While it’s perhaps morbid, could there ever be a feature of Steam Inheritance? Eg, a person owns many thousands of dollars in games, passes away, and has a family that might like access to them.
Has some legal difficulties where you’d need to verify identity and have contact with lawyers to execute it, so it’s not exactly a software problem.
No. Because it’s a contract between you and Steam. These digital contracts haven’t been around for long enough for society to figure out inheritance standards yet, so the companies have all the power to just force your family to repurchase.
Nothing is stopping you from just handing your login credentials to your family. If they can’t figure it out then they were not worthy of your library.
That doesn’t mean that implementing fail safes would still be nice. I think Google has it so that your information can be dumped into another family’s email if the account hasn’t been active in 500 days or something along those lines.
Why not just have a select Steam inheritor account if inactive for more than XXXX amount of days. It could also crack down on dead steam accounts.
We kind of dealt with that for my Dad, but it was never really an issue. My brother just assumed control of the account and that was that. We already had all the access info, so it wasn’t like we had to ask them for anything. We just got it setup on this new Family thing yesterday though, so I can actually access most of his games again (for some reason on the old Family Sharing, his games got blocked out).
I generally use Steam forums/news for relatively niche indie/AA games in the economic strategy/city-builder genres. Rarely do you encounter overly heated discussion with some exceptions around Denuvo use or a particularly intense debate about gameplay approaches.
But I have seen some sections of Steam that honestly look surreal due to the level of toxicity and the overall bad faith tone.
Valve should honestly police this stuff, they have more than enough resources to do so, but they won't since it goes against the "scalability and automation" mantra of modern technology companies.
P.S. I don't consider free speech issues to be relevant in this case. One can always start their own site/forum and spam it with whatever they like. If product owners finds this valuable, they can join the shitbox.
Free speech issues are not relevant because it’s a private company. Free speech is about limiting the government’s ability to control speech, companies are always free to do so for their own reasons on their own platforms. While that can be problematic when you don’t know whether the government is leaning on the companies behind the scenes, what the first amendment is really written to prevent is the overt fascist gestapo tactics the Trump administration is now using to bully their critics.
It is important to understand the constitution and why it was written, so people can act accordingly. It’s especially important when the government is not acting accordingly.
I am not American, I have a completely different perspective on this topic than most North Americans (lived there for a decade, as well as Europe and Asia for many years).
I was using the term in a very broad sense. Think of it as more of an "off the cuff" remark.
I don't know how to make Valve aware of the blatant racism going on. Maybe they only look at twitter and reddit and there needs to be a "shitstorm" about the harassment the devs are facing. It's despicable how it just continues to happen and there doesn't seem to be a "account banned for improper conduct" on most of those fasches.
It’s definitely not just indie games. I was looking forward to the Trails in the Sky remake, checked on its discussion forums, and it’s polluted with overblown “censorship” claims, sprinkled with “Guess the game FAILED cause it went WOKE” cringe.
If only Steam had something like BlueSky’s crowdsourced blocklists. That would be a freeform way of handling the issue.
I actually respect the hell out of the dev here. Owning up to past wrongs, growing as a person, clear and concise communication, honestly that’s all huge progress.
Looks like you still can't adjust the font size with either ctrl+/ctrl- or directly in the settings. At least the larger pages will increase the font size slightly on larger screens.
Steam: the billion dollar storefront failing to implement an insanely common accessibility feature browers have had for 20 yrs.
As with the several times they tried this before, this is a train wreck of an idea for so many reasons. While I do love the idea of mod creators getting to make money doing what they enjoy, from the consumer perspective this is bound to be awful.. I don't want to have to get nickel-and-dimed by what are essentially third party micro-transactions.. with no grantee that the product I just bought will even work with the others I bought or that they will continue to be supported if the game gets patched a year later. Not to mention virtually zero quality control, leaving users to trust in reviews, AKA other customers who put their money on the line.
And from the mod development side of things, this is going to make building off other mods a complete mess. Think of how many mods you have installed that have had other mods as requirements to work. Are those mods going to need to be bought by the user too? And are the mod creators going to have to set up some kind of revenue sharing with those dependency mods? What happens if a mod developer uses a free mod as a dependency, is that fair to the other mod creator? Do moders have the rights to request their content not be used by other mods? And if so what does that process look like and who arbitrates it? Having seen this tried before, it makes a mess and long term it will stifle collaboration leading to weaker mods.
I think those are all good points, but I think they’re also potentially surmountable ones; I think the key would be to be as restrictive as necessary for which mods are allowed to charge. If only a small fraction of the most clear cut and expansive mods can charge, maybe even hand-picked by the developer, I think that’s still a better state than it was before.
Some potential examples: a mod isn’t allowed to charge if it has any mod dependency. Games supporting paid mods must support opt-out updates (steam already supports this easily via "beta branches) and mods have at least one version available to consumers that are guaranteed to work. Depending on the mod, it could be possible to do some automated regression testing, similar to how the Steam Deck verification works.
I wish that Steam would just unify all their damn search UIs. Like, take every criteria that they let a user search by all across their client and different parts of their website, and then make one unified UI for it and let a user search using that UI everywhere Steam permits for searches. Steam’s got the most-insanely-fragmented set of search UIs I’ve ever seen on an online service, which all have overlapping sets of functionality.
