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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

I don't see what kind of regulation Steam needs. They are hardly the only storefront on the platforms they support, aren't the default one, have almost no exclusive content, and don't even take a cut if you sell Steam keys on other stores.

What is there to regulate? If you don't like their terms you can sell on a different store or distribute yourself, there's nothing stopping you like there is on a typical iPhone or Android device. And frankly their terms are pretty damned fair. For the longest time they took such a hands-off approach to their marketplace that people got angry about that instead!

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Steam did not offer refunds at all until they came into trouble for it in Australia and the EU. That is what regulations are for.

Other than lack of refunds and poor support for a decade, Steam was still the most consumer friendly app store. They got everything else right.

The family plan settings on an account are certainly not an example of getting it right. You can share a library, have multiple linked accounts, but the instant any one of those accounts fires up a game all other accounts are locked out of the entire library. Not just the game that is currently running, but the everything. Valve missed the entire point of having a family account setup and every time I mention this I get “shut up pirate” as the response because having kids isn’t a valid use case.

> The family plan settings on an account are certainly not an example of getting it right.

What other stores have a family plan at all?

Play Store

Basically every internet game/app store does this differently. Google's, Apple's, Xbox, PlayStation

I think even the Nintendo Switch is more fair about it, but I haven't checked it directly

This has burned me really badly. I had an account with hundreds of Steam games, and then my dad got hooked on some of the VR games I'd bought and set up on a Vive machine in the living room upstairs. I had to make a new account to be able to play new games. Then my nephew got hooked on one of the games on the new account, so I ended up giving it to him and making a third account for myself. That one only has a couple of games on it, since I've mostly just transitioned to playing stuff on GoG and the Nintendo Switch

Netflix. Amazon Prime. HBO. Disney+. HULU. Epic. Microsoft. GOG. Apple App Store. Google Play.

In most cases the regular plan is the family plan because most people live in a family and the extra features don’t harm people with individual accounts at all.

It's not close to an ideal solution, but I've started working around this by distributing all new games I get between three different accounts, all part of the same family. That way playing a game only renders 1/3 of the library unavailable to others, instead of all of it.

If the games you play are single-player (mine are), then simply run steam in offline mode to play your games. That way anyone sharing your account is unaffected. You can also use shady steam_api.dll replacements to not tell Steam you're playing at all (I'm actually quite glad something like this exists, I've been locked out of shutdown activation servers and other dead platforms in the past)

Steam actively banned users for getting chargebacks and defrauded ~20,000 Australians seeking refunds, Australia's like 5% of their users so they probably defrauded several hundred thousand more people worldwide. They're not a consumer-friendly company at all they just had an epiphany about their liability and updated their refund policy while being sued for a little tiny fraction of their thievery.

My biggest complaint about Steam is Valve’s retail sales. They sell a DVD with the installer for Steam and then you have to download from Steam even though you’re holding a physical DVD in your hands.

Me as a kid on Christmas morning 2004 unwrapping the Half Life 2 disc only to realize it’s a 6.5GB download over my 14.4k dial-up connection. My parents bought the physical disc for a reason, because we had a shitty Internet connection.

They definitely did not get everything else right.

I'm surprised you couldn't install the game itself from the disc. My physical copy of the orange box installed steam, but it also game with the game data on multiple discs.

Steam is not a monopoly. You can install other stores and you can acquire and install software directly on your computer.

AppStore and, to lesser extent, Google Play are monopolies, that severely restrict rights of their users, no matter what people say that 'Apple is not a monopoly because you can buy another phone'

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