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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

Ah, that's a fair criticism.

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.

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

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.

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