So What's The Issue With Steam?

[Jackalvin]

Did I miss something? I use Steam for all my games, and I see people on the Forum who seem to dislike Steam? I'm sorry for being clueless, but I wanna know why.

[haanuman]

I see the same nowdays, steam is pretty decent in my opinion, my account does get suspicious "logged" in emails a lot more than Origin, infact my origin account never had any unauthorized access. Maybe it's the lack of good servers and security due to which people dislike it.

[Kegereneku]

I haven't noticed any bad vibe against it.
In fact I trust more STEAM than I trust Origin (which is by EA and all that imply).

[Injured Muffalo]

Don't know who you mean, but I don't like Steam because it's a proprietary system designed to control data and the gameplay venue. That's pretty typical now, but I remember when Steam was new and it was quite a shock to see a company demanding updates, DRM, content standards, web connections and supplementary software to do stuff like they were Apple. I refused to do any of that.

Of course there were still platforms like GameSpy Arcade, but that was totally voluntary and individual games could be used independently on-line or not.

These days, many games use Steam (or similar networks) as a venue for their beta testing or feedback, as you would obviously know. If you want to use Steam's forum though, you have to have spent money on Steam.

[mabor0shi]

If you want to use Steam's forum though, you have to have spent money on Steam.

1.They were like, "Oh you want to put your mod here, spend $5 USD first." I just deposited into my Steam account. Then I couldn't figure something out and I gave up and my mod never went on Steam. Still have $5 credit on Steam.
2. You know Tynan gets less money when people buy the game on Steam? They take a percentage.
3. They are Big Brothering your ass. Wake up!

[5thHorseman]

You know Tynan gets less money when people buy the game on Steam? They take a percentage.

Yes but he doesn't have to deal with returns, complaints about delivery, and server uptime. He's paying for a service by giving them a cut. If he thought it was a bad idea, he'd not have done it.

[mabor0shi]

You know Tynan gets less money when people buy the game on Steam? They take a percentage.

Yes but he doesn't have to deal with returns, complaints about delivery, and server uptime. He's paying for a service by giving them a cut. If he thought it was a bad idea, he'd not have done it.

Well said. You even forgot what is probably their most valuable service: exposure to the masses. Steam is great for discovering games that are low budget and not mainstream. You have convinced me, Horse Man 🐎 Steam is not ideal, but it is probably doing more good than bad.

[RicRider]

The thing about Steam and cloud stuff in general (and call me a tinfoil wearing Gen X I don't care) is that everyone is into data collection nowadays. Your gender, your preferences, your shoe size, your political beliefs... even what you ate for dinner last night. They want to know everything about you and then use that information to push stuff into your browsers and text messages, etc. And there's worse than that too and it's related to how people think and improving AI based on the way people play games.

So Steam makes you play every game while you're logged in, so they can collect all this information about you and then anonymise it and then sell it to anyone who pays for that data. You can bet there's companies paying big bucks to find out how people think so they can improve their AIs.

I played RimWorld for a while on Steam but at some point I removed the game from the Steam directory and put it somewhere else on my hard drive and blocked its access to the Internet when I realised I didn't need to have Steam turned on.

I'm not suggesting you wear a tinfoil hat like I do but the reason why I avoid Steam is the same reason why I avoid Discord, Dropbox, Facebook and Twitter. Third parties don't need to know anything about you, but they damn well make sure they can bait you into giving them the stuff they want by putting it behind a wall of some sort that you will give up information to get it.