Sadly I see Gabe saying something that makes sense, and then Valve ignoring it to do whatever a corporate publisher demands, since it's a private company and not forced to bow to shareholders I kinda hoped they could take a stand but it seems like the whole recommendation list lately has either been AI slop or a corporate "AAA" shovelware game that demands I run a secondary client on top of Steam to launch.

Steam has done a lot of good things, but I think they need to take a stand against the publishers. Kicking them off Steam would cost them money, but it would cost the publishers far more, and I think they could use their damn-near-monopoly status to make good changes in the insdutry by simply refusing to alow abuse of paying gamers.

It's pretty sad that I have dozens of games that I can't play anymore because of an "update" that broke it I was forced to install by Valve because the publisher said so. It's why my 1500ish game library is all cracked and backed up in zip files to old mechanical hard drives (no need to pay the AI bubble premium on storage, not running the games off the HDD, I extract the archive to my SSD and play from it) now and any games I buy are form GOG with everything not sold there pirated instead.