this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024

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114

Steam is a ticking time bomb (www.spacebar.news)

submitted 7 months ago by corbin@infosec.pub to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

I disagree with the author, the enshittification of Steam started ages ago. Day one, in fact. It's come and gone in waves.

Yesterday there was an article on the exploitative practices of Roblox doing the rounds around here. Some of the bad praxis around monetized UGC called out there was pioneered by Steam. Online DRM for single player games? Steam was there at ground level. NFT stock markets? Steam tried really hard, they were just bad at it. Gig economy automation replacing human moderation and greenlight processes? They banged their head against that wall until they uberified PC game development successfully. Loot boxes? They are remarkably resilient. Where others have moved on, Valve insists on keeping them around for CounterStrike 2.

Also, CounterStrike 2.

There are also ways in which Steam is ahead of the competition, or they wouldn't have the near-monopolistic position they have. Their Linux support may be motivated entirely out of spite and an ironic fear of Microsoft's monopoly, but it's welcomed. Their client is easily the best in the market and there are crucial features from it that should have been universalized by MS or Nvidia and still haven't been, somehow. It's good stuff.

But it's been enshittified since day one of Steam, when it launched torjan horsed with CS and Half Life 2, and it remains problematic in many areas, including its role as a single point of failure for game preservation on PC.

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[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 10 points 7 months ago (7 children)

It's amazing that a company who's primary product is a DRM system managed to make so many people think they're the "good guys"

[–] beepnoise@piefed.social 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Truth be told, it's a little bit more complicated than that.

PC Gaming has had tons of DRM examples - from SecuROM (anyone remember those times?) to modern day Denuvo DRM.

So there are a few unpopular DRMs out there:

Disc checking based DRM (if the disc was cooked, that's your paid game down the drain)
CD Key based DRM (if you lost the CD Key, that's your paid game down the drain)
Online activation (you registered the same game on two different PCs? Try that again one more time and you're done for. For added bonus, sometimes the activation software would register the same PC as different hardware because someone had the audacity to upgrade their hardware!)
Always online - need I say more?
Cloud gaming - now with the added joy of not owning the ones and zeros you paid for!!

Steam has managed to use account based DRM while avoiding the trappings of pretty much all of the above (for some games you can enter a CD key, and that game is permanently attached to your account, which is great if you lose the disc, but sucks if you want to sell the physical game on afterwards), while the competition used any of the above (some used multiple layers of DRM, which is eurgh).

Then on top of that, hats off to Valve - they do tend to listen to their customers and give them what they want, even if the whole point is to keep them tied to using Steam and strangle out the competition:

Cloud saving
Steam Workshops
Game streaming via local network
Sharing the game library with family
Controller support with button remapping for legacy games with poor support
In store game reviews
Store algoritm suggestions based on the game categories you buy and what you friends buy
Discussion forums (even if they can be thoroughly toxic at times)
Guides (the formatting is awful)
Fairly deep and independent social integration
Built in audio streaming via Steam
Those card things that you can sell for a bit of money or craft

Compare that to Origin, Epic Store, GOG etc. They just cannot compete with what Valve offers in terms of features on top of features.

What bothers me about Valve is that

They have such a chokehold on PC gaming that everything else feels inferior, and no other company can really compete in terms of features
They have fought refunds in the past (as mentioned in the article)
The whole paid modding fiasco because Valve really wanted to financially exploit a community known to give stuff away for free
How they often abandon their own products due to lack of customer attention and their limited size due to wanting to remain a limited company
- I'm looking at Valve Index, and apart from Half Life: Alyx, I don't see much in the way of new games. Even worse is that I watched someone on YouTube basically explain that there are still glitches and weird stuff that occurs in the Valve Index - aa product that costs £919 here in the UK.
- I'm also looking at the Steam Controller, which has been very, very neglected with no talk of a sequel (given how successful the Steam Deck has been, I'm shocked at the lack of a "companion controller")
- I'm also looking at the infamous Steam PCs that completely flopped
How TF2 started the trend (at least on Steam) of microtransactions in games, and how CS:GO has carried that flag (and started a gambling community which has probably done untold damage to young children as they grow into adults and are confronted with the world of gambling)
How Valve, as a company that started off making games, has absolutely no desire whatsoever to make games anymore because of how wildly successful they are.

And this is the stuff I can think of at the top of my head. I was going to say it also concerns me they don't have a bug bounty program, but it turns out now they do.

[–] sus@programming.dev 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

steam's drm is a complete joke though? Tons of game developers add their own drm on top because it is so trivial to bypass steam's own.

Their main product is a marketplace/content delivery system

[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 6 points 7 months ago

The only "DRM" that they have is checking the game against your steam account the first time you run it. Is that great? No. Would it be nice if they offered offline installers? Of course.

[–] averyminya@beehaw.org 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You mean the trivially easy DRM that is a single patch found on GitHub?

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[–] philpo@feddit.de 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Steam is a major problem for a lot of reasons,but basically none of the reasons the author gave are the main problem - It sounds more like a whining of a Mac/Apple user. Once again....

There are hundreds of more important problems with Steam.

[–] YMS@kbin.social 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Would you mind to name five of those hundreds of problems?

[–] blindsight@beehaw.org 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Not parent poster, but I'm going to see if I can come up with some.

0: If you get banned from Steam, you lose hundreds or thousands of games.

0.1: You can't use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.

0.5: If you're blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you're locked out of all your games that use VAC.

1: Steam requiring other storefronts to sell at the same gross price instead of the same price net fees. This means nobody can compete with their 30% cut... On the other hand, they take 0% for activating games sold elsewhere, which kinda balances it. Still, this is probably the biggest barrier that's maintaining their 30% cut.

2: Discoverability since they stopped curating the games list. (Maybe? Not sure if this is a problem, tbh.)

3: Normalizing the concept of games requiring a launcher to run/DRM.

4: Offline play functionality is inconsistent, so sometimes it breaks when people are traveling with no Internet access.

5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.

6: Region-locked censorship, like gore in Germany.

7: Some people would say region-adjusted pricing, but I disagree. Still, might be a valid reason for some.

(Numbering is wonky because I thought of actual real problems later.)

I think I did pretty well! It's hard to find things to fault. It's a pretty great platform.

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