2023-07-09
You don't own the games you "buy" on Steam, you are merely renting them, and Steam can suspend your account at any time for silly or made up reasons e.g. account sharing (without refund of course). After you buy most games on there, you can't even play them without launching Steam even if they are already installed on your system. They have the same ability to remove games that you bought from your library/account as Amazon who have many times banned and removed bought e-books from users' Kindle libraries because they were controversial/banned or for other undisclosed reasons. Do not give companies power to enact such censorship.
Reject it and support DRM-free games, and especially free and open source games. Many game developers have pages where you can buy their games outside of Steam like personal/company sites, itch.io or similar where the distribution platform doesn't take a cut of the profits, or the cut is noticeably lower than Steam. Piracy is an option, you can still support the developer by donating to them directly or finding some other way if you want to. At worst you could buy the game on GOG which takes the same cut as Steam (30%) but the games are DRM-free at least.
Another way to get some games would be to buy physical copies (i.e. CDs) but these can be hit-and-miss as many such products today are simply an empty plastic box with a digital activation code in place of the CD (and maybe a manual, art, or some similar bonus) with requirements to make an account and other nonsense (related: some recent single-player games are actually not playable without an internet connection). This method is fine if buying second-hand/old games that don't suffer from this problem. All of this is not taking into account the required industry, waste, and retail distribution costs (profit cuts to the developer) supported by using physical copies.
If you can't find a certain game through these methods, is the fault of the company/developer for not distributing through them, so message them if you want to see change :)
A person I was talking to said that not releasing on Steam would be hard for developers, since Steam has many additional benefits like bigger audience, Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), Remote Play and many other features of Steamworks (payment processing, pricing, translation, distribution, fraud prevention, DRM, sales data, early access, cloud saves, achievements, statistics, leaderboards...). Sure, I don't deny you will reach more people if you release through Steam, and that Stean has some benefits. If people are urged to use other platforms more then Steam's popularity wouldn't be such a problem. Also in any case I'm not completely against some game being released on Steam (even though it may be harmful in some ways), I'm just saying that it can also get released by other methods at the same time (which would be beneficial to everyone).
These benefits are somewhat tangential to the original topic of distribution and the problems of Steam, some only matter for online multiplayer games, and are not necessary features (nor reasonable expectations) for a game distribution platform to offer in the first place. The fact that Valve offer their own Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) for games on Steam is just a mild convenience for developers, and many games on Steam don't even use VAC, and instead choose anti-cheats provided by other companies or develop their own solutions. Also I doubt the merit of VAC in the first place, you can find countless posts of people complaining about how many cheaters there are in games that use it. I've even had such negative experiences against cheaters in VAC-using games myself in the past. As for the other features, again I say a game distribution platform doesn't need to offer them, they are just a convenient bonus. Expecting it just complicates things. I think game distribution platforms should be primarily judged by the way the distribute games, and not so much on additional services they offer. These are just additional services they offer, what I'm discussing is game distribution methods and those features are not required for that, the primary "purpose" of those sites. Sure these might be a nice features to some people but it is additional overhead for the company, they have to develop and maintain such services, and it doesn't contribute anything to game distribution in particular.
None of these things even relate to the problems I mentioned originally, nor is any solution presented. I'm not going to recommend people to support Valve/Steam by using their platform, even if it has some features or advantages that others don't, because it doesn't negate all the bad things about it. There is no better way to support an (indie) developer than supporting them in the most direct way possible. Game distribution platforms take cuts of the profit from developers, dictate if/how they publish their games, etc. and while they do offer some benefits, there are other ways to implement these features, and to market and distribute games (some of which I have mentioned above).