less than 2 hours.

Hours played. Can’t remember the purchase timeframe. Could of been the difference.

My only experience with hitting the limit was also the only time I've ever tried to return a game. I'm sure it mostly depends on the service rep handling your claim and how many bogus returns they've seen so far that day.

It is quite literally no questions asked. It isn’t meant to be a demo system which is what you seem to want.

No, there's a single question asked: how long have you had the game open on your computer?

Costco has a no-questions-asked return policy, and demo-ing your purchase is absolutely part of the expectation for how people will use said policy. Steam even explicitly includes "it wasn't fun" as a valid return option, as long as you reached that conclusion quickly enough.

To be clear, I'm not saying the policy is wrong, it's clearly designed to prevent abuse, I'm just saying that it's not no-questions-asked.

People have returns returns from Costco denied and have their memberships cancelled for abusing the system.

https://bestlifeonline.com/costcos-return-policy-membership-...

You sound like the type of person who has a problem with Dropbox offering unlimited storage and then reneging when people upload 17 petabytes of anime.

Yeah I always considered something used to make sure the game will run correctly on my system and I feel like 2 hours is generous enough for that use case. I suppose it doesn't preclude game breaking bugs later in the experience but nothing is perfect.

Valve is there to facilitate the sale of the game, not guarantee the game is good.

> was generally kind of clunky and buggy

Steam is by far the jankiest program I have installed on my machine. It's TSAB (time to seeing a bug, I just made it up) is measured in seconds, not minutes or hours. I know they're raking in money for being what is mostly a very large FTP server (I kid...), but please spend some of it on the basic experience.

Strange, Steam is quite stable for me. On both my SteamDeck, my couch PC on the main TV, and my laptop.

A lot more stable than Tim Sweeneys ego.

I have only seen one Steam bug once in the last 6 years and that was a game that restarted its download from scratch, followed by the client crashing. Never happened again, never saw another bug either.

Used it on hard drives, SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs.

Of all the "app store" type programs that I have to interact with, Steam is somehow the least painful one.

And I deal with a bunch of them; Gnome Software, Microsoft Store, Epic Games Store, Google Play Store, (Samsung) Galaxy Store, F-droid, not counting some dedicated pseudo-stores aberrations like JetBrains Toolbox and Wargaming.net Game Center... Those are all much smaller (ok, Google Play Store is probably the largest), almost featureless in comparison, yet they are slow as molasses and buggy as hell.

Maybe its just my bad system (integrated graphics, 4 GB ram, i3 8th gen processor) but Steam actually performs far worse than MS store, Gnome Store, and the Google Play Store (though thats on my phone and not my laptop).

Your system is either old or a Chromebook heh. Same problem here.

Try disabling the options that preload and refresh all the store/community "stuff" behind the scenes. Maybe auto-updates too.

Steam continues to be the best platform because it shares per-game and per-user cross-game transactional data with everyone. It's kind of hard to explain why this is so important, but it is unique to Steam, compared to all pay-to-play and subscription media as far as I know.

Whereas things like DRM and returns and even royalties differ amongst platforms, and none of those have the same hegemony as Steam does; and the compulsory platforms, like the App Store and Google Play, developers complain bitterly about them in a way I've never heard regarding Steam, which they participate in voluntarily.

Valve will never say “You know what, we are going to go this direction, market be damned. Follow us if you want to be cool” and proceed to introduce a new graphics API. Don’t get me wrong, we needed one, but the current state of graphics “drivers” sucks. Here comes Valve: “Hey bro, I heard graphics apis suck and are bifurcated by platform, here’s a wrapper that wraps them all into an API you probably already use.” (Initial version of their DX9->OpenGL bridge).

Years later, Valve again: “You know, we just kept going on that thing we told you about, here’s a full fledged x86 win32 compatibility layer for anything posix. We had to patch the kernel but they were receptive.” Who does this? No one. Not a single company does this. They all have ulterior motives. Patch Linux for some hardware they are introducing for sale or patching it for some platform to get your PII data. Valve is the only company that is patching to make things better for the sake of making “the ecosystem” better. Apple: “We have the best products” yet those products aren’t helping the compute ecosystem. Microsoft: “We have AI” yet those products are still being worked out and is under active litigation from pretty much every creative out there. Valve: “We just want to play, make sense of players, to make better play experiences, to make better games, and not write more code than we have to. Our business is games, not code”.

I might get some flak for this, but Meta is pretty big contributor to open source projects. The amount of bugs and features that they work on that are not used in their own products is quite staggering. Their open source projects are very embracing of the community.

Google on the other hand...

Meta is doing things for Meta. Yes, it helps the greater ecosystem but they have problems no one else has outside of Google and Amazon and a few foreign players. Presto, React, etc are things they needed and decided to open source. Valve needed something at went TO the source. There’s a huge difference. The few tools Meta has released for Linux were things that were important to them at that scale. btrfs, etc. While one could argue Valve did it for Valve, the sheer impact it has on small to medium sized studios is undeniable. Not having to rewrite your engine and just compile with a -lproton is wizardry. SteamOS forced graphics card manufacturers to start including drivers. GNU community being what it is, they reverse engineered it and upgraded Mesa. I’d love to see Facebook include something like making Oculus open source. React isn’t a fair comparison either because it’s a singular path architecture. There’s really only one way, the React way. If they wanted to be serious about improving the web, they would have brought the legacy along and made jsx a web standard for browsers to support natively.

Google, isn’t the same Google. Eric Schmidt is from my area of the world but advertising poisoned the company (one would argue, gave it a monetary value). Like Napster, Google was designed with good intentions in the beginning. That’s why it beat Excite, Webcrawler, Yahoo, Bing, AskJeeves, etc was because its usefulness at searching AND ranking.

All the FAANGs contribute to open source. That’s not what I’m getting at. I’m saying Valve does it not just for them but for everyone. With the only hope that Gabe can get HL3 running on a CoreBoot Linux Handheld because console royalties suck.

My main point is that Meta works on issues to support the community much more than other companies, especially Google. Even when those issues don't directly contribute to Meta products itself.

Sure it is self-serving in the sense that they do get a lot out of the community as well, but I don't feel that super min-maxing of resource allocation on their open source projects.

There is no good company, they are all just profit-maximizing paperclip machines - they just put different weights behind the public opinion on them. E.g. Nike will put up a BLM logo not because they care, but because based on their calculations, it brings in more money. Some oil or logistics company won’t, because the average Joe doesn’t even know about them, and another company looking to minimize costs in general don’t decide on their partners based on that.

In Valve’s case, it pays them to have this “good guy” look - some other stores try different strategies, but overall we really should never put personalities behind companies. They all are lawnmowers.

People need to understand this I buy several ETFs. I dont give a crap about the companies each etf is composed of. And I care less about how good or bad the company is with their environment, society or whatnot.

