Why I don't use Steam (anymore)
===============================

I used to use Steam, Valve's digital distribution platform, but I've
realised this was a little naive. Why?

Steam's Terms and Conditions say, essentially, that Valve can
retroactively change the Terms and Conditions to say anything they like.
This is not remotely permissible under EU contract law, but as an
individual user, you have little comeback.

When they have changed the T&Cs in the past, users have been faced with a
choice of agreeing to the new ones or losing access to all games protected
by Steam's DRM. Therefore, if I'm to use Steam, I have to trust that Valve
will never bring in a T&C change that is unacceptable to me. For example,
if they decide to start charging monthly for access to Steam, I can pay up
or lose access to those games.

This is also not acceptable to the EU, which has declared that Steam
purchases are - well, purchases, and that the fiction that it's a
subscription service is a fiction; but again unless the EU cares to step
in and enforce that, there's little I as an individual can do.

So, can I trust Valve? Two years ago I would have said "yes"; I genuinely
thought that Valve had grasped the reality that the best way to sell games
is to make it easier, for people with money, than piracy. Now I would say
"no", for two reasons.

First of all, in August 2012 they brought in a change effectively
forbidding users to engage in class-action lawsuits. (This only affects
Americans, for practical purposes). This is clearly a substantive
change, not in the interests of the users.

Furthermore, it is interesting to note that Origin and Games For Windows
Live (and neither EA nor Microsoft are noted for their kind and fluffy
nature), while they brought in corresponding T&C changes, did not use
the "or lose all your games" stick; they required users to agree to the
new T&Cs in order to make further purchases. Hence, it's not just that
Valve are willing to make a substantive change and use that threat to
enforce it, but that that is sharper practice than the rest of the
industry.

The second one is that it does not just matter what Valve is like now.
They aren't going to start charging monