Steam is ze devil

I haven’t used Steam in quite a while. I initially started using it in 2012 after begging my dad to get me a copy of Half Life, much to the horror of my mother. I ended playing hundreds of hours of Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike throughout my teenage years, although Minecraft ended up taking a majority of that. I’ve spent an unknown amount throughout the years (hundreds of dollars probably) building up a library of basically unused and unloved game licenses. I have no way of reselling or getting rid of them barring the deletion of my account, so I’m sure all of my hard earned money is just sitting in Gabe Newell’s fat stacks of cash or some other Valve executive’s wallet.

This year has been a sort of revelation or development of my psychic outlook on my life. I’ve realized that the 12 years I’ve spent playing PC games on Steam have left me lacking in other areas of my life that I would rather have developed. I don’t really work well with my hands or I sometimes have trouble handling new social situations. I have career aspirations that aren’t being fulfilled either so a couple of months ago I decided to stop using Steam. I just deleted it off my computer and resolved not to buy any more titles off of it and contribute to that monopoly market.

Albeit, I decided to use GOG instead, but that platform at the very least lets you keep your titles offline and you have access to the offline install files regardless of whether you get banned or violate the terms of service. I’m sure other people would say “how dare you choose not to use Steam anymore? What about all the titles you accumulated over the years??” The sunken cost fallacy no longer applies to me anymore. I would happily go in and delete my account should I have the whim to do so. What has become clear to me over the years is being governed by impulses and consumer psychology is not a great way to live one’s life. Steam certainly has their mechanisms by which it entices its customers to pay for their game licenses, often getting them to buy more than they should or even buying things they’ll never ever play. I fell for the meme about a year ago and bought a Steam Deck, thinking that would get me to play through my backlog or that I’d be supporting linux adoption and development. It of course didn’t, and I ended up shelving and selling the thing out of embarrassment.

You could make the case that Steam is somehow pro-consumer, that they have a great refund policy or that they’re not making worse decisions than their competitors. The reality is that they’re very good at spinning stories about themselves and appearing to be the pro-gamer company. That they would never do anything to harm their customers (although they love DRM) and that they want you to play your games easily (be a good little consoomer). Not to the mention the burdens placed on game developers to get their games on the platform at the cost of their rights to sell the game elsewhere.

GOG has its faults and is ultimately just another company looking to profit as well, but at the very least their structure allows some redundancy and real ownership when it comes to purchasing titles off of it. I’m happier playing older titles as well before the industry went down the gutter. I’m sure PC gamers disdained the release of Steam when it first came out for forcing them to use a centralized platform to purchase and download all of their games. Internet speeds were pretty awful back then so it made sense to just have an install CD to throw into your computer to download a game. Steam obviously did away with all that, making the “right” decisions and turning the tide against physical media so that they’d be the ones on top of the market today.

I would recommend either quitting Steam or deleting your account at this point. Lots of young men and boys these days usually game to either socialize or get away from reality, however bitter and harsh it may be. We can always tell ourselves lies about how it helps us relax or how it differs no more than watching TV or reading a book. Some of that may even be true to an extent, but the reality is that video games these days serve as a distraction, desperately fighting against the other systemic forces vying for the attention of consoomers. Trying to get a leg up on the competition and keep people hooked on it as long as possible. Doesn’t help that social media and smartphones with all of its varied apps keep people from thinking straight. I still struggle with it myself as a matter of fact. Hopefully more people wise up to these circumstances and at least try to save their attention and hard earned money. If anything, playing classic games (offline and on low-end hardware of course) reminded me that there was in fact a time when games didn’t have to take up all our capacity for thought and attention. There was a beginning and end to a lot of digital titles and they were either released finished or unfinished. Failure for a video game these days means failing to keep peoples’ attention (or not making enough money for shareholders), so I imagine the video game industry has nowhere to go but down at this point.