The only thing I care about my set of ETFs is how profitable they are. If one of them stops giving me profits, I'll sell it, contributing to de downward trend of the etf and its underlying stocks.

Social, environmental or other aspects do not play in capitalism.

Valve operates quite differently from publicly traded companies that must see infinite growth to appease the investors.

It is important to take these things into account when deciding who to buy things from because we need to put pressure on them to do good things

> I never thought we'd see a no questions asked return policy for digital games and yet, with steam, it's a fairly simple process.

That was however not Valve's idea, but only came in response to EA Origin offering a return policy in 2013, Valve follow up in 2015 with their own.

One of the very rare cases where the competition was a little ahead for once.

Valve's 2 hour refund option came in direct response to a 2014 lawsuit from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission[1].

Rod Sims, head of ACCC at the time, asserted that Valve's original no-refund stance broke Australian law.

> Under Australian Consumer Law, everybody who buys a product or a service has a right to a refund if the product doesn’t work. They have a right to a refund, or a repair. Those rights are enshrined in Australian Law, and our allegation is that Valve sought to remove those consumer rights which is a breach of Australian Consumer Law

[1] https://gizmodo.com.au/2014/08/accc-commissioner-heres-why-w...

UK Consumer Rights Act gives you two weeks for no fuss return of items bought remotely. IME, Steam do not adhere to the law here.

Digital items too?

No, GP is incorrect. Digital goods are treated differently under the act.

full form of GP?

Grandparent [comment].

Last I looked they were specifically included. Can you maybe cite it as you're the opposing party.

This quote supports my position.

Digital goods are treated differently by the act to other goods(hence them being mentioned specifically in this section).

Purchasing non-digital goods online provides a greater right to return them even if they are not faulty. Digital goods, as your quoted section points out, can be returned if they are not of (objectively) satisfactory quality.

The two week mandatory, no-fuss return you mentioned originally only applies to non-digital goods/services bought remotely.

Yes, see eg https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15 section 34.

For some context on the early days of steam, I remember the Friends network having reliability issues presumably due to scaling as everyone adopted steam.

But by reliability issues I don't mean it occasionally failed. It did, but that was early on. I assume they just killed the backend and never pushed a client update to remove it because I remember what was at least months if not a full year of the friends UI just saying it failed to connect to the Friends network.

The actual matchmaking never had any real issues that I remember, but the login servers definitely did, and deleting clientregistry.blob and restarting steam was just a routine thing you did to get steam working again.

None of this is really that surprising though, steam was originally a tool just for beta testers, while the live game used WON for matchmaking. WON was shutting down and Valve had to rush steams public release.

It got flak when it came out because it was released at the same time as HL2 and steam was the _only_ way to get HL2. If you wanted HL2 then you were installing steam, even if you weren't interested in it.

Steam came out before that. You missed the HL1 mod era.

I was around before HL1 existed, I didn't miss anything.

I wasn't trying to imply they were released on literally the same day, of course steam was out before HL2, but HL2 is what drove its popularity because people were forced to install steam to get access to HL2.

And most people resented them for it. At that time, store purchases was still the common way to get at PC games.

I resent them now for the same reason but on another game: Civ 5. I even bought that one in a box from a store.

and still had to install steam? ouch, yeah, that would irritate the crap out of me too.

Yes. DVD was pointless. Online steam was required. Worse still it happened to be down that day. The worst possible first impression.

Ultima Online launch day had a similar feel. Servers melted under the load of 1500 (maybe 2,000). After a weekend of reading the booklet and studying the map, I was able to login. Only to find that cave on the map I wanted to explore was between me and a dozen Ogres and Ratmen. Good times.

Steam was the first “online required” for offline play I think. Others like EA and Ubisoft followed shortly after but didn’t have their own stores until many many years later.

I'm in this crowd. I initially resented them but now love Steam and HL2 was what got me to install it. I have a 7-digit steam ID but my account is still 20 years old (it might be 19, I'm not sure).

Steam came out with the CSS beta, and for a week or two it worked fine, after the proper release of Steam... It went to the doghouse for a few months.

That their games aren't filled with Pay To Win microtransactions and Day 1 DLC is yet another reason to love Valve. If someone wants to spend a few bucks to buy a hat in TF2, that's fine by me.

Conversely, CSGO and DOTA 2 has facilitated real money gambling among the youth on third party sites for years. Valve has attempted to crack down on gambling sites, however it's still possible for a fourteen year old to insert credit card details and lose real money gambling for virtual skins.

And Artifact has card packs that are effectively loot boxes, and a whole marketplace to facilitate selling/buying them. I don't know how much/if they made any cut from the marketplace, but it's certainly a form of "play to win".

this is nothing compared to Roblox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ

Man complaining about a monetization platform by making a video on a monetization platform.

Which could easily be fixed if Valve decided to put a hard-cap by selling skins for a fixed price, even if they were only for sale a couple weeks a year.

They'd also pocket all that money, but I guess they don't want people who spent more than said cap to get their skins. But people who are spending 100+ on skins should know they are playing the NFT game.

They should kill their RNG skin distribution and open a normal cash shop like everyone else. I find this cosmetic market where people pay hundreds or even thousands for items they want skeevy as hell. It's a big black mark on Valve's otherwise exceptional reputation.

Why do people spend this much? Are they being tricked or something?

When it was TF2 and not CSGO, there was a lot of money laundering.

Not sure if that's still happening.

1) People really like skins

2) Unlike basically every other game with paid skins, Valve games let you sell them to other players on an open market for Steam credit.

Valve takes 5% of each market transaction and many skins hold their value quite well so using a $200 knife for years and years could only end up costing $10 (+ opportunity cost) or so assuming the market stays flat and you will eventually buy $200 of games in the future.

The real losers in the system are the people with gambling addictions opening cases and hoping to get something really good for less than market price. Cases are free drops but cost $2.50 to open and the average market value of what you win is usually less than (value of the case)+$2.50. Because the cases can be sold there's no limit to the amount of gambling one person can do.

https://csroi.com/

>Valve takes 5% of each market transaction

... on their own community market platform. Valve supports third party stores that don't have a Valve cut, and they freely provide the ability for users to trade items for items with no fees to allow third party stores to work. These systems kick off a whole third angle of businesses being propped up around the exchange of these items and of people doing speculative trades on certain items.

The market where Valve takes a cut of all cosmetics sold also incentivises them to maintain an extreme level of artificial scarcity for the most desirable cosmetics in the game.

To me this is infinitely worse than just having a skin shop and/or battlepass.

I bet valve makes more off the hundreds of thousands of $2 transactions than the occasional $100 or $1000 transaction. I mean think about it...

As someone who played a lot of CSGO as a 15-16 year old back in 2015, it's all psychological. Why does anyone become addicted to gambling? The thrill releases enormous amounts of dopamine. Satisfy this over and over, and the threshold for the same euphoria becomes higher and higher. That's how yo end up with people, and particularly teens and young adults spending massive amounts of money for 'some pixels'. I think I sank about 1.5k into it in total over the years. When Belgium decided to ban such loot boxes I was happy to see the addiction forcibly ended. They just need to repeat it for predatory battlepasses and the likes.

