this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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It really is impressive. Steam is honestly a pretty shitty platform in a number of ways, but their competition just keeps managing to be worse.
Agreed, I'd rather use GOG but they don't accept my card :/
I too would like to try it only if they have regional pricing and good Linux support. Maybe 1 day, hopefully within this decade.
Heroic works fine for gog
I'm gonna guess you're German? I believe I heard that German banks are gradually moving towards the international standard where debit/bank cards are indistinguishable from credit cards and so they'll be supported by online platforms.
That's a really wild guess lol, no, I'm Israeli. It's most likely because I don't use a normal credit card but something else that is anonymous and lower risk.
Haha the guess was just because I've seen users complain about how a website "doesn't accept my bank card" many times before, and it's almost always been German people. Over there, I believe, the most standard average person gets a card that isn't compatible with most online payment systems.
But yeah especially with a government as sketchy as that I can see why you'd want to use something with a bit more privacy.
I'd rather use gog but the prices are extremely high (like up to 3 times higher than on steam)
Is that bc of like regional pricing or? At least for me the prices are around the same
maybe...?
(i'm from ukraine if that matters)
That might be a reason. Most games in my region (Brazil) are similarly priced between the 2 platforms, with special email offers on GoG often being better than any Steam price.
I mean what is really shitty apart from the high fees? The platform is good, the library is good, the services for gamers are unparalleled
I think they may have remedied this eventually, but for a long time they were in violation of consumer law. They went a long time misleadingly displaying prices to Australians in USD despite having Australia-specific prices, and once they finally fixed that they still continued imposing international transaction fees on purchases.
I think they've mostly, if not completely, gotten rid of this recently, but they used to do some really gross exploitative psychological tactics during their sales. Then there's the DRM inherent in the platform requiring you to run their client in order to play your game—yes, other platforms apart from GOG all do this too, but that's the point: Steam is bad, but others are even worse. This becomes especially bad when you consider the risk of losing access to all your games just because Steam decides you should, or because you disagree with a changed terms of service.
Then there's just the ways that it's bad for the gaming industry. Steam acts as a monopsony as game developers are basically doomed to fail if they're not on Steam. Steam's strong emphasis on its regular sales cycle might appear good to consumers at first, but like the net neutrality violations in "unlimited bandwidth to [our partner website]" coming from your ISP, this creates a short-term benefit to consumers in exchange for causing longer-term harm.
Oh and also I'm salty about their recent in-game overlay redesign, and the fact that it took away the ability to "ctrl-f" to help me find the achievement I'm working on.
Steam DRM is opt-in and even then rather trivial to circumvent, practically all it does is prevent things being as simple as copy+pasting files. GOG can go completely DRM-free because the bulk of their offering is stuff they hold the rights to, way fewer publishers would put games on Steam without that basic DRM being available. They're not trying to defend against hardened pirates but opportunistic copying. If you want to ship a rootkit with your game you will have to include it yourself, Valve doesn't offer that kind of thing.
Their monopoly position is an issue, yes, but also frankly speaking not their fault. Though things will get interesting once the EU vs. Valve case is through and they have to allow resales, it's probably going to mean more than resales within Steam.
As to the cut they're taking -- meh. I think it's too high, of course I think it's too high because it's money not landing in my pocket, but it's also ballpark market standard. And much unlike other companies they actually spend the money they rake in on sensible stuff, like the work they do on proton.
Oh yeah for sure. But it doesn't really matter whose fault it is, what matters is that it's bad for developers and consumers, and it's a reason to want competitors to succeed, and to be frustrated that they're not.
Just asking out of genuine curiosity, what do you mean by steam DRM being opt-in?
The developers can choose. Many games are "DRM" in scare quotes, it's not that developers are enabling this but they're hooking into features such as cloud saves or the workshop and to get them running outside of steam you need to provide a
steam.dllwith stubs for some functions so the game doesn't get confused.DRM, at least from a programmer's perspective, only starts once you actually a) check for integrity of game files etc. and b) check for integrity of that integrity checking code. The bulk of steam games will throw some error when you try to run them outside of steam, but they're not taking any measures to prevent you from making them think that steam is running.
From a developer's perspective -- honestly, I don't care. If a game gets published on multiple stores I'd generally try and make all of them the exact same version so the game will check whether steam.dll is available, use it if it's there, and not if it's not. If it's only published on steam I may blindly assume that steam.dll is there and error out if it's not because I didn't bother to make a version of the main menu that doesn't have a "workshop" menu item.
I don't really mind whether you pirate my game, unless you're a millionaire that is at that point I will judge your character quite harshly. But I'm also not going to spend time and effort on making the game easier to pirate.
They probably mean publishers can choose not to include DRM on Steam
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
You don't need a third party launcher to use software to begin with, the platform is proprietary and mines your data. Valve engage in criminal business practices such as abducting kids into gambling
The funny thing is, their fees aren't high. You just got duped by Epic's propaganda that 30% was high.
In fact, it's vastly lower than the previous alternative, which was in store and took almost twice as much more of the cut.
Even today, 30% is standard for a digital eshop (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple), except Valve offers more services and benefits than all of them combined.
How is Steam shitty?
It's a DRM platform, it won't let you play games unless you update them, it can unilaterally remove games you bought, and the desktop application is a shitty web app. Just from the top of my head. There is also a morally questionable gambling system with a huge secondary market that they refuse to acknowledge.
That being said, I think its virtues outweigh its flaws. Games and their updates are deployed conveniently and with a great bandwidth, the refund policy is generous, and it gives indie developers a massive audience (as long as they make it out of the algorithmic hell). Then there's also Proton, Valve's massive conributions to Linux gaming, and the Steam Deck.
It's only DRM if publishers/devs choose so. BG3 for example is DRM free even on Steam. If you run the executable the Steam will not even attempt to launch and game will run just fine.
Common Larian W. I actually wasn't aware of steam not having DRM on some titles and I've found this pcgamingwiki list that has more details. Pretty cool!