Among other things:
Sometimes permitting searching by a Boolean value — but only for one of the values. For example, searching the Store in the Web UI lets you exclude games in your library, but not include only games in your library. This is despite the fact that for tags, there’s a tri-state (Yes, No, Ignore) checkbox (at least now they do…they didn’t used to permit for exclusion there either at one point).
In the Store search, I can put an upper limit on the price I’m searching for, but not a lower limit.
It’s easy to pull up a list of games by a particular developer or publisher by clicking on their name in a game’s store page, but then one can’t use the Store search criteria to filter that down, nor can one search by developer or publisher in the Store.
Just today, I wanted to sort my games in the left-hand Library sidebar of the client by release date. The Steam client can’t do that…but you can create a shelf, another sort of search visible in the Library, sorted by Release Date.
I can sort by User Rating in the Store, but not in my Library.
I can sort by Release Date in the Store, but not search by it.
I want to have exactly the same set of search functionality in all locations that I can search. I want to be able to sort by all of those fields, search by all of those fields, and search for any value that a field might have.
That means:
In the Store search.
In the Library sidebar.
“Virtual categories” in the Library sidebar, which are basically “saved” searches that are re-invoked to build the category in the sidebar.
In Library “shelves”.
When viewing lists of games available as part of a particular sale or promotion.
When viewing lists of games from a particular developer or publisher.
It improved quite a bit since early days, it’s just the flat structure they used to run with led to a messy development and disjointed feature set.
Valve did make some changes in terms of organisation a few years ago so hopefully all the recent improvements will lead to a serious UI overhaul to tidy things up.
I’m still confused about searching by tags in the store. You can’t search by tag in the normal search bar, and the “categories” dropdown at the top doesn’t have all the tags I want.
Yeah, that’s also an issue. It should be easier to get to the “advanced Store search”. Most websites have some kind of “advanced search” or “more options” button or dropdown or something next to the search field. On Steam, none of that is accessible for the Store search until you’ve actually done a search, and then it’s exposed with the results. So basically, put your cursor in the “search” field, whack your enter key, and you’ll get a list of all Steam games in the Store along with all the options to do tag searches and whatnot in the right sidebar.
Sadly it doesn’t seem to add the possibility of whitelisting/blacklisting games. I do not want to share porn & VAC games, not even with adults, since the bans are shared to the account actually owning the game.
You can mark games as Private in your library now. It hides your ownership, play stats, etc. It doesn’t specifically say it disabled Family Sharing but it’d be silly to keep that. There is also a Hidden Games section which stops it from showing up on your list.
Edit: I just tested it with current Family Sharing (not this beta version). Both Hidden and Private prevent games from showing on another shared account.
That’s only for VAC games, right? The historical advice given by modders is to share your library, and use another account to mod it. If you accidentally login to the online portion of a game with a mod enabled, only that account is banned not the library owner.
This specifically says that getting banned on a shared account will also ban the owner who shared the game. Likely to prevent exactly what you described, where people could evade bans simply by sharing their library with a throwaway account.
You can mark a game as private and it won’t show to the other family members. I verified this just now after signing up for the beta and setting up an account for my spouse. The games I marked private don’t show up on their families library.
"This will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use it. "
So it sounds like the floodgates are opening and now it’ll be up to the users to sort out the flood of BS. None of this is truly surprising, while I’m not cynical enough to suggest their temporary stance was a quick way to score some easy points with the anti-AI crowd, we all kind of have to acknowledge that this technology is coming and Steam is too big to be left behind by it. It stands to reason.
I also understand the reasoning for splitting pre/live-generated AI content, but it’s all going to go in the same dumpster for me regardless.
I certainly think it’s possible to use pre-generated AI content in an ethical and reasonable way when you’re committed to having it reach a strong enough stylistic and artistic vision with editors and artists doing sufficient passes over it. The thing is, the people already developing in that way would continue to do so because of their own standards, they won’t be affected by this decision. The people wanting to use generative AI to pump out quick cash grabs are the ones that will latch onto it, I can’t think of any other base this really appeals to.
Definitely a great game. Recently had a pretty big update adding enemies and combat that has been fun so far but you can also just disable combat mode for a chill time building your swarms/spheres
I think the devs are making a mistake by reacting interacting the trolls.
They are people frothing at the mouth and sent on that steam page with a political agenda. It seems the devs think they will “change their minds” after they brought the topic of slavery for no reason…
So I will add this to my wishlist check if I can report the posts that are straight up insults or racists and move on.
The trolls in question can’t stand that this game might be successful and there is nothing they can do beside review bombing at release which should trigger Steam’s detection.
Don’t feed the trolls and entertain them with a discussion…
Maybe the devs are acutely aware of the Streisand Effect and using the trolls to boost marketing.
There are numerous examples of boosts in sales when fascists try to villify something. I imagine Kimmel’s viewership has increased even factoring in the markets he’s pulled from.
Nothing generates mass support like Nazis hating on something; nothing destroys faster than a Nazi embrace.
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