Skip Navigation
Gaming @beehaw.org ryujin470 @fedia.io

Modder behind the 'Swiss army knife of PC gaming' deletes their 20 year-old Steam account with anti-Valve manifesto: 'By the end of my bitter dealings with Valve… there was zero hope'

www.pcgamer.com Modder behind the 'Swiss army knife of PC gaming' deletes their 20 year-old Steam account with anti-Valve manifesto: 'By the end of my bitter dealings with Valve… there was zero hope'

"You no longer have the liberty of buying a game from wherever you want."

Modder behind the 'Swiss army knife of PC gaming' deletes their 20 year-old Steam account with anti-Valve manifesto: 'By the end of my bitter dealings with Valve… there was zero hope'
77
77 comments

  • Reposting my comment from the other post:

    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.

      • Some of the complaints are valid, but their solutions are just as baffling as their targets.

        It seems evident that they've either got a case of cognitive dissonance flowing out their ears, or they're dishonest in their motivation.

        In any case, you're right, it is weird to point the finger at valve, especially since they've done so much for gaming as a whole;

        • Proton: should speak for itself. Carves games out of M$'s gated community.
        • Platform features: workshop, discussions, groups, guides. Fucking amazing.
        • 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.

  • 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.

  • Kaldaien in need of more attention? How is this news?

  • Here's the actual source, I don't think the article really adds anything

    https://gist.github.com/Kaldaien/c66bf3dca62a5ac63785714f686e60ad

    Enter Monthly Subscription Game Libraries and DRM-free → Exit Steam

    I strongly disagree with this paragraph, as we saw with Netflix and video streaming monthly subscriptions are a trap which allows a massive increase tot he cost to the consumer and a noticeable drop in the quality of the content in a way steams model simply does not.

  • There is a valid argument against the DRM being that your ancient air-gapped system should be able to run the game still but can't run the DRM due to the requirements changing after the point of purchase. Perhaps there is a discussion to be had about whether DRM should be removed once you change the system requirements drastically, but this feels like a rare circumstance.

    The simple solution is to get DRM-free copies from GOG where possible. Archive the installers if you're worried about future compatibility. That way you can have a nostalgic Windows 98 machine or whatever that only plays games and won't bug you with random unprovoked changes and updates from day to day.

  • The author of this article reflexively and illogically defends Steam (like usual):

    But at least some of what Kaldaien complains about isn't necessarily on Steam's shoulders. It's well within devs' powers to provide players with access to older game versions on Steam (KOTOR 2, which I recently replayed, lets you access its pre-Aspyr version via a beta branch, for instance), but many of them elect not to. That strikes me as an issue with individual devs rather than Steam as a whole, and as for Steam Input? Well, again, if there's a problem there it's with developers electing to use that API over OS-native ones that's the issue.

    He literally completely misses the modder's point. Steam itself will not run on the original machine you purchased KOTOR 2 on. You can buy a gaming machine, purchase a game through steam and 6 years later, one random day you're suddenly no longer able to play your game, simply because Valve has decided that the version of Steam that you bought the game through is no longer ok and now you need to upgrade your hardware and OS to play the same game you've been playing for years.

  • A moot point if you're running Linux.

    Your problem is your OS, not Valve's software.

    Though I prefer Gog's model.

    • 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.

  • I'm a big fan of Special K as it effectively fixed Nier Automata on PC for me. Kaldeian has done excellent, thankless work on making PC games work better and for more people.

    And though Valve shouldn't always be given the benefit of the doubt, I don't really agree with his arguments.

    Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10...

    Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father's Gateway. Maybe he means the game's original system requirements, as listed "on the back of the box" so to speak. But if I want to play SWBF2 from 2005, must I find an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and an ATI Radeon HD 5570? No, I just need parts with equivalent/better performance that I can find today. Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible, not less. It considers new gamers discovering older games and gives them a path to playing it.

    The inexorable passage of time, and the eventual security flaws that can no longer be patched, means that every single one of those devices will be retired. But that's why emulation and tools like Special K are important to game preservation. It's why Stop Killing Games is not retroactive and does not ask for infinite software support.

    • The store you bought the game from is squarely responsible for your game not running.

      I... Huh? If I wanted to play Dark Forces, a game developed for DOS, it doesn't just run natively on my Windows 10 PC... I need DOS Box. Heck, that's exactly what you get when you buy Dark Forces on Steam. Is Steam supposed to sell a game as-is, when it can't run on modern processors and operating systems? The store is responsible for the move from i386 to x86-64?

      Coming from the pre-Steam era of PC gaming, ... [where you] go online to a BBS or FTP site to get patches (irrespective of whether the store you used is even still in business), this is all infuriating!

      That era of gaming was the domain of SecuROM and it's ilk, an era where I had to buy a game disc THREE TIMES because my disc drive kept scratching the disc! This waxing nostalgic for a bygone era is not convincing, I know the dark magic, I was there when it was cast.

      • I need DOS Box

        It's Valve's responsibility that Microsoft stripped DOS support from their OS in Windows 10?

        Starting with Windows 10, the ability to create a MS-DOS startup disk has been removed, and so either a virtual machine running MS-DOS or an older version (in a virtual machine or dual boot) must be used to format a floppy disk, or an image must be obtained from an external source.

    • Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible,

      I think they mean modifying the minimum requirements, because their electron based abomination of a client does not support older systems

      so unless you know to use the goldberg emu, it will possibly make those games different, or at worst unplayable. I know of games that glitch with modern hardware, in one instance because it is so old the dev never thought about graphics hardware with 2 GB VRAM or more, and it was never patched either.

      its suprising that such a high profile person does not know about goldberg emu (or various other solutions), so they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.

      • they rather recommend subscription services that are multiple orxers of magnitude worse.

        Yeah that was a pisstake, a totally unforced error in judgment. Many commented on his GitHub repo to say as much. I sympathize with getting jaded about Valve and Steam, I understand the frustration with how exploitative gaming has become, but nuking his own 20-year portfolio, a thing he should be proud of, because Valve made him so mad he wanted to stick it to them?

        That's a highly self-destructive and ultimately futile decision. What a waste.

    • Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father’s Gateway. Maybe he means the game’s original system requirements, as listed “on the back of the box” so to speak.

      I think it's more about if you don't upgrade your PC.

      Say you bought a game on Steam, while Windows XP was current, then just kept that PC, didn't upgrade for whatever reason. Why would you, your game is running fine. But now Steam doesn't support Windows XP anymore or Windows 7 for that matter, even if the game itself would run on it, making Windows 10, eventually 11, then whatever in the future, effectively the minimum requirement to play your game. The dev isn't really at fault, because the game could technically still run on that OS, you just can't download it anymore.

      I agree with him in that regard, that it these things suck, however few people are actually affected by this. I think there should be some sort of "Legacy Client", but then you have to deal with security. Just saying, connect your Windows 98 machine to the net for an occasional DRM check isn't really viable. Installers would be the obvious answer, but that's not what Steam does. Maybe Linux could be the answer, but I don't know if it could be basically the same at one point with kernel version requirements or something like that.

  • Enter Monthly Subscription Game Libraries and DRM-free → Exit Steam

    In lieu of even the simplest commitment by Valve to keep their DRM client free of system requirement creep, business models like Ubisoft+, EA Access and Game Pass represent far greater value to consumers. The claim is often made that you "do not own the game" with these services, but you do not own them on Steam either; Valve stops pretending to care if their store's software breaks your game after you have played it for two hours.

    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. You can consume the entirety of a game within one month and pay an appropriate amount of money for the ephemeral service offered.

    this person is extremely misguided. the a copy if the game files, drop in the goldberg emu dll, and done. works forever, in as many copies as you feel like. DRMs can stand in the way, but that's exactly what makes it even worse on subscription platforms. and online only, or strictly multiplayer games? these won't work whatever you do, but that's not valve's fault.

    valve is careless but today other than GOG, it's still the best (read: least bad) popular storefront, and subscription based systems are simply just the worst.

  • 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.

77 comments