Comment on Steam is a ticking time bomb

• blindsight@beehaw.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Not parent poster, but I’m going to see if I can find up with some.

  \0. If you get banned from Steam, you lose hundreds or thousands of games.

  \0.1. You can’t use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.

  \0.5. If you’re blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you’re locked out of all your games that use VAC.

  1. Steam requiring other storefronts to sell at the same gross price instead of the same price net fees. This means nobody can compete with their 30% cut… On the other hand, they take 0% for activating games sold elsewhere, which kinda balances it. Still, this is probably the biggest barrier that’s maintaining their monopoly.

  \2. Discoverability since they stopped curating the games list. (Maybe? Not sure if this is a problem, tbh.)

  3. Normalizing the concept of games requiring a launcher to run/DRM.

  \4. Offline play functionality is inconsistent, so sometimes it breaks when people are traveling with no Internet access.

  5. Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.

  \6. Region-locked censorship, like gore in Germany.

  7. Some people would say region-adjusted pricing, but I disagree. Still, might be a valid reason for some.

  (Numbering is wonky because I thought of actual real problems later.)

  I think I did pretty well! It’s hard to find things to fault. It’s a pretty great platform.

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  • lud@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    0.1: You can’t use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.

    This or similar actions are very common. Getting chargebacks can be very bad for a businesse even if they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s also a common type of fraud and the easiest way of reducing that is presumably to never dispute chargebacks and just ban the account and/or credit card.

    0.5: If you’re blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you’re locked out of all your games that use VAC.

    That’s kinda the point of VAC and you are only locked out of online play. The good and bad thing about VAC is that it’s conservative in handing out bans, so false positives are relatively rare. It does of course reduce it effectiveness against cheating.

    5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.

    Adult content is a setting that I believe is disabled by default.

    Unrelated but I really like their new version of “steam family”.

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