Future museum
“And here we have yet another product of double human stupidity: one for stapling an electronic and another for buying the entire thing for over 120k dollars”
Yeah, even if it’s a big brand attachment or whatever, I’m never going to complain about a big charity donation. (as long as it’s not a bogus charity, of course)
Makes sense. Individuals regularly get patents in America and individuals regularly get cancer in America. It’s just an asset albeit one that may have emotional value. But cancer will cost you your heirlooms here too
In an actual free market all the corporations would act like this, because shit like this is what people want out of a business they patronize.
You will recall that there was a bit of a fuss a month or so ago when an undoubtedly-harried GameStop employee stapled some customer receipts directly to Nintendo Switch 2 boxes—and through the boxes, and into the Switch 2 units themselves. It was all quickly resolved, without lawsuits or fistfights, and with the ugliness now behind it GameStop is looking to make some proverbial lemonade by auctioning off the Switch 2 killer for charity.
No lawsuits, no fight required by affected consumers
The company made it right and turned a bad situation into a PR move that helps a charity.
I really thought we’d see some kind of ethical capitalism out of the whole GameStop thing but it never really spread.
Stores should only provide DRM, and anything else that they do must be optional.
But earlier:
I would rather pay a fraction of the price to play a game for one month than pretend digitally distributed games have the lifespan of a boxed physical product.
So, DRM is bad… but acceptable if it’s only DRM?
If DRM is a critical failure point for game preservation and ownership, then a store providing only DRM is still part of the problem.
In lieu of even the simplest commitment by Valve… Game Pass represent far greater value to consumers.
Game Pass is the epitome of temporary, self-updating, DRM-heavy software that you can’t patch, mod, or preserve. Yet it’s presented as a solution?
Valve does not expect users to delete their account; they think… nobody will ever hold them accountable.
Then:
They claim that upon deleting your account, your community posts will remain and will be attributed to [deleted], however this is not true…
Wait, isn’t it contradictory to say they didn’t expect users to delete accounts while criticizing their policy on deleted accounts?
Because the Steam client patches itself… their DRM prevents running Windows 98-era games on original hardware.
That shit is 25 years old. Does this goober really think it’s reasonable to expect support for an obsolete operating system?
Also, is this really a steam-only issue?
Valve’s… design deliberately hooks and blocks access to those APIs as part of Steam Input’s initialization.
This is typical behavior of API abstraction layers.
If Steam Input replaces lower-level APIs, that’s exactly what it’s designed to do. Epic, Microsoft, and others do the same. The difference is the option to disable it - not the architectural behavior itself.
In summation: This dingbat is a walking contradiction with an axe to grind.
I would field a guess, that this person is super angry about being left behind in the ever growing tech industry. Some of the complaints are valid, but directing them at specifically Valve seems super weird, since they are currently the best company concerning user-experience.
Family sharing: nobody asked for it, and it seems like a bad business move - Valve did it anyway.
Index: great piece of tech. Too bad about the price tag though.
Deck: fucking masterpiece. Blows Switch out of the fucking water.
Support staff: fucking legends. I’ve had multiple interactions where they have breached their own policy to keep me happy,
Privately owned: despite the incentives to cash out and make bank. They have a fucking spine, which makes them dangerous to other platforms.
This guy claims to be a long-time developer and modder, yet suggests Game Pass is better for preservation than Steam. If that’s their industry insight, no wonder nobody at Valve took their feedback seriously.
“You no longer have the liberty of buying a game from wherever you want. You must consider whether your store is going to continue receiving patches, whether the store itself is going to continue supporting your hardware and software, and whether your friends online bought the game from the same store.”
So are we pissed at the entire industry, or just Steam? You don’t have the liberty to buy anything from wherever you want. Go download Fortnite from Steam, buddy! Oop! It ain’t there!? Here’s hoping he deleted the rest of his online accounts while he was at it, but online blowhards tend to be hypocrites.
You’re only underscoring Kaldaien’s point about Steam by bringing up Fortnite, given that Epic is willing to release their products on other stores, whether it’s mobile or Microsoft Store on PC, as long as the terms are reasonable, not junk fees, as Sweeney puts it.
Yes, Valve is quite consistent about keeping things locked to its store. Steamworks is also limited to Steam. Proton is an exception, but the LGPL license of Wine simply wouldn’t allow it to be otherwise. Publishing the source code is required if building on it rather than just using it as a component.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of Kaldaien’s points, but I can’t say they aren’t well argued. Their opinions are valid if you’re willing to accept and consider their perspective.
I personally don’t see the point playing games on the original hardware, and I think keeping them updated for modern systems is a good thing, but I can see why someone might disagree and prefer running them in a VM on a traditional operating system, especially in terms of keeping the original way the game ran intact. I also disagree about the value of Microsoft’s game rental service, but I also see the value in saying “if I don’t actually own my games anyway, why not take it to it’s logical conclusion of just renting them.”
As I said, their points are well argued, even if I don’t necessarily agree on them.
I also disagree about the value of Microsoft’s game rental service, but I also see the value in saying “if I don’t actually own my games anyway, why not take it to it’s logical conclusion of just renting them.”
