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Steam Input and Steam Play both work fine with games bought elsewhere, you just have to add them as non-Steam games to your library. Though even if they didn't

Steam Input and Steam Play both work fine with games bought elsewhere, you just have to add them as non-Steam games to your library. Though even if they didn't, I can't see how these features being exclusive to Steam "punishes" users for buying games elsewhere. The most probable alternative scenario is that these features wouldn't exist at all. The biggest alternative to Steam Workshop is Nexus Mods, which is ironically far less friendly to mod developers.

danShumway 3y ago
> Steam Input and Steam Play both work fine with games bought elsewhere, you just have to add them as non-Steam games to your library. I've talked about this in a sibling comment more, but as far as I can tell, no they really don't. Valve does ownership checks for a nontrivial number of games before downloading workshop mods. And I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that 3rd-party games can be linked to the workshop, I am not aware of any mechanism to do that. I'd definitely be using it if it existed :) Steam Input partially works with 3rd-party games but won't work with things like glyphs and seems to (in my experience) have very limited support for searching for existing configs. > The most probable alternative scenario is that these features wouldn't exist at all. I strongly disagree with this, and I think if we slip into thinking in this way, you can excuse almost any abusive behavior. It's just as plausible to say that without Epic's exclusive sponsorship a number of indie games also wouldn't exist -- and in fact many developers have outright said that Epic is the reason their games were able to be funded at all. But I'm not going to give Epic bonus points for doing timed exclusives, it's still abusive behavior. And similarly I'm not going to give Valve bonus points for building services that are arbitrarily tied to a specific storefront. There is no reason Steam Workshop and Steam Input couldn't be debundled from Steam. We're on here praising Valve for upstreaming code to Wine through Proton. If Wine wasn't already Open Source and Valve had built it from scratch, I don't believe they would have Open Sourced it. What I'm asking for (particularly with systems like Steam Input which could be standardized outside of Steam and which are heavily reliant on clientside APIs that run entirely locally) is for Valve to not conditionally engage with Open Source communities only when they have to or are they working with codebases that are already Open Source. "We wouldn't build this if we weren't able to use it for lock-in" is how companies get away with a lot of consumer-abusive behavior. And I just don't buy it -- if anything, the opposite is more likely true; we might have standardized on more Open mod platforms and might have gotten true platform-agnostic controlling binding support within libraries like SDL much sooner if Steam Input didn't exist and games/gamers weren't able to just ignore the problem and stick with Steam's solution.

danShumway 3y ago

> Steam Input and Steam Play both work fine with games bought elsewhere, you just have to add them as non-Steam games to your library. I've talked about this in a sibling comment more, but as far as I can tell, no they really don't. Valve does ownership checks for a nontrivial number of games before downloading workshop mods. And I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that 3rd-party games can be linked to the workshop, I am not aware of any mechanism to do that. I'd definitely be using it if it existed :) Steam Input partially works with 3rd-party games but won't work with things like glyphs and seems to (in my experience) have very limited support for searching for existing configs. > The most probable alternative scenario is that these features wouldn't exist at all. I strongly disagree with this, and I think if we slip into thinking in this way, you can excuse almost any abusive behavior. It's just as plausible to say that without Epic's exclusive sponsorship a number of indie games also wouldn't exist -- and in fact many developers have outright said that Epic is the reason their games were able to be funded at all. But I'm not going to give Epic bonus points for doing timed exclusives, it's still abusive behavior. And similarly I'm not going to give Valve bonus points for building services that are arbitrarily tied to a specific storefront. There is no reason Steam Workshop and Steam Input couldn't be debundled from Steam. We're on here praising Valve for upstreaming code to Wine through Proton. If Wine wasn't already Open Source and Valve had built it from scratch, I don't believe they would have Open Sourced it. What I'm asking for (particularly with systems like Steam Input which could be standardized outside of Steam and which are heavily reliant on clientside APIs that run entirely locally) is for Valve to not conditionally engage with Open Source communities only when they have to or are they working with codebases that are already Open Source. "We wouldn't build this if we weren't able to use it for lock-in" is how companies get away with a lot of consumer-abusive behavior. And I just don't buy it -- if anything, the opposite is more likely true; we might have standardized on more Open mod platforms and might have gotten true platform-agnostic controlling binding support within libraries like SDL much sooner if Steam Input didn't exist and games/gamers weren't able to just ignore the problem and stick with Steam's solution.