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> Steam Workshop is literally DRM as far as I'm concerned; there are plenty of games that are completely inaccessible I think that the Steam Workshop would be

> Steam Workshop is literally DRM as far as I'm concerned; there are plenty of games that are completely inaccessible I think that the Steam Workshop would be at least partially fine IF they allowed all Workshop items to be downloaded without a steam account. And even if a game developer enables this option, steam randomly disables it occasionally and the game developer has to re enable it all over again (this happened with Terraria). Furthermore, its really, really hard to download Workshop items for a lot of games. Short of buying the game (a good $30-70 down the drain), your only options are to: - Download through steamcmd. this only works if the game has explicitly enabled the anonymous download thing I talked about earlier. steamcmd (like the name suggests) also has a CLI which a lot of gamers can't/won't navigate. - Go through external services. These external services often charge you if you download Workshop items for popular games or if you download Workshop items that are new. - As a player playing through steam to download the item and then send it to you. In the Terraria discord server you'll find plenty of these people (I'm one of them!). This also doesn't work for games without an active playerbase.

danShumway 3y ago
I think you've phrased the problem better than I did. > As(k) a player playing through steam to download the item and then send it to you. If anything this might be my biggest critique of Valve's handling of the situation. Even with the DRM on top of Workshop mods, community mirroring of locked-down games would be possible to do in a way that was convenient for end-users outside of Steam... if Valve didn't occasionally just straight-up send cease-and-desist letters to those services. It wouldn't cover every game, it would still be a problem, there would still be legal and ethical questions about distributing mods without modder consent, but it would be a lot better than the current situation. Right now if a game has those restrictions turned on (which Valve seems to specifically encourage) you kind of have to go underground or interact with shady services or ask players directly, and so coordination between communities becomes very difficult. I can't read Valve's mind, but I lose a lot of sympathy for them when they're both not supplying any option for users to get access to mods without rebuying the game on Steam and stopping anyone else from trying to solve the problem Steam created for them -- at that point it's very hard for me to avoid thinking that Valve is being deliberately anticompetitive. I'd still have criticism of a less locked-down system, but it would be easier for me to assume Valve just doesn't see it as worth the effort to support rather than thinking that they seem to be taking a lot of active steps to make the situation worse than it needs to be.

danShumway 3y ago

I think you've phrased the problem better than I did. > As(k) a player playing through steam to download the item and then send it to you. If anything this might be my biggest critique of Valve's handling of the situation. Even with the DRM on top of Workshop mods, community mirroring of locked-down games would be possible to do in a way that was convenient for end-users outside of Steam... if Valve didn't occasionally just straight-up send cease-and-desist letters to those services. It wouldn't cover every game, it would still be a problem, there would still be legal and ethical questions about distributing mods without modder consent, but it would be a lot better than the current situation. Right now if a game has those restrictions turned on (which Valve seems to specifically encourage) you kind of have to go underground or interact with shady services or ask players directly, and so coordination between communities becomes very difficult. I can't read Valve's mind, but I lose a lot of sympathy for them when they're both not supplying any option for users to get access to mods without rebuying the game on Steam and stopping anyone else from trying to solve the problem Steam created for them -- at that point it's very hard for me to avoid thinking that Valve is being deliberately anticompetitive. I'd still have criticism of a less locked-down system, but it would be easier for me to assume Valve just doesn't see it as worth the effort to support rather than thinking that they seem to be taking a lot of active steps to make the situation worse than it needs to be.