Yeah, monetarily it doesn’t even make sense, since it’s just cheaper to buy the game then rent them through gamepass lot of the times. Like I got Yakuza 0 steam key through a humble bundle that included other games and it took me a year to finish. Renting that on Gamepass to playthrough would have cost me 12 times the cost of what it cost to buy the Humble Bundle monthly that had Yakuza 0, and unlike Gamepass it is still in my steam account and not continued payment to retain access.
Why would I spend more renting and something that just stops working immediately once my subscription is up even if I don’t “own” the game on steam? Just bad money mangement.
Yeah, monetarily it doesn’t even make sense, since it’s just cheaper to buy the game then rent them through gamepass lot of the times.
Did you know that the main policy of Steam is its Subscriber Agreement? You never buy the games. Moreover, most people play games shortly after they come out, so they don’t care about something like Yakuza 0 in 2025. A new AAA game costs $60 to $70, but you can pay for a month of Game Pass for $12 and play through multiple new AAA or other games.
I’d rather buy a new AAA game than play it through Gamepass, since usually you can get those from like GMG for 10-20% off. And even if there was no discount I just don’t finish games fast enough.
AAA titles that I’d even be interested in are ones like Red Dead Redemption 2, which take me half a year or longer to get through. So paying $12 a month for it would end up being more expensive for me. And I don’t even keep access once the subscription ends. Would have to subscribe again and pay again.
Reason I put “own” in quotes was in response to people like you who say it isn’t buying. It was to point out that one time payment for much longer extended access is still something I consider way better than monthly subscription terms of agreement.
But that’s another thing isn’t it? If games like Yakuza aren’t worth it than it make much of the library not a good value if people aren’t only playing newly released AAA title. It’s wasting money to be paying games that aren’t newly released on Gamepass.
Anyways I haven’t bought a game at full price in years because playing at launch just isn’t important enough to me, so I’m just not the demographic for Gamepass. So for me trying to sell gamepass as some monetary savings just doesn’t apply to me.
To each their own. Some people are just too busy to finish a game in a month. Personally, I can finish a 30-hour game in a month without worrying too much, though I’d probably not even think of time if it was two months. That’s still $24 though. For $60, you can get four. I’m a patient gamer like you though and I wait for the deepest discounts, but most people aren’t.
Yeah it’s like for Gamepass if you decide to play mainly old games it’s not worth it. If you don’t finish new games fast enough it’s not worth it.
But, if you play new games and finish it fast enough it is worth it. Or for people who usually buy COD and Fifa annually because stuff like player base dies next new release or roster goes out of date so already like a subscription model.
Gamepass is like one of those things where unlike the Netflix model it can be hard to consume that much content to make it worth it. Much easier to watch a lot of TV shows and movies. And being a PC gamer it’s not like I need gamepass to play multiplayer so can view it like an add-on the way PS+ people do with their subscription.
And I guess enough people feel that way since I’m always amazed to see newly released gamepass games be top sellers on Steam. They decided they’d rather pay a one time $60-$70 to play at their own pace for however long the “steam subscription” lasts versus a month to month subscription approach of Gamepass.
They immediately lost me with props to the Microsoft store with what a pain it was to even access the game directory in the past. And even if it is improving is something that just locks you into having to use Windows OS as opposed to being able play the purchased game on other OS.
Hell with stuff like recall and Windows moving to trying to force OS online accounts compared to how clean Winows 7 used to be they just lose credibility for whatever they are trying to argue.
Yeah, I… ok, I haven’t read the entire actual post, but uh…
Yes, Steam is not perfect, but… just run it on linux.
Via Proton.
A project massively spearheaded by Valve, that functionally has resulted in, among other things, extremely significantly improved game support on older hardware.
Also…with… a great many older Steam games… at least on linux, sometimes even on windows… you can just download the actual game files, and then move them out of the Steam directory, and … back them up, run them outside of Steam.
Its usually much, much trickier to do this on Windows, but still.
Yes, this doesn’t work if its reliant on hooking into Steam for whatever various services… but like… you can do this, I’ve done it many times for fucking around with more intensive attempts at modding a game.
And you of course can setup Proton without using Steam… at all.
I am honestly baffled that Kaldaien, who has been modding PC games for quite a while… seemingly doesn’t know or realize this.
I guess they just don’t have much linux experience?
… fucking MSFT doesn’t even support Win98, XP, or 7 or 8.1, and 10 is basically on its last legs.
How can Steam be reasonably expected to work on OSs that aren’t even supported by their own publishers?
Ok, I’ve now read his post.
Like don’t get me wrong, I super understand the frustration of being a modder and running into unending stupid edge cases where you need something to work that just does not have an actual ‘responsible party’, because it lies at the convergence of systems that 2 or 3 or more entities built to work between them, at that point in time… but that just is the nature of this beast.
A whole lot of this screed seems to be frustration with stuff like that, and… weirdly being angry that deleting your steam profile results in your posts being deleted?
???
I think Kaldaien needs a big fuzzy hug from a penguin.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne