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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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They have a monopoly but that's because they're just the best service. It's not just that they were the first, they're just consistently the best. Everybody who has spun up another ancillary launcher and DRM service has always made an inferior product to Valve's.
Epic games bribes you with free games, launched without a functioning cart, and hoovers your data.
EA has gone through Origin and the EA app, both of which are awful; Origin being the butt of jokes for years and the EA app being an unstable piece of garbage that logs you out every day with "a particularly annoying bug".
Ubisoft. Self explanatory.
I could keep going on, but Valve earned their position in the market. Could they reduce the cut and still exist with a good profit? Absolutely, but that's the only thing I'd really want them to change - treat the devs a bit more fairly.
Any way to limit this?
EA is worse with data collection imo. Or at least just as bad.
Steam has always done a little bit of it, particularly their hardware surveys, but even then it's never felt so creepy when they do it.
Steam's hardware survey gathers a narrow set of hardware info, shows you what it finds, and asks permission before sending. It is completely ~~transparent~~ forthcoming and optional. That is not hoovering up your data.
Yeah, the one thing I would say is that you can never be 100% certain what data is being gathered by closed source software, especially if there is an encrypted communication channel. Saying that though, Valve are decently trustworthy.
Agreed; I would much prefer games and their storefronts to be open-source.
Of what we have today, though, most of Steam's competitors are far worse in this area.
Special nod to GOG, which lets you download games with a web browser. (Does Itch do this, too?)
And what gives about hardware.
The personal data is the scary stuff.
The payment history, the invested money, browsing history, mouse movement tracking, other programs installed on the pc and so on.