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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.

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.

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. And I just don't buy it -- if anything, the opposite is more likely true; we might have standardized on more Open mod platforms and might have gotten true platform-agnostic controlling binding support within libraries like SDL much sooner if Steam Input didn't exist and games/gamers weren't able to just ignore the problem and stick with Steam's solution.