Why I Deleted My Steam Account After 20 Years
Some may know me from over a decade worth of modding broken, under-performing or otherwise inconvenient aspects of PC ports. Dedicated users of Special K also know that I have spent as much time battling problems caused by Steam as I have defects in the games themselves.
My experience with PC gaming goes back a further two decades, to the days of shareware, dialing into a BBS to get game patches / user generated content and tedious DRM fetch-quests involving physical game manuals. I was irritated when Half-Life 2 shipped on PC and required a dedicated piece of software to satisfy DRM and patch the game, but at the time these were minor inconveniences. Valve tried to quell concerns of software preservation with the first of a long series of lies wherein they claimed to have a contingency plan for the DRM scheme reaching end-of-life.
Steam's DRM scheme has reached end-of-life multiple times without the promised parachute.
In 2002, the client ran on Windows 98. Over the years, they bloated the living hell out of the DRM client with all kinds of unnecessary and undefeatable features that hinder software compatibility. 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...
Because the Steam client patches itself and because Valve was lying about contingency plans, their DRM prevents running Windows 98-era games on original hardware. Requirements go up post-purchase without the developer doing anything. Neither the game's publisher, nor its developers are to blame for the game no longer working. The store you bought the game from is squarely responsible for your game not running.
Coming from the pre-Steam era of PC gaming, where you could purchase a game from whatever store was most convenient and then 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!
The proliferation of Steam for content distribution has fragmented PC gaming irreparably.
You no longer have the liberty of buying a game from wherever you want. You must consider whether your store is going to continue receiving patches, whether the store itself is going to continue supporting your hardware and software, and whether your friends online bought the game from the same store as you did (thank you Epic for partially addressing this).
I was a registered Steamworks partner and had access to developer forums.
No matter how many times I raised red flags about the implementation of various things in the Steam client (mostly input-related), my concerns were ignored. I watched other developers raising the same concerns for years with no action from Valve. By the end of my bitter dealings with Valve I was simply working-around bugs in the Steam client, not even wasting my time reporting the bugs because there was zero hope. The Steam client is layered on various open-source projects, all of which I could submit bug reports / pull requests to if those projects were causing the problems.
Unfortunately, it is all Steam's proprietary code that has problems and because that is coupled tightly to their DRM client, I now regard that code and all of the unnecessary features that keep being integrated into Valve's DRM client without true off switches as obstacles rather than value-added service.
Ironically, the only store that messes with input also frequently has input-related features patched out of games after you purchase them. Numerous games have native DualSense support on Epic, but are XInput-only on Steam. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl uses Microsoft's advanced GameInput API on Microsoft Store and Epic and supports Xbox One controller Impulse Triggers, but has had input functionality removed from the Steam version after a few patches and has been reduced to Xbox 360-equivalent on Steam.
I buy games from Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store and GOG precisely
because those stores have no bloated features unrelated to DRM crammed down your throat. Without those stores adding unwanted code that requires
patching the store's client to properly disable, open-source projects like DS4Windows operate free from interference from obnoxious proprietary software.
Stores should only provide DRM, and anything else that they do must be optional.
Stores must not invent proprietary APIs like Steam Input (the actual API accessed through steam_api{64}.dll, not the XInput translation layer) that require the store's DRM client to provide services that the Operating System provides for the same game purchased from a competing store. The native Steam Input API is an abomination, many games that use it have fallback code to use Operating System input APIs (i.e. DirectInput, XInput, HID, Windows.Gaming.Input), however Valve's unbelievably short-sighted design deliberately hooks and blocks access to those APIs as part of Steam Input's initialization.
Patching-out the native Steam Input API involves modifying steam_api{64}.dll, which is considered by many games to be tampering with the game's DRM. Depending on the publisher your punishment for trying to cut the Steam client out of the equation and preserve the software you paid for may range from the game simply refusing to run or deliberate glitches during gameplay such as missing assets or a screen that gets dimmer until you can no longer see the game (thanks CAPCOM, I hate it!)
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.
GOG actually guarantees they will not patch anything without user consent. CD Projekt has my respect and may have its full retail prices and 30% revenue cut; they earned it. Valve and others should not be leaching as much money from the publishers as they are without stronger commitments to the end-user that their software is going to continue running in the future.
The Lies of Valve
Valve does not expect users to delete their account; they think because you paid them thousands of dollars on your software library they can lead you around and nobody will ever hold them accountable. I do not have the patience to bother getting a company I no longer have an account with or any respect for to keep their word, so I am just going to mention this passive-aggressively and you can judge them on their documented actions.
They claim that upon deleting your account, your community posts will remain and will be attributed to [deleted], however this is not true and 50,000+ posts and 30+ guides (some of which had shared attribution with multiple accounts) are gone. In less than one month, all of this content went from [deleted] to literally deleted, despite their worthless promise otherwise.
> Will all of my information be deleted?<br>Your personal information is removed, but some content you’ve posted in community areas is not. This includes things like discussion posts, or content that you posted in Steam community hubs, as well as comments you made on other Steam account’s profiles.<br>
The biggest obstacle to game ownership on PC is the store you licensed it from, not developers.
A game with zero online features is subject to internet-based DRM and constantly increasing system requirements when the store self-updates and irreversibly patches the software in your library. There is some value to having a store automatically update your software, there is
literally no value to a store that forces patches and offers users no path back to the working version of the software they initially paid for.
Valve is right about piracy being a service issue, their service inevitably
I would encourage re-evaluating who you license your software from and whether long-term "ownership" of software that self-updates is even possible. Given the weak guarantees and outright lies of some stores, subscribing to a publisher's entire catalog of games for a month, or buying from Microsoft Store to take advantage of their cross-platform license to avoid the headache of PC compatibility may give you peace of mind.
