opinion No Steam No Buy?

[Broccoli Clock]

On 12/8/2025 at 9:50 PM, CastIronFabric said:

... so that I can use the pier to pier feature ...

I know it's just a typo, but it still gave me a chuckle..

 

[Crabsoft]

Valve has done some great things for the world. Steam still feels like malware. One thing I really appreciate about Vintage Story is being able to just launch and close it quickly without a million layers, updates, ads, social features, etc. It's just software on my computer, not a whole ecosystem of nonsense.

I think it's nice that folks trust the boss, but meteors happen. We have to judge based on the realities of today. Even static one-time cdkeys are Digital Rights Management. I totally get why makers of digital consumables would want to implement some. There's nothing malicious or evil about taking basic steps to stop the laziest of pirates -> doubly so if you plan to take the guards off when you're outtie.

The evil comes in when you interfere with paying customers, either degrading performance of your product or extracting value from them. The popular DRM tools are evil because they go beyond our transaction and insist on embedding deeply into my system (which is none of their business) or waste resources harvesting my user data. In an ideal world, we would show proof of purchase once and never hear from them again. However, most users today would throw a big ol' hissy-fit if they couldn't redownload things for free. 

The degree of evil really scales linearly with how often and how much we have to interact with a company after the point of sale.

[Broccoli Clock]

2 hours ago, Crabsoft said:

Steam still feels like malware. 

Hmm...not the choice of word I'd use. Remember the term malware is a concatenation of malicious and software. I don't think you could claim Steam is being malicious. I'd perhaps even say Epic (and their mining services) aren't malicious. Something like Origin or UPlay, yeah, they are malicious as both companies have effectively admitted as much.

Now, if you wish to rant on about how the orphan crushing machine of late stage capitalism slides the world into a post fact, techno-feudal, oligarchy and that we as individuals have a determined value based on how much data they can mine from us, then brother... trust me, I am all here for that!