I understand gambling for money, but not gambling for, as you say, pixels. Is there nothing real to spend on or save for?

Yes, Valve is relying on gambling mechanics to entice people, the same way a casino does.

It's difficult to come up with an informed opinion on this sort of thing because it's nigh-impossible to talk to the people involved. I certainly don't know anyone who spends thousands of dollars on TF2 hats.

One possibility is that they're gambling addicts in countries where gambling is heavily restricted, and buying "loot boxes" containing random items is the closest they can get to playing a casino slot machine.

Or perhaps they think of themselves as clever investors in collectables, which they hope to sell on at a profit later on. You and I might think they're buying the equivalent of tulips or beanie babies - but they think their purchases are more like fine wines or rare postage stamps.

Perhaps the big spenders actually only spend big five bucks at a time, and they're merely poor at managing their personal finances - spending five bucks a day for five years, unaware of how it's adding up.

Or it could be money laundering - perhaps there's some criminal scheme where bank transfers are heavily monitored by the cops, but transfers of rare TF2 hats aren't.

Perhaps the big money transactions are actually fake, aiming to pump up prices or make people spending mere hundreds of dollars feel better about it because at least they're not spending thousands.

Yet another option is that they're super-successful billionaires, and a thousand bucks is nothing to them, not even worth bending down to pick up if they saw it in the street.

People who make games with microtransactions for a living probably find it a lot easier to sleep at night if they think all their whales are billionaires.

Or, maybe they just value the skins? Maybe they want to contribute financially to a game they really like in the hopes of keeping it healthy? I do know people that buy every new cosmetic that's released and they enjoy doing it. They aren't even millionaires. So what?

The people I know who have thousands of dollars in TF2 hats, have played the game for thousands of hours and so want to show off a little bit with cool looking items while doing so.

They have a fair amount of disposable income, but certainly aren't billionaires.

Depends on how you define tricked. The whole practice relies heavily on FOMO driven by artificial scarcity. It's all psychological manipulation, that many of us are susceptible to even if we think we aren't.

I bring it up because games like Overwatch 2 get regularly shit on for introducing things like a battle pass and paid skin shop. Those rely on FOMO as well, but not nearly to the same extent. There are no gambling mechanics, and there is no Blizzard-sanctioned auction house where the most desirable items sell for thousands of dollars. The most desirable cosmetics in the game can be had for 10 dollars plus spending some time playing the game.

As a player, it also just feels really shitty that customizing my character the way I want is reliant entirely on blind luck through gambling mechanics or spending obscene amounts of money.

So if Blizzard is gonna take heat for this (and they do deserve at least some of it), then Valve absolutely should get raked over the coals for their far worse system.

Pokemon as an entire game relies on artificial scarcity and psychological manipulation. It's just a fixed cost up front for the game (and arguably not even strictly so these days with Pokemon Go). Same with any game ever that has loot and drop tables. Allowing people to pay more money to get more drops is the only thing that's really changed. And honestly it seems the feedback depends entirely on how "sleazy" the game studio's street reputation is. Dota2 cosmetics are considered tasteful while Genshin Impact is "gacha". But heh even Genshin gets a pass because it's such a good game and not one of those mobile penguin island simulators (which even get a good rap in many circles for being cute and fun to play).

Yes. They sell items via loot boxes where you don't know what you're buying until you've already opened it. It's gambling. Distributing purchases this way is well known to increase spending and hurt people. It's why they do it.

The stock market is also gambling. Plenty of informed consenting adults visit casinos all the time. What's the "responsible adult" way to spend your discretionary entertainment budget these days? NFTs? Disney+? Binge drinking at cocktail bars after work? High yield savings accounts? I mean seriously I'm not pro psychologically damage people with manipulative feedback spirals. But let's not ignore the fact that 1) owning a cool cosmetic and looking good stomping noobs is fun, and 2) that people are willing to pay purely for entertainment.

I'm not passing judgment on the victims of this practice. We should be regulating it, instead of allowing companies to abuse people.

Because they value the content. Might not be your style, but participating in battle passes and cosmetic drops is enjoyable for many people. What else should they be spending their discretionary income on? Stonks?

It’s slot machines with a different UI

But when will Half Life 3 be released.

Other than DRM, what's not to like about Steam policies?

I don't know if this is accurate, but IIRC, if you're banned, you lose access to even the single-player games in your collection.

I don't think that happens. You might lose access to features and multiplayer, but not the games you own.

At worst, you cannot buy more games or gifts or trade your items. But you can still download the single player games you already have.

EDIT: Generally it seems account suspension is possible, but that usually means they noticed something illegal or extremely suspicious activity.

That sounds odd, because how does your steam account even get banned? If you cheat in a game and get banned, your steam account isn't banned

AFAIK most horror stories are from people who move between countries, particularly from one with "cheaper" prices like Argentina to one with more expensive ones. Not sure if the account itself gets banned but the games previously bought do get locked out.

Back in the day playing on VAC servers and attempting to use exploits would get your whole account banned.

They've caught a TON of criticism for Counterstrike cases, which is where they make an absolute crapload of money. I don't think it's a big deal, but others do.

Taking 30% of indie developers revenues while being a near monopoly, so indie devs have to be on Steam. Something like Epic's 12% would be a fair cut given storage and bandwidth costs have gone down over the years. Being able to keep an additional 18% of their game's revenue would be huge for developers. Some may call it rent-seeking.

Ah, that's a fair criticism.

They're a monopoly in the same way that Amazon is: they're not, there are plenty of popular alternatives and publishers aren't locked from selling wherever else they want.

They're just the biggest player and the 30% cut is worth it for all the additional sales.

>there are plenty of popular alternatives

Like what? GoG? And what else?

Epic Games comes to mind. Or just buy the game from the developers.

Erosion of the concept of ownership. I can lose access to the content I have paid full price for through no fault of my own. Just because they've decided to no longer support the platform I've never stopped using. Also not being able to resell the product I supposedly "own".

To be fair, none of these things were pioneered by Valve, but more of a general change in what society accepts as the new normal.

Even though I can remove SteamStub DRM with an automatic tool to solve these issues, It still irks me how there isn't a regulatory solution to these problems

My personal Steam customer support 'win' was several years back when I decided to start building a game library for my son. I had purchased Conan and Elite Dangerous while they were on deep discount and gifted them to my son's account. At the time I was unaware that gifts can expire and be refunded. So, at some point the gifts expired and they refunded the purchases, but the game were no longer on that deep discount. I was fairly upset and contacted customer support. The initial customer support agent was unhelpful and I sent a follow-up contact to Gabe that expressed my discontent. I explained that they'd managed to alienate a user that had been on the platform since 2005 and who had a massive library of purchased games at that point. I told them I would no longer be using the platform and would not be using it for my kids either. This email elicited a response from one of the Steam devs and they agreed that my initial interaction was not what they wanted the experience to be. He sent me copies of the games that have been refunded and he sent me to codes for "all present and future Valve titles" for me and my son to be able to play together. In the end he turned it around fully and only increased my appreciation for the company and platform.

