Steam is a popular online gaming platform and client created by Valve for PC video games. A lot of people like to simp for steam and gaben online due to thinking that Valve is extremely pro consumer.
Is steam pro consumer?
Steam is a mix between good and bad. There are many games on steam (although some don't) that uses steam's copy restriction and makes it so that you cannot play those games without steam. Although you can circumvent that requirement with golderg emulator or goldberg emulator fork link. If drm is embedded in the executable file of the game, you could use a program called steamless (it is a legal gray area to break drm in software even for personal use since the dmca says it is illegal to break drm but it is legal to make backup copies of software you bought so use steamless and goldberg at your own risk). You cannot pass down or give your steam account to friends and relatives, and if the person you gave your account to told steam support about that, Valve will ban that account even if that account was apart of a will (link). There are games on steam that require third party launchers like Ubisoft launcher or Rockstar launcher and steam does allow third party drm like denuvo which further restricts how one plays the games they paid for. If steam was extremely pro consumer they would have banned those things. This is the equivalent of having to require someone to buy a chair with a table when all they want is a table. The Steam launcher is quite bloated and uses over 1 GB of ram when even firefox or foss game launchers like lutris uses less ram. Steam is based on chromium and receives the chromium bloat. If you do not have a debit or credit card, you can use Steam gift cards to pay for games. Steam has offline mode but will not work with denuvo restricted games but offline mode itself apparently can be unreliable and may stop working after 30 days. Steam created the proton compatibility layer which is a fork of a program called wine that allows windows games to run on GNU/Linux or other unixes like freebsd. Proton is free software and can be used without steam and there are forks like proton ge that are better used without steam than using normal proton to run non steam games since ge has codecs certain games need to play fmvs. It has additional features too such as wine wayland, sdl controller support if using a playstation or nintendo controller to play games, and hdr support.
Steam tracks and surveils what people do within the steam client and let's people know what games you are playing when launched through steam (you can set steam profile to private to not let random people see game activity but valve and people on your steam friendlist still knows your game activity). You cannot be fully anonymous on steam since steam requires full name, address, and phone number to purchase games (although in theory you could lie about those things). This is unlike phyical game copies where the game is stored on a medium such as a disc or cartridge where you could go to a retail store and pay anonymously in cash. Valve has a job posting about working as a data scientist. On the page they say, "One thing we have at Valve is data. Lots and lots of data". Steam uses psychological manipulative things to keep people on the steam platform. One thing is with achievements and recorded playtime with how people can compare these things to other people's playtime and achievements. If you look at the steam reviews of krita which is a free libre drawing program, people say that it is so convient to buy krita on steam since the windows version doesn't come with an updater (on GNU/Linux or BSD, you can just install and update with package managers preinstalled such as apt or pacman) and how they are supporting the developers even though steam takes a 30% cut and you can directly donate to krita developers on their website without even having to use steam and all money goes to them. And when buying on steam, you have to give valve your full name, address, and phone number to buy krita from them which makes it less convenient than just installing with a package manager.
Any alternative to Steam?
GOG is a good alternative to steam since all the games there are DRM-free and do not require internet or a launcher after installation. Epic games store is a worse version of steam. Ichi.io can also be a good alternative but is mainly dedicated for indie and smaller project games. Piracy or playing foss games is an option.
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