That's why I refuse to use Steam.
I assume their contracts for listing on Steam are quite different in order to support this. I'd be interested to hear more about the inside of these sorts of things.
You absolutely have to list your games there because many people will refuse to buy your game anywhere else even if you are listed on more player-friendly DRM-free platforms like GOG or itch.io. Yes, I get that players want to use one launcher for everything but with DRM-free, you know what? You don't need launcher! Just download and play!
For the hefty 30 percent cut they take from devs, I would at least expect them to do some basic curation. They allow so many asset flips and general trash games to flood their listing making it very hard for players to find good indie games.
Plus, censorship is a bit of a hit or miss. You see some very sexually explicit titles on steam but then again even relatively harmless stuff can get you flagged. This creates an insecure situation for devs in certain niches and not just erotic. For example Visual Novels can be easily flagged for having a certain art style. Artistic freedom and monopolies never mix well.
[0] (Please no "Actually, it is not a monopoly...". Yes, I am using a broader definition of monopoly on purpose. )
This seems a lot like intentional obfuscation of precisely what that "relatively harmless stuff" or "certain art style" is because you know it's going to sound a whole lot worse if you actually explain it.
I'm fairly pretty sure the actual answer here as to what's likely to get you flagged is: "drawn/animated characters that look like children in explicit or highly suggestive settings", maybe with the lip service of calling them 18 in text, maybe not.
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That content is in a legally risky area of it's own AFAIK and is a massive political/PR risk in a way that other content is not.
Obviously any games where children are portrayed by a sexual manner wouldn't and shouldn't be tolerated on any platform but it is silly to say, we can't have children in games at all or that certain art styles should be banned.
I use the term monopolistic to describe companies that have such a overwhelming market dominance that free market effects barely apply anymore. That is not the legal definition but a more useful definition that is popular in more progressive circles as it can be used to actually describe actual real world companies in the 21st century.
You don't have to, and no.
This is not true, I still apreciate Steam for theyir work on Linux stuff so I am not hating on them, but facts are fact.
1 You need to start Steam to play most games
2 The Steam client dropped support for older oeprating systems
In my case I had an old laptop with a few games, Steam updated itself to a version that was not compatible with the OS so my son could not use the laptop, I was using this old laptop only when traveling so the issue was sudden to me, I had no time to fix this crap.
The fair thing to do is for Vale to create just a SteamLauncher that allows you top run your games, no Store/News/Social/Workshop, it could run in offline mode.
Maybe this was a stupid bug that the client fck itself, but it sucks to turn off your laptop working fine, turn it on in a few months and now you need to do research and debugging and fixing.
Tou don't, the default shortcuts it creates uses an url like format and steam to track down what exact binary you want to run, but if you double click the exe in the directory it works with steam closed. Lots of games (specifically indie games) have no DRM at all, you can freely copy to some other storage and play it later.
I doubt your "lots" claim, it is ambiguous, do you maybe mean a very few ? I found this >Total number of DRM-free games: 1,075 out of 41,147 games in total.
This is my source, if it is wrong let me know https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_...
At least Valve games seem to be DRM free
It's more work, but that's life when using old hardware. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a software provider to support old hardware/OSes forever.
I agree, but the hypocrisy is that old games might not work on the new OS that Steam client requires. So if you upgrade to a new machine to play your old game you might not be able to play it.
Don't laugh. It's completely possible.
But even if I buy a game on EGS today, I can still probably play it on Linux through Steam for free thanks to Valve, so... I'm very conflicted to say the least.
I know there is this meme among gamers that if anything ever happens to Valve they will release all the games they distribute from DRM but this doesn't make any sense because, except for Valve's own games, they don't have the legal right to do that; whoever comes into legal possession of Valve wouldn't allow it. The fact that Steam DRM is weak and easy to crack, presently, is a bit more comforting but even so I'm not interested in paying for a product that is even nominally under DRM. So I buy games without DRM, from GOG/etc, or not at all (I don't pirate software, simply because that's too sketchy for me.)
I guess that’s a way to resell games? Buy cheap in a low cost region, sell the entire account to someone in a high cost region for a lot less than they would have paid originally?
Just a quick Google will show you others that have had their accounts locked and even apps removed from peoples libraries (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1pzpny/steam_has_now... )
Only gaming launcher that's different would be GOG for their focus on DRM-free...
I don't really care what the law says. I care that I can be without something I literally paid for, due to corporate sophistry, that I have zero recourse to address. Well, it's addressed now, at least in my personal case.
The other side is I rarely support this model any more. I haven't bought a Steam game in years, because one day, they'll all vanish, just like my money did.
Now the windows store, that's more worrying. As for the consoles, they have limited storage and I don't think I can ship my files over to the synology for safekeeping. You are relying on 'just redownload it' as your cold storage but that function isn't actually guaranteed to stick around. The diskless consoles are untenable to me compared to any other option.
Sony and Nintendo only do this because they control the hardware.
Gabe understands the bargain he has struck with his customers. That is not necessarily true of the next guy. Take for example Atari. Atari in the early 80s was a powerhouse. Because Nolan Bushnell orchestrated it that way. He basically had dozens of companies making one off batches for 'the next atari console'. It cost him about a quarter million a year. But it locked out any competition he had. When Warner bought them out they said 'thats a dumb expense get rid of it'. Suddenly there were dozens of competitors and a glut of stuff. Some deals are just understood for their side effects not the primary thing. Not all MBA's understand that.
But nothing will motivate someone. Unless they decide to do it. As a customer all I can do is go elsewhere (if there is an elsewhere).
Also as you point out there a plenty of other stores out there but they have not really made the same bargain (other than gog). GoG being the only exception but they positioned themselves as the 'old dos games' place. Even though they have plenty of other stuff.
It will be a sad day when Gabe says 'im out'.