Yeah, Steam has always some really impressively dedicated help when somebody escalates. It's probably harder to access now, but I remember one time in college when TF2 came out of beta and performance was awful. Steam Support didn't have anything, so I sent an email to GabeN; he put me in touch with a senior Source dev who had me press some debug buttons and hop in a game with a bunch of Valve folks (I was pretty good but this was definitely an exception to "game devs are worse that their games than players", I got my ticket punched worse than when I was playing in competitive leagues). A few weeks later there was a patch that significantly improved perf on my particular flavor of hardware.

You "own" Half Life 3 in some timeline.

I’m glad everything worked out for you in the end, but it seems like the Steam policy here is pretty reasonable, and you come across as unreasonable.

I know I shouldn't engage, but your comment irks me.

This is the email I sent, make of it what you will:

Mr. Newell,

I figured I would email you as a sort of spiritual goodbye to my fandom of Steam.

I have been a customer for as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure it's longer than the 15 years my profile lists as I had a profile that I lost access to before this one. For this entire time I've been a staunch supporter and advocate of Steam. I've slowly built my collection over the years and would always prefer to buy via Steam vs.another platform or even direct. I would always recount my many positive experiences with the Steam platform when discussions online turned negative. Overall I was a very happy customer and advocate.

My son is now 10 and I had finally decided to start a game library for him. We are a multi-PC family and we frequently want to game together or just want to all play games at the same time, even if they are different ones. As the Steam sharing feature means we cannot all play different games I decided I'd just buy him some of the games he asked for or that we could play together. The last two of those purchases is what triggered my loss of faith in Steam. And to be honest, it was such a trivial thing to trigger it in the end. I purchased a copy of Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition and a copy of Conan Exiles - Complete Edition. They were both on sale for a good amount off, 75% for ED and 40% for CE. As I seem unable to just purchase a game and hold it as a later gift to someone and instead I have to specify the recipient right away I went ahead and sent it to my son's email address. That address is simply a group that goes to myself and my wife until he's a little older. Apparently I missed the fact that I needed to go and accept the gift or the gift would be REFUNDED. Eventually the gifts were both refunded and I had missed it until the second gift was refunded. I immediately reached out to support to help un-refund the purchases. They said that they were unable to help me.

That is really where the story ends I'd say. Nothing dramatic, but I told them they'd lost a customer for giving me my money back. Pretty ironic really.

I keep getting emails about deals on items on my wishlist and I keep realizing that I meant what I'd said. You guys lost a customer. I've gone so far as to start buying games I already own on Steam on GOG instead now. I won't walk away from my Steam library and I'm not saying I'll never spend more money on Steam. But I'll never do it as a first choice and I'll never do it as a happy customer.

I just wanted to write to you on the off chance that you might read this so perhaps you can do something for the future to not lose another loyal customer over such a trivial thing.

And this was the response:

Hello Mr. [X],

My name is [Y] and I am a developer on Steam. Thank you for taking the time to email us and bring this issue to our attention.

I have reviewed your help request and I am contacting you to apologize for the responses that you received. Your request was not handled appropriately and we will use it as well as your feedback to improve how we handle cases like yours in the future.

We would like to add free copies of the games that were automatically refunded to your son's account. From your email, it sounded like you were hoping to delay giving him these games until he is a little older. So, I have added giftable copies of Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition and Conan Exiles - Complete Edition to your account's inventory. You can access your inventory through the dropdown menus near the top of the Steam Client and gift them to his account at any time.

We also think it is great that you are starting a game library for him and we would like to contribute some games from Valve as well. I am including two CD keys which you can register on both of your accounts so that you can play the included games together. These keys include all present and future Valve titles:

[CODE1]

[CODE2]

Thank you again for bringing this to our attention. Please let me know if I can help with anything else.

I have nothing to add except that this is such a wonderful interaction between two polite people. On the internet, too!

>but I told them they'd lost a customer for giving me my money back.

That sounds unreasonable.

How so? If the customer doesn't want their money back and didn't intend to get their money back, that seems completely reasonable. There's no reason someone should expect that a purchase they made got removed without their consent regardless of whether or not a refund was issued.

Wow that's pretty cool. So you get access to all new Valve games on day 1 for free?

Seems that way. I received Alyx when it came out. They don't release many games, so it's not easy to verify.

These kinds of cases can be rare enough that finding them is absolutely worth that cost, in terms of fixing a rare but annoying bug, helping customer retention, "word on the street", etc.

I don't do customer support very often, but when I do, it's my default response.

Talking about customer service, the best I've _ever_ experienced has been with Sweetwater, on online music store. I seriously rave about them to anyone that will listen. Someone should do a case study on their CS program.

This is great to know. For some reason, I got the impression that Sweetwater was a terrible company but I can't, for the life of me, remember if that's based on a personal purchase I made from them (and I made several) or if it was based on someone else's experience that was related to me. It's just something that I had stored away in my memory as a "Well, I'm never buying from them again".

Weird. I'd maybe give them a try to see if your memory is right or not.

I have zero affiliation with them, I just have had absolutely amazing interactions with them.

As a small follow-up to this that exemplifies the continuing good interactions:

I posted the email exchange I had below another comment. In that exchange you'll notice that the dev said they'd added the games under my inventory to gift to my son at a later date (when he was older). That came about 2 years later when he was 12. The problem was, when I tried to use the gifts from my inventory they both failed for unspecified reasons. I reached out to the initial dev again, hoping he was still there. He was and he helped resolve the issue right away.

I know some people have had bad customer service with Steam or have other complaints, some valid and others not so much. In the end, I'm a pretty satisfied Steam customer and will generally speak well of them when the situation arises (like today).

I whole-heartedly agree. They seem good for the right reasons.

That said, I'm scared about the inevitable creep of capitalism. What happens when Gabe retires? Or some legal/financial event changes things?

I have no reason to doubt them, but history gives me reasons to be cautious with my optimism. We've seen similar parallels with beloved tech companies in the past.

Developers don't get much sympathy from users over Valve's store policies precisely because Valve cares so much about the users.

Epic makes a big deal about digital storefronts only needing a 12% cut to turn a profit, but Epic isn't turning around and investing that money into things that make the platform better for everyone like Valve does (Steam Input, Proton, Workshop just to name a few things).

>into things that make the platform better for everyone

Correction, for Steam users, not for everyone.

