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Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0 | Hacker News Reader

I think it is a very underappreciated point. Those anti-consumer actions are only fueling future piracy ( and for a good reason too.. cracked games don't suffer from the DRMs and so on ). I accepted Steam and they won a lot of goodwill from me based on their work on Proton ( although I still try to throw some money GOG way ).

But instances like these heavily undermine my getting more comfortable in Steam walled garden.

Edit: And I think am pretty deep in already. I just ordered Steam Deck. Stuff like this makes me question that decision.

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Steam isn't the guilty party in this nonsensical bullshit, Ubisoft is. Steam allows you to list titles with zero DRM, zero Steamworks integration, or zero online components just fine.

Right, but Ubisoft's actions here still undermine trust in Steam. It sucks because it's not Steam's faint, but I think OP is right. This may ultimately be training people to distrust platforms like Steam and return to piracy.

Yes and no. Ultimately, I primarily blame Ubisoft ( and I do not buy anything that bears their name ), but I am not going to pretend that a platform that sells me something is completely off the hook. They have a lot of market power. They could have put their weight behind it and put Ubi in their place. They chose the path of least resistance.

So they might not be the guilty party, but they are sure not innocent. They are taking the cut of the money. It better be going towards protecting me. If they are not protecting me from bad actors then why am I using Steam?

Valve could use their market power to prevent this kind of rug-pulling behavior by publishers. Customers expect Valve to ensure that the software they provide is free of viruses, spyware, and harmful defects; this seems like a similar type of defective and/or malicious software that they should prohibit from sale.

Valve don't have the market power with the big players you think. Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft all sell a subscription service and their games & DLC directly. Epic have a competing store, and pumped in enough money that people have gotten used to having their owned games in multiple wallets. The small and medium players are who Valve has power over, and even they get to choose between Valve's large cut or accepting a bribe from Epic for exclusivity. I see a remarkable change from when your game was on Steam or it didn't exist.

I worked for 6 years at Ubisoft.

Valve has enormous power and uses it often, even at one point de-listing our entire catalog without warning because we had an additional asset in a game which was granted based on region. (and we got blamed in the media for it).

Ubisoft games are still on Steam despite this, though the big publishers despise this amount of power, and sometimes valve does come across as bullying when you’re on the receiving end.

You took away "expired" my hard earned ubi points that could be used to lower purchase prices. Since then I'm not spending money on your platform anymore

HA!

Those ubi points exist to give people the discounts we aren't allowed to directly give because of Steam licensing terms. :D

The fact they even exist is a symptom of what I'm talking about.

(also: I never worked on uPlay, I worked in the same building)

I think the reasonable thing Valve could do is to allow refund for products that stop working. It is one thing for multiplayer servers being turned off, but single-player game stopping working should allow refund from anytime in past 20 years.

I paid my money to Steam for a particular product, if they want to revoke it, they can refund my money.

If Steam is legally required to do that, their contracts with developers will inevitably have the same clauses about refunds if you disable the product.

Steam also gave you a clear notice that there was additional third party DRM on the product before you licensed it. They are also not the ones who are shutting it down.

Another reason games get cracked: the anti-piracy functions significantly impact performance. Time and time again there are benchmarks showing that when Denuvo and other anti-piracy stuff is striped out (the publisher has to pay to license it, per time period), performance dramatically rises.

I remember that some DRMs in the pre-Steam era of low internet access basically acted like viruses. They'd slow the computer down and get flagged as viruses.

Steam made it clear that piracy wasn't the enemy - people who pirate might not even buy the game, and people who buy games might not even play it. But back in the old days, this wasn't as clear.

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