Steam seems to work out pretty well. Why do I care if people can see what I'm playing, it's a much better system then 15 years ago - going to the store and buying a DVD/CD/Floppy and installing your game. You never need to find disk 1 to start your game anymore, never need to worry you'll get to the store and they will be out of the game you wanted to buy, or older games disappearing off the shelf. There are lots of sales online, and the prices are more competitive than before. If you're worried about privacy, buy from GoG.com, the selections not the same but no one is looking over your shoulder.
Parallax Abstraction wrote on Apr 11, 2018, 10:32:
So in addition to having a horrible to use web site, a marketplace full of shovelware and scams that makes discoverability impossible and is killing indies, with some of the worst customer support in the entire games industry, Valve has now destroyed the ability for the tools that gave a modicum of transparency into their black box to function. They could have worked on a private API to allow these places to work but didn't. It's almost like they're trying to hide away information that the big AAA publishers (who made up like 90% of Steam's revenue last year) keep trying to hide from the public.
"Our lord and saviour GabeN" is NOT your friend and never has been. Valve is in this for the money, the same as any AAA publisher people love to hate.