cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/15970074
Valve:
- popularized DRM on PC
- killed the used games market on PC
- bans people for selling their Steam account
- contributed to popularizing microtransactions, loot boxes and Battle Pass
- forces you to run a proprietary app to play your games
- forces updates on you
- pretends they invented Wine
- ships devices with a proprietary SteamOS
- forces devs to use proprietary libraries to use Steam’s features
Gamers:
Yes uncle Gaben more of that please!!!
The downvotes proof how right you are.
Everyone has also forgotten what a mess Steam was in the beginning and it’s getting worse lately in my opinion, at least one major new bug per week.
The Steam client is also what introduces most young people to online scams more than everything else on the net, on the side of becoming a scammer and being scammed.
The microtransactions and the API that can be used for stuff outside of Steam also created a whole black market that is worth millions and introduces kids to completely unregulated gambling and betting.
After so many years Steam still has no real age verification option.
If you die, you can’t give your account to your heirs (you can give them login credentials, but it’s against the TOS), it’s not just that you can’t sell your games or your account.
Steam has lost a plethora of law suits for not following consumer laws all over the world, some ongoing as far as I know.
On top of everything else and despite a few mostly non profitable competitors, Steam is a monopoly which comes with its own problems for users and developers/publishers.
Valve is a company, companies are not your friend. Is it the worst company that exists? No, but that bar is low.
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I’m hoping the EU takes them/other digital storefronts to court at some point about my right to sell/transfer my licenses to all these products.
I should absolutely be able to sell my license to a game to another person. It’s bizarre that I can in the physical world but not the digital world where the actual “transfer” is 1000000x easier.
Also from just a platform standpoint it’s absurd I can’t disable updates on steam. I know some games offer alternative solutions to this through the beta branch feature but that is a band-aid over the full solution.
Actually you can’t, since most PC games contain Valve’s DRM, even if you buy a physical copy :). So best you can do is sell your Steam account and risk getting banned.
Edit:
People have told me that you can do that now. But once you update, I doubt that you can go back to the previous version if the new one turns out to be worse. Devs can literally remove features from their games. Most patches are useful though, so if your only options are getting all updates or not getting any, it sucks.