Steam Input and Workshop are completely proprietary services that do not work outside of Steam. Steam Input configs are difficult (not impossible, but unnecessarily complicated) to access/share across services, meaning that even if you do use Steam, if you bought a game outside of Steam and are importing it, you're probably going to be rebuilding the Steam Input config from scratch. Steam Workshop is also inaccessible to games purchased outside of Steam even if you import those games into Steam. And not only has Valve not built a way to link imported games to a Workshop and not provided mechanisms for games to make use of Workshop outside of Steam, the company has actually clamped down on efforts to circumvent that DRM.

Both Steam Workshop and Steam Input are very clearly designed to be vendor lock-in. To gamers who only use Steam and nothing else, it feels like Valve is making it better for everyone, but it's a lot more like the Apple ecosystem -- Valve is leaving behind anyone who buys games outside of Steam and almost explicitly punishing users who get games from other storefronts.

That's not to say Valve doesn't do great work elsewhere. Proton is genuinely good for the ecosystem, even though Valve still ties it heavily into Steam and combines it with Steam-specific features like shader caches that are inaccessible outside of Steam. I think the Steam Deck is a wonderful device, hampered only somewhat by the fact that it's so reliant on Steam Input which is entirely proprietary. But it's still miles above other consoles. It's repairable, it's far more open, Valve might "punish" users for installing 3rd-party software but at least installing that software is allowed.

Valve is neither perfect nor evil. People get enamored with Valve because our standards for companies have fallen so unbelievably far, to the point where just allowing people to install 3rd-party software at all feels like being granted an unexpected gift. But Valve has plenty of vendor lock-in and plenty of proprietary services and systems that are designed to make it so that you as an end-user can buy the exact same game on two platforms and run both versions on the same device, and one of them will perform worse, be harder to configure, and won't have mod support.

Regarding Steam input, can't you add any program as a "non-steam game" and apply custom inputs with it? I haven't used it much myself, but as far as I know there isn't any sort of lockout on what you're able to apply it to.

And regarding the workshop, I would be lying if I said that I never bought a game on Steam only for the convenience of using the workshop for said game... But then I have also paid Nexus for their mods because by default they cap downloads at 1 mb/s. I am also aware of tools that let you download workshop mods for games you don't own. It's certainly less convenient to have to manually download them and drag-and-drop them into your mod manager or mods folder or whatever, but they hardly make it impossible, so it's not like the mods are actually locked in to the platform.

> can't you add any program as a "non-steam game" and apply custom inputs with it?

I mentioned this -- you can only do so if you use Steam as the launcher, Steam Input is tied to using the overall Steam client. Additionally, you'll have to make that config by scratch, Steam's community sharing for configs is much more limited for non-Steam games. This seems like a small complaint but if you're buying new games you don't know what the optimal config is, so the Steam Input experience for non-Steam games is that you load up the game and as you play it you constantly adjust the config until you find an setup that works, as opposed to Steam games where you just download the highest rated community config and go from there.

On top of that, there are Steam Input features that flat-out don't work for 3rd-party games; specifically input glyphs within the game. Steam offers an API for developers to define "action sets" that among other features will make sure that instructions within the game use the correct keybindings and pictures. 3rd-party game are (as far as I can tell) completely locked out of that service.

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> I am also aware of tools that let you download workshop mods for games you don't own [...] but they hardly make it impossible, so it's not like the mods are actually locked in to the platform.

I mentioned this as well, Steam has actually gone after and shut down community projects that allow you to do this. It's much harder than it used to be and for some games it's outright impossible.

Steam Workshop is literally DRM as far as I'm concerned; there are plenty of games that are completely inaccessible. Even if that wasn't the case, the inability for 3rd-party games to be linked to Steam Workshop profiles by users is vendor lock-in. The vast majority of gamers didn't have the technical skills to route around Steam's restrictions even before Steam started shutting down community projects and putting ownership checks in front of downloads.

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What would be far more market-friendly and what would actually benefit everyone would be for Valve to debundle those services from Steam -- I'm not saying every developer should be able to use Steam Workshop for free, but Steam Workshop should not be tied to Steam. It should just be "Valve Workshop".

There are a lot of games that are Steam exclusive specifically because there are Steam APIs that they can't take advantage of on other storefronts. And it's very common for games to come to other platforms outright missing features (particularly online content) because developers don't even have a choice to pay to utilize those features outside of Steam.

I think modding and input configuration are the two most obvious examples of this, but if you've ever bought a game on GoG and then found out after the fact that it's missing an entire game mode, Steam is (in my experience) probably the reason for that.

Thanks for clarifying, in particular about the workshop. I think you're right that the service could definitely stand to be decoupled from Steam. While that might be easier said than done (you would still have to implement Valve's downloading/update checking to match the quality of the Steam client to make it as seamless), it would definitely be huge for modding. I mentioned Nexus in my post to get at the idea that modding for a lot of games is far from an ideal system and you pretty much have to pay to get around that in most cases, but an independent Steam workshop page that developers pay to opt into would be a good approach to that. Now I want them to do it...

The input thing does seem like a niche complaint, sorry to say. I don't think I've ever encountered that, and I think even if I did it wouldn't stop me from playing the game, I would just bind the controls myself. I guess this could be decoupled as well, but I don't think the reason that it isn't is necessarily lock-in; I would bet that there just aren't enough people that care about it, so to Valve it would be wasted effort. But now I'm assuming intent so what do I know, really.

That's fair, the input stuff is annoying but it doesn't get in the way of actually being able to play the game or get content -- stuff like modding and multiplayer/online storage is arguably a much bigger issue than needing to build your own controller mapping. I just think it would be really low-hanging fruit.

SDL is currently working on an Action Set equivalent, and I think their plan is to just use configuration files on disk for the most part. So in the same way that ProtonDB is mostly community maintained and outside of Steam and you can look up a game's settings and apply them to a 3rd-party game, what I think would be the easiest improvement would be allowing arbitrary search for community-supplied configs and moving that to be an independent URL that Steam hits that just downloads an encapsulated config file that Steam reads.

There is some way to do share non-Steam configs, if you link a 3rd-party game in Steam you will sometimes in community configs and then see a subset of the normal configs? I have no idea how that subset is calculated or if users need to do something to enable it though, the entire interface around sharing Steam Input configs even for games purchased from Steam is a little bit of a mess, or at least it is on Steam Deck.

I feel like I'm settling by saying this because I'd also like straight-up input binding outside of Steam, but even ignoring stuff like action sets, 3rd-party clients -- just being able to load a community config by typing a game name into a search box instead of needing to build my own would get rid of a lot of my problems, particularly for control schemes like flick stick that require me to take measurements of mouse/gyro sensitivity.

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> but an independent Steam workshop page that developers pay to opt into would be a good approach to that

My current plan for my own games I'm working on is to leverage git for modding support -- I'm not going to build a studio-specific mod hosting service or partner with a company, I similarly don't really like ModDB that much and don't think they're great community players. So instead I'm going bundle a small git client with the final game and use that to download/update mods and handle stuff like versioning, readmes, etc...

