It used to be a legitimate choice to publish for Windows. Even when Microsoft started trying to force every private file into the cloud, I wouldn’t have chosen such drastic words. But with the fall of the divided states of america to an authoritarian regime of rapist / pedo billionaires, if you still develop for Windows, where do you draw the line? Gas chambers? And my objection to Windows is not because of Microsoft. It’s because of being the government system, that the totalitarian government has its hands on all kinds of backdoors and will use them to sabotage democracies whereever they can.
My point is Windows is an ecosystem enabling totalitarian regimes and exposes all user privacy to corporations. Developing anything for Windows-only strengthens that ecosystem and is thereby anti-humanity, antidemocratic and just overall an awful decision.
I am not talking about the age categorization, I am talking about having to implement a customer age verification which they won’t do for the German market, and again, while this would be easy, I don’t necessarily blame steam for it. But that they do censor is unquestioned, and therefore more options are welcome, as long as those stores do not require a launcher, installer or otherwise intrusive software.
You forgot patreon. Steam censors the library in places (hello German government & fuck you hard with a rusty rebar). But even outside censorship, patreon game developers usually do not lock in their games into rootkit-protected anticheat/copy protection/whatever bullshit.
Only if those other partitions are not encrypted. Sure, it could still wipe them - but that’s something that backups are good for, and something you would certainly notice immediately :)