Steam does not respect user privacy, at all:
In Steam’s privacy policy[1], Steam details that it collects the following user information:
Name
Address
Credit Card Number(s)
e-mail
Age
IP Address
Device Unique ID
Chat logs
Forum posts
Voice Chat Recordings
Hardware Enumeration
Steam also confirms that it shares this information with third parties. The implications of this are as follows: Steam knows your name, age, where you live, your banking information, and what your e-mail is. Steam shares this information with other companies (at least, to the extent allowed by law). Steam can use your IP Address to track where you are to the nearest county and can use your Device Unique ID provided by the fingerprinting spyware features inside Steam to track your usage habits across devices that you use. Steam also records all of your communications with others through its social networking and instant messaging services, such as all chat logs, voice conversations, and forum posts, and can share all of this information with third parties as well.
Steam is a self-updating proprietary DRM launcher. It serves 4 main purposes: act as a webview into the Steam store (in which Valve takes the lump sum of each and every transaction made), download and manage your games library through their Steam content delivery network and library UI, funnel users into its social media platform called “Steam Community” and most importantly enforce software digital restrictions via Steam DRM.
Though developers can disable steam’s DRM check and users can take any number of obtuse workarounds to crack steam security: the intention is to make it so that Steam becomes the singular monopoly and model for video game distribution on PCs.
Valve has also been guilty of inducing underage gambling addictions in young children (as young as 12) and has profited immensely from pioneering the virtual “skins” economy where users spend real world money to obtain artificially scarce digital aesthetics. If your “virtual economy” has a market cap in the hundreds of thousands of real dollars then it’s safe to say that you’ve built an extremely toxic space that preys on people’s psychology. Search “CSGO and gambling” on any site and you’ll find dozens of sources and documentaries on exactly how little Valve cares when it’s their bottom line going up. Valve’s Steam social platform also perpetuates, this, through frequent sales and advertising that’s impossible to turn off. Through “Steam trading cards” that fire up the dopamine in your brain to keep buying, to keep trading, to wonder if you can fork just a little bit more to get a new game or skin.
Valve supporting “Linux” is not a plus in Valve’s part but the culmination of years of thankless work by thousands of volunteers across dozens of projects to actually create a space that Valve could contribute to. In reality, Valve isn’t doing anything different compared to most large tech corporations when it comes to publishing new work and making contributions.
Steam is also intentionally a terrible product on a technical level, instead of publishing a Steam API SDK for app developers: Valve has realized that creating their own google chrome-in-a-box launcher would allow them to double their launcher as an uncontested advertisement platform for all their future products. This slow, memory-intensive archaic 32-bit application for Windows and Ubuntu stays always on in the background, ready to manipulate your psychology into playing more video games and interacting with the platform as part of your daily computing use (not too dissimilar to Discord).
Steam also is, like most US-based social platforms, a vector for alt-right reactionary content to spread. The content moderation guidelines in Steam are guided by how far Steam knows it can take it and again, are not so different to any other tech corporation.
I’m sure some 
will come and defend their treats and how steam is the lesser evil and all that and how it’s bullying to come after their treats, but I don’t care, you’re perpetuating harm by using Steam. You’ve given up before you’ve started and have become dependent on a multinational corporation who can and will get away with it again and again.
I’ve had a steam account before, it had hundreds of games that I’ve accumulated through years of Steam summer sales (probably hundreds upon hundreds of dollars in value in games alone). I decided to delete my steam account because I wasn’t comfortable having my entertainment outlet be under the whim of a company who represents everything I hate about the tech industry.
I started to read/listen to theory, I take walks, started a fitness routine, I enveloped myself in indie webcomics. I pirate all my games and have a retro-game library at my fingertips. Life got a lot simpler once the “[[ 90% ]]” tag was being blasted in my face when I opened the Steam app, manipulating me into buying slop I won’t even play or enjoy
We need to start supporting game developers directly, cut out the parasitic middleman, because sure as shit you’re not supporting your favorite games when they take an enormous 30% revenue cut just for their monopoly.
We need to start supporting game developers directly, cut out the parasitic middleman, because sure as shit you’re not supporting your favorite games when they take an enormous 30% revenue cut just for their monopoly.
Steam needs to be nationalized and transformed into a platform of the people! One means of gaming distribution to rule them all—an egalitarian platform that delivers only the highest quality button pushing and finger clicking! No longer shall our immaculate gamer proletariat suffer under the blazing hot sun of the capitalist monopoly that is Steam, and instead, they shall level up in the shade of a truly revolutionary gaming delivery mechanism! Socialism, with gamer characteristics!This isn’t really a refutation but Steam is kinda a non-issue compared to the rest of the tech space, much less American capitalism in general. When AI companies are burning through energy and water, Facebook is melting the brains of most of my older relatives, and Microsoft is enabling genocide, it’s hard to care about Steam knowing my IP address. Like what level of
does a person have to be on for Steam’s easily bypassable DRM to be something they think about at all?That said, I suppose in a broad sense you could make the same argument for all sorts of time wasting things, including Hexbear. God knows how many hours I’ve spent reading and arguing about meaningless struggle sessions. Still though, I find Steam to be comparatively less harmful than the great majority of large US corporations.
To add to the Microsoft part : https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/
wtf Microsoft ?!
“Easily bypassable DRM” is the same load bearing negation that “hey just go disable windows telemetry” is. They’re both uninspired responses to larger structural issues. I don’t appreciate you trivalizing this because you personally don’t care.
That said, I suppose in a broad sense you could make the same argument for all sorts of time wasting things, including Hexbear. God knows how many hours I’ve spent reading and arguing about meaningless struggle sessions. Still though, I find Steam to be comparatively less harmful than the great majority of large US corporations.
First part is a non-sequitor, and the second part is your own claim and also obvious just by the fact that steam and valve are games companies and are not near the size of much larger corporations.
ehh, how could it not collect such data if you’re creating an account, buying stuff, and posting things hosted on their servers? The shady part is how much of it it shares with other companies - like, yeah, obviously it’s going to share your login info with the companies whose games you’re logging into through your Steam account, or send your bank the info that this person with this credit card just paid for something.
The only game devs you can support directly are the ones on Kickstarter selling physical copies - there’s some fantastic stuff, especially for retro-gaming fans.
I’ve been a pirate all my life. At some point I had a Steam account, but I never bought any games, only played some free ones, and later I deleted the acc. A few years back I decided to start buying games on GOG because I don’t need to use any installer or launcher, I can just download a .exe and do whatever I want with it.
G*ming as a whole has been an affront to FLOSS. The vast majority of g*mes are closed-sourced proprietary software after all. This systemic contempt for FLOSS and FLOSS principles seeps into how g*mers view their proprietary software.
Just read how the way g*mers, even g*mers on Hexbear dot net, understand difficulty levels. If they truly internalize the four freedoms, then they will easily understand that difficulty levels are a poor substitute for difficulty mods, which are themselves a poor substitute for making the code open-sourced and allowing people to develop forks where the g*me forks can be as hard or as easy as the new developers want them to be. But the way g*mers discuss difficulty levels shows how they quite frankly do not believe in Freedom 0 or Freedom 1 (or the other two freedoms outside of piracy). G*mers believe that the dev’s artistic visionTM or the g*ming community collective wisdomTM should trump an individual’s particular way of playing the g*me (repudiating Freedom 0) and g*mers believe changing the g*me is an affront on the dev’s artistic visionTM or “cheating” (repudiating Freedom 1). This is why discussions of difficulty levels devolve to “git gud” vs “they want to target people who aren’t basement dwelling tryhards.” And this is just one example.
Steam violates Freedom 0 because it can block you access from your games and it violates Freedom 2 and Freedom 3 because it controls distribution. Kernel-level anti-cheats, which is just malware btw for the g*mers reading this who are addicted to their AAA slop, violates Freedom 0 because it’s not something you can just turn off without rendering the entire software inoperable. The disgust towards “cheating” in singleplayer g*mes is another instance of repudiating Freedom 0. Cheat codes should never be used even if they’re in the g*me apparently. Hell, even crying about using OP items or characters or whatever in singleplayer games is a repudiation of Freedom 0 because by what ethical or moral grounds should someone using OP whatever be shamed?
The fundamental problem is that g*mers are not only ignorant but also contemptuous of the four freedoms. They do not believe that anyone ought be able to run the software installed on their PC as they wish. They simply don’t.
G*mers are treatlers par excellence.
Gee, I have no idea what gaming communities you got into. I’m just glad every gaming community I’ve got into has plenty of modders and other people creating more stuff for it - and kinda everyone agrees it only made the game better.
hey that joke censorship makes your comment way harder to read for no value, and is probably bad for screen readers but someone who actually uses one should say so.
users can take any number of obtuse workarounds to crack steam security
You download an app. Open the gui. Select the game’s exe. Game is cracked. Steamdrm is by far the easiest one to crack. It really was not difficult for me to figure out.
Which violates the steam license subscribers agreement which has the chance of voiding your steam account entirely. Just because Valve doesn’t crack down now doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t in the future.
There are so many ways to circumvent digital tollbooths but the issue is that you have to do it in the first place.
Can you uninstall Steam after it? Does the game folder become portable?
Yes and yes. It just becomes a cracked game at that point, same as you’d get from a site like steamunlocked. Only for games that only have steamdrm.
You can get the cracking tool from cs.rin.ru, I can try to DM something more specific when I get back to my computer. It’s a pinned post it shouldn’t be hard to find.
No, it’s just good to know. There are a lot of games that I don’t think are ever going to be available on GOG, so if I ever want to make a backup from a safe copy that’s only available digitally through those shitty stores, now I know there’s a way :)
If your “virtual economy” has a market cap in the hundreds of thousands of real dollars then it’s safe to say that you’ve built an extremely toxic space that preys on people’s psychology.
Valve brought in $1 billion in 2023 from CSGO/CS2 cases alone.
Steam also is, like most US-based social platforms, a vector for alt-right reactionary content to spread. The content moderation guidelines in Steam are guided by how far Steam knows it can take it and again, are not so different to any other tech corporation.
People rightfully complain that Twitter and Facebook are cesspools but oh my god, any time I come across anything Steam Community it is worse than most things I see on there. I’m sure Discord also has some nasty stuff but you don’t see it come up in a barely related google search because you largely have to get an invite. Almost all Steam Community stuff is public to my knowledge. I cringe when I have a technical problem with a game and the only solution I can find is in a Steam post.
i have no idea who is using steam community stuff. extremely occasionally it’ll come up in a regular web search for some troubleshooting thing.
G*mers will then go on to praise Steam community as this great service it provides to users, which justifies the 30% cut Valve takes on every game.
Thank you Gabe for the infinite Nazi cesspit!
Of course they are bad. They just happen to be a ton better then the competition.
I would love to support devs directly, but there are no avenues for this that I know of. I would love to be proven wrong about this, but if a game isn’t on as many of the platforms as possible, it won’t recoup it’s costs unless a Jesus-level miracle happens.
Ultimately, this is such a minor issue that I don’t think focusing energy on it is a good use of that energy, as compared to other stuff one could be doing.
It just goes to show how captured the video games industry is by capitalists who get to decide all the rules, or the lack of them.
Yep. Same with every other industry.
Ultimately, I think opposing Nestle (not that I have a good way to do that either) is more important then Valve.
Nationalize Valve. Games for the People by the People!
I’ve had a steam account before, it had hundreds of games that I’ve accumulated through years of Steam summer sales (probably hundreds upon hundreds of dollars in value in games alone). I decided to delete my steam account because I wasn’t comfortable having my entertainment outlet be under the whim of a company who represents everything I hate about the tech industry.
For Linux gamers who want to move away from Steam, you can use Proton outside of Steam in Lutris. Just download whatever version you want with ProtonUpQT. It’s usually recommended that you use Proton for games that have a Steam version available (so pirated copies), and Wine for those that don’t. But Proton works for a lot of other stuff too if you have problems.
Good post.
If you absolutely can’t resist buying a video game, have some self respect and check if it’s available on GoG. You deserve DRM-free redistributables. You have a right to share your games with your friends and to store backups of your software collection in whatever way you like.
i commented the other day in a way that could be construed as “defense” of steam so I’ll clarify that my point wasn’t defending the company, rather pointing out the ‘value prospect’ of the product, rather than just DRM (which it absolutely is). most of your points are good save the last.
We need to start supporting game developers directly, cut out the parasitic middleman, because sure as shit you’re not supporting your favorite games when they take an enormous 30% revenue cut just for their monopoly.
this is the part of your post where we disagree. “wallet power” is a myth dreamed up and spread around by “free-hand o’ market” types.
True that last part was lib. The only real solution is to either break up valve in a anti-trust bid or to just focus on building a community of libre game dev co-ops who are supported by the collective rather than given a small portion of the profits.
Neither solution is particularly possible under capitalism.
Exactly.
Also one of the worst part that you understandably waved off, is that it became and stayed an oligopoly only because their (real) competition has only been interested in offering something worse, so it is enticing to people to use Steam and think of it as a well intended company when in fact it just has different priorities. To most people it appears as the better end of the stick (« the lesser evil » as you called it), but that mean they won’t move on regardless of how bad it is, they might not even believe (or choose to ignore) something better could exist. In a way it’s a bit worse than just being dependent or brand tribalism. I believe it’s still interesting to point out because not many companies are like this.
Tbh I think its also just purposefully (on valves part) impossible to compete with valve on its scale. The network effect of being the largest games platform means that either you go the epic route of selling at a loss or you become another miniature storefront for your own first party titles and also sell on steam.
If valve was compelled to release a steam SDK that could be used to build alternative launchers then that position would be more fragile since it would actually create unified launchers.
Oh I’d say it’s impossible to compete regardless of their intent, that being said yes they are absolutely taking advantage of this.
I don’t see how having unified launchers would change much though, I mean I like the idea for sure, but it’s not the software that made Steam indistinguishable from a monopoly, among many things it’s their store and how both studios/developers and gamers are compelled if not forced to use it. Even going through different stores won’t change much of that because most studios/devs still have to publish there.
Both “solutions” are still possible under capitalism. which is exactly why they are non-solutions. Neither one can fix any inherent trait of capitalism, such as its tendency to create monopolies.
Fortunately, there are other options: for example, a planned economy.
quality post 10/10
Kitten Space Agency will not be on steam btw
lotta gamers were big mad about it when announced.