That doesn't help with discoverability or ratings, but my thought process is that a lot of games (Terraria, Celeste, Hollow Knight, etc..) are organized around Github/Gitlab/Codeberg already for the primary modding engines, so at least if people are using that they can get issue trackers and embedded wikis, there's a standard way to download, it encourages releasing the mod source, you can look at activity to see whether or not a mod is active, you can have beta branches, you can check for updates without re-downloading everything, you can have a canonical source URL without wondering if a mod is only updated on Workshop/ModDB/whatever.

At least for the moment I don't plan to enable Steam Workshop for any of the games I'm working on, I think git will give me most of the same features minus a search function and user ratings. To be fair, search and user ratings are pretty important though, so :shrug: I'll see how that goes.

> Steam Workshop is literally DRM as far as I'm concerned; there are plenty of games that are completely inaccessible

I think that the Steam Workshop would be at least partially fine IF they allowed all Workshop items to be downloaded without a steam account. And even if a game developer enables this option, steam randomly disables it occasionally and the game developer has to re enable it all over again (this happened with Terraria).

Furthermore, its really, really hard to download Workshop items for a lot of games. Short of buying the game (a good $30-70 down the drain), your only options are to:

- Download through steamcmd. this only works if the game has explicitly enabled the anonymous download thing I talked about earlier. steamcmd (like the name suggests) also has a CLI which a lot of gamers can't/won't navigate.

- Go through external services. These external services often charge you if you download Workshop items for popular games or if you download Workshop items that are new.

- As a player playing through steam to download the item and then send it to you. In the Terraria discord server you'll find plenty of these people (I'm one of them!). This also doesn't work for games without an active playerbase.

I think you've phrased the problem better than I did.

> As(k) a player playing through steam to download the item and then send it to you.

If anything this might be my biggest critique of Valve's handling of the situation. Even with the DRM on top of Workshop mods, community mirroring of locked-down games would be possible to do in a way that was convenient for end-users outside of Steam... if Valve didn't occasionally just straight-up send cease-and-desist letters to those services.

It wouldn't cover every game, it would still be a problem, there would still be legal and ethical questions about distributing mods without modder consent, but it would be a lot better than the current situation. Right now if a game has those restrictions turned on (which Valve seems to specifically encourage) you kind of have to go underground or interact with shady services or ask players directly, and so coordination between communities becomes very difficult.

I can't read Valve's mind, but I lose a lot of sympathy for them when they're both not supplying any option for users to get access to mods without rebuying the game on Steam and stopping anyone else from trying to solve the problem Steam created for them -- at that point it's very hard for me to avoid thinking that Valve is being deliberately anticompetitive.

I'd still have criticism of a less locked-down system, but it would be easier for me to assume Valve just doesn't see it as worth the effort to support rather than thinking that they seem to be taking a lot of active steps to make the situation worse than it needs to be.

Steam Input and Steam Play both work fine with games bought elsewhere, you just have to add them as non-Steam games to your library.

Though even if they didn't, I can't see how these features being exclusive to Steam "punishes" users for buying games elsewhere. The most probable alternative scenario is that these features wouldn't exist at all.

The biggest alternative to Steam Workshop is Nexus Mods, which is ironically far less friendly to mod developers.

> Steam Input and Steam Play both work fine with games bought elsewhere, you just have to add them as non-Steam games to your library.

I've talked about this in a sibling comment more, but as far as I can tell, no they really don't. Valve does ownership checks for a nontrivial number of games before downloading workshop mods. And I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that 3rd-party games can be linked to the workshop, I am not aware of any mechanism to do that. I'd definitely be using it if it existed :)

Steam Input partially works with 3rd-party games but won't work with things like glyphs and seems to (in my experience) have very limited support for searching for existing configs.

> The most probable alternative scenario is that these features wouldn't exist at all.

I strongly disagree with this, and I think if we slip into thinking in this way, you can excuse almost any abusive behavior. It's just as plausible to say that without Epic's exclusive sponsorship a number of indie games also wouldn't exist -- and in fact many developers have outright said that Epic is the reason their games were able to be funded at all.

But I'm not going to give Epic bonus points for doing timed exclusives, it's still abusive behavior. And similarly I'm not going to give Valve bonus points for building services that are arbitrarily tied to a specific storefront. There is no reason Steam Workshop and Steam Input couldn't be debundled from Steam.

We're on here praising Valve for upstreaming code to Wine through Proton. If Wine wasn't already Open Source and Valve had built it from scratch, I don't believe they would have Open Sourced it. What I'm asking for (particularly with systems like Steam Input which could be standardized outside of Steam and which are heavily reliant on clientside APIs that run entirely locally) is for Valve to not conditionally engage with Open Source communities only when they have to or are they working with codebases that are already Open Source.

"We wouldn't build this if we weren't able to use it for lock-in" is how companies get away with a lot of consumer-abusive behavior.

First off, Steam Workshop. The way Workshop works is it requires deep integration into the asset management of the game. This deep integration often requires custom build of the game to support it. Stitching packages of assets isn’t something a small team wants to tackle. Workshop will do that for you. The reason you can’t just drop in any game and have it “workshop ready” is because Workshop needs to know how to deliver assets to your game. It’s needs developers to do some legwork to register that stuff. You aren’t downloading zip files like it’s FTP. You’re downloading signed asset packages in the engines own format. If you’re using Unity or Unreal that has multiple asset package management capabilities this is trivial. If you’re running SDL2 or your own Vulkan renderer, you’ve got a bunch of work to do parsing and stitching assets bundles and layered ordering loading of asset files.

Mod packages have been a thing long before Steam Workshop existed and long before Unity/Unreal. Steam didn't invent modding.

And if mod support for non-Steam games was as technically challenging as you suppose, Valve wouldn't need to be sending cease and desist letters to community projects that redistributed mod files. Valve wouldn't need to be verifying purchases before allowing users to download files.

The fact that Valve is putting additional technical and even legal barriers in front of mod redistribution means that it's not just that the mods wouldn't work without a special Steam build. The reality is that many of the mods would work, and that is precisely what Valve is trying to prevent. Tools that allowed for loading mods from Steam Workshop weren't shut down because they didn't work, they were shut down because they did work.

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There's a somewhat weird deference here to technical issues, but it's not clear whether you're claiming that developers are solving those issues or Valve is.

Saying that Workshop needs to deliver assets in the "engine's own format" is really just another way of saying "different games need to be modded differently." But that has always been the case and yet before Steam Workshop modding files were distributed and installed manually. Similarly, asset patching and replacement for games has always been a thing. And mods worked.

To the extent that mods today are drag-and-drop, they are drag and drop because the developers put in the work. Valve is not going into engine source code, decompiling everything, and then figuring out how to get the mod to work. They're providing APIs and mechanisms for developers to tell Steam Workshop how to modify the game files.

So unsurprisingly, the majority of mods that work in Steam work outside of Steam because once the developer puts in the work to build a modding system that's compatible with the assets and files that Steam workshop downloads and once those assets are patched for a version of the game, then developers are shipping that same version of the game on multiple platforms (unless they're using proprietary Steam APIs, in which case it's probably a Steam-exclusive game anyway).

Whatever APIs Steam is providing for Steam Workshop, there is no reason those APIs need to be restricted to Steam. A debundled service could provide the same stitching and the same APIs on-demand for games outside of Steam.

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Now, if you wanted to defend some of Valve's other anticompetitive behavior, such as precompiling shader caches, that would be much easier for you to do, since shader caches are not only game-version specific, they are also often platform-specific, and there's very little way for Valve to provide those assets without knowing exactly what version of the game is installed where. It's not like Valve can compute a single set of shaders and then just give them to everyone, they're dependent on the actual install.

But mods aren't in that position. Developers are putting in the work to support modding, games have to opt-into this system anyway so it's not like 3rd-party installs can't report to Steam Workshop what version they are, it's not like games who are adding modding support can't upload resource files to a debundled Workshop to be modified. And the end result of that process would work for games outside of Steam, as evidenced by the fact that in the instances where you can download mods from Steam Workshop and get access to the files, they tend to work in versions of the game from alternate storefronts.

This is another way of re-saying -- if this was actually a technical issue, Valve would not need to put barriers in place keeping people from downloading mods outside of Steam. If it's so impossible for Valve to support mods outside of Steam, then fine, they don't have to do anything. Just get rid of the extra barriers they've constructed and let communities solve the problem for them without interference. But Valve isn't willing to do that. The reason Steam Workshop has such poor support outside of Steam isn't because it's an impossible technical problem, it's because Valve is taking active steps to prevent people from accessing those mods. Valve could do literally nothing to support Workshop access outside of Steam and the situation would be better than it is today.

As an engine developer, I get what you’re saying. However, Workshop files are workshop files, mods are mods. Sometimes they are the same, sometimes they are not. In the cases where they are not, redistributing them outside of workshop is going to get the ire of Valve, and rightfully so. Mods that aren’t workshop specific (like HL mods or Unity Asset mods, etc) then there’s nothing other than legalese keeping you from redistributing them granted the authors have given you permission to do so.

What you can’t do, is take mods, put them up on your site to download, without the authors permission unless stated in the license.

> In the cases where they are not, redistributing them outside of workshop is going to get the ire of Valve, and rightfully so. [...] What you can’t do, is take mods, put them up on your site to download, without the authors permission unless stated in the license.

This isn't a problem for Valve, which has been granted permission to host the files by the authors who uploaded the mods. I'm not saying Valve should give permission to mirror mod files without the author's permission, I'm saying Valve should stop blocking non-Steam users from downloading files from Valve that Valve has permission to host and distribute.

Redistribution of mod files outside of Steam is a problem for Valve that only exists because Valve is locking mods behind login requirements and ownership checks. Nobody would have a need to redistribute mods out-of-channel if Valve wasn't going out of its way to lock down the channel and prevent legitimate access.

And it's Valve making the decision to do that, it's not that mod developers are asking Valve to block downloads of their mods. Mod developers themselves get zero input into whether or not a game's workshop page is locked down. Locking down the official channels is a decision made by Valve (and to a lesser extent the game publisher). Valve doesn't need to offer that option at all to game publishers, and Valve certainly doesn't need to default that restriction to on. The locked-down nature of Steam Workshop has very little if anything to do with the IP rights of mod authors, they're not consulted for any of this and Valve gives them no control at all over how their workshop mods can be accessed.

And of course Valve has permission to distribute their own assets. You take it as a given that downloading workshop files using a non-Steam client would "rightfully" draw Valve's ire, but I can't for the life of me figure out why that would be true if Valve is acting reasonably and isn't trying to be anticompetitive. The only reason for Valve to be angry about unauthenticated download requests to the Steam Workshop would be if they were trying to lock consumers into Steam, which is... exactly what I'm criticizing them about, that they should not be trying to create anti-consumer moats around their product.

Just like Apple? I do agree with you overall but 30% is still excessive

Better than Apple.

Apple don't reinvest in creating open standards, and don't invest in improving user experience for everyone.

Their investments are generally to increase lock-in.

Yes 30% is a lot, but valve does a lot more than apple imo. Games are a lot larger so bandwidth costs are much higher, they don't charge for in-game transactions, you get free cloud storage for saves, free mod hosting, good multiplayer functionality and much more.

Apple gives you less features, has a lot more restrictions and is pretty annoying to deal with

> Epic isn't turning around and investing that money into things that make the platform better for everyone like Valve does

Epic invests in devs. Valve invests in users. I guess the difference in focus is why you'll see such different reactions to Valve vs. Epic online vs when talking to actual devs.

>Epic invests in devs.

Is this true? I know they pay up front to have exclusivity for some games, but I don't know if I would consider that "investing in devs" in the same way that Valve "invests in users." Valve puts money into platforms and tools that users enjoy (things like forums, hosting mods, user reviews, community pages) as their investment. Does Epic do something similar for devs? The only thing I can think of is using funds to polish Unreal Engine, but that would only invest in devs that use Unreal which is not really applicable to most devs.

>Valve puts money into platforms and tools that users enjoy (things like forums, hosting mods, user reviews, community pages) as their investment. Does Epic do something similar for devs?

Sure,

- They invest in Unreal Engine and all the adjacent tech available, some of which can be used without Unreal Engine (Epic Online services). Of course, tech like Metahuman and Quixel want to draw people into UE but if you are already using UE it's a strong consideration.

- Similar to Unity, they have an asset store which enables some devs to make money selling tools/assets to other devs

- Lastly they do directly fund various games and tools. The forced exlusivity didn't put a good taste in consumers mouths but I'm mostly talking about Epic Megagrants. No strings attached, they can just throw money at good devs and most notably they invested into Godot and blender (again, no strings attached. True grants just to make open source tooling better).

most of their stuff is skewed towards Unreal Engine, but I don't see it as any different from Valve being skewed towards Steam. The difference is that consumers want to buy games while devs want to make money. So while there's a stronger business angle to every Epic solution, it fits with what a dev would want to do.

All good points, I had totally forgotten about their asset store as well. Thanks!

> but for their never ending support on making sure “gaming” can be enjoyed by all.

Oh how I wish that was true. Steam's accessibility story is an utter and inexcusable piece of garbage. Using Steam with a screen reader is a constant struggle, to the point where people had to write guides [1] on how to go about this. It got a bit better recently, at least on Windows, Mac still sucks. There are plenty of Steam games that a blind person can play, sometimes natively[2][3], sometimes through special accessibility mods[4][5][6]. Not to mention the Steamdeck, which has no accessibility support at all, despite the fact that Linux screen readers do exist[7], and consoles like PS5 and Xbox implement their own[8][9]. Valve really doesn't care.

[1] (outdated) https://www.mail-archive.com/audiogames-reflector@sabahattin... [2] https://blind.shadows1428.com/ [3] https://mortalkombatgamessupport.wbgames.com/hc/en-us/articl... [4] https://github.com/bradjrenshaw/say-the-spire [5] https://www.nexusmods.com/stardewvalley/mods/16205 [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQC6TJkBElY [7] https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/getting-started-with-orca/ [8] https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/accessib.... [9] https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps5-acces...

Their policy is for you to get a Gameboy clip on magnification panel. Ebay has them.

I don't think that would help blind users.

In before Steam has moved off of web interfaces (I haven't checked in a couple of years so they might be doing something different now particularly with big picture mode), but I'm frustrated that we all started building interfaces for native platforms in HTML/Javascript and it didn't lead to embracing any of the accessibility features that those same interfaces would get by default inside of a web browser.

To be fair, my understanding is that Linux screenreader support is pretty bad, but it does seem like if a developer is going to the trouble to build the majority of their interface in a semantic XML-like pure-text format, there should probably also be an option to read that text out loud.

Part of Steam is indeed HTML, and that is the accessible part. They're rewriting more and more of their UI in that technology, and that's definitely a good accessibility move.

They haven't really cared about games since Portal 2. Counterstrike simply enabled them to benefit from their own marketplace, which spread to other games. And we don't need to Talk about Artefact. Alyx was really good but inherently niche given its focus on VR (which made sense, because they had a hardware investment in VR).

They have billions so they can do both games and services if they want to. But it sounds like there was a lot of brain drain from the game designer perspective as Valve's priorities shifted. Why risk something as unstable as a game if you can focus on steady income from others making games?

As much as I like half life games, there are a handful of studios capable of creating interesting sci-fi shooters but no other company can really have things like Steam Deck, Proton, etc. as some of their core products

>no other company can really have things like Steam Deck, Proton, etc. as some of their core products

well of course not. These aren't product that directly make money. Maybe a small chinese startup can do it, but they would still prefer to ship with Windows.

I only really played Portal so I have no real fond memories of TF/CS/HL. But I'm just saying that Valve definitely has the money to invest in games if they really wanted to.

> Alyx was really good but inherently niche given its focus on VR

I'm being pretty critical of Valve on here in other places, but I would say that taking the time to make an excellent game even though a platform is niche and even though that game is essentially just a hardware advertisement and even though that advertisement isn't likely to move that platform to be non-niche to me shows a strong commitment to good game design.

Alyx didn't really need to exist I don't think. I don't think it moved the needle on making VR any less niche. I don't see it as a good economic move. And yet it's arguably one of the best shooters on VR.

I do think they're a lot less interested in game development than they used to be, I do have criticisms of some of their monetization schemes, but whenever they do get interested in games enough to actually make something, they seem to do a pretty good job of it. Even with Artefact, I'm not sure if the game was bad as much as just part of a crowded market and burdened with Valve's (admittedly awful) monetization philosophies for games as a service.

Steam Input alone gets them a lot of respect from me.

Years ago I lost access to my steam account that I had since HL2 came out.

I was able to get back in by emailing Valve support the account name, and photos of the box and serial key HL2 came in.

I was genuinely impressed - up to that point I had absolutely despised Steam as DRM shovelware that almost never worked right due to constantly downloading updates over my shitty internet connection.

I want to see what happens when Gabe retires. If Steam goes public, starts hiring EA management and begins to squeeze the sponge ala Unity, we will regret not challenging Steam's supremacy earlier.

Yeah, it's already bad enough you can no longer play games through Steam that were made for the respective OS, e.g. Windows XP, and soon Windows 7... like, I bought games on steam nearly 20 years ago, and the games I bought at that time were designed to run on the systems of that time (and many haven't been updated since). I expect to still be able to play those games on my old computers... but I literally can't (unless I pirate them), because Valve decided old computers just don't matter and you might as well throw those in the trash, I guess? Cool.

Take your favorite game today. In ~20 years, you'll be lucky if you can even play it at all.

I guess luckily the backup insurance we have is Linux... but that's also a matter of how far back of a Linux install you could log into Steam with. I guess we'll see. :)

Can't you just play these in a VM?

What OS would I be running in the VM? I still can't run Steam on the old OS, and thus can't install/run the respective game I'd want to play :( Actually, now that I think about it, I bet a pretty noteworthy % of my Steam library is literally not playable on any OS supported officially by Steam...

I'm pretty sure you have a few options - you can download an old version of Steam and just not update, you can download the games for offline use and then copy them to the VM, you can just download a crack for that game since any game old enough to not be usable on a new OS wouldn't have DRM, or you can pirate them (as you said). :)

Gabe will find a way to AI himself to be Valve’s CEO in perpetuity.

It helps that they aren't beholden to shareholders and the "value" of showing unlimited growth. You'll never see enshitification there. They're a group of creators who want to create. Sometimes they slip up, but it's no more than anyone else would.

Well said. Many Valve products have been absolute artisanal masterpieces. Very rare today.

They had the means to implement a good refund policy for Steam (evidenced by the fact that they have a good refund policiy now) but they didn't implement it until they were legally forced to.

wat. enabling kids to gamble with csgo skins and then only doing something about it when it got exposed in the media? the amount of money and stress that minors were going through with the entire csgo gambling racket was insane. they caused real harm imo, and they didn’t even make a change prohibiting it until this year.

https://kotaku.com/valve-steam-gambling-csgo-skins-ban-18504...

they don’t care about gamers wellbeing when the alternative is a money printer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling

Don't forget that:

- they did a massive fuck up with Artifact, thinking they could pull out MTG's monetization model for an online game (where you didn't even receive card as rewards for levelling up, you actually had to spend money to enjoy playing the game)

- they released Underlords and killed it right away, the battle pass is still the first one and the game hasn't received any balancing patch in 3 years

Underlords could be a real good competitor to TFT. and Artifact would be nice to compete against Hearthstone's cash grab. Thankfully they actually listened to our feedback and put a nail on the coffin for Artifact.

Funny how tech companies that are still owned or run by the technical people that founded them are awesome, while those where business bros take over turn to … dust. A lesson to be learned by us, the market, when we spend money. I prefer spending on those still “true” to their core - steam being one of them. I am literarily using linux daily part thanks to them (I still play games sometimes).

It makes me sad to think about what will happen when the guiding lights at Valve grow dim and have to be replaced. I hope that they can continue this culture that you're describing. Their games are my favorites, the Steam Deck is incredible, Steam itself is wonderful, and Valve's VR platform is the only one that I've ever really enjoyed enough to tell non-tech people about it.

Long live Valve. Long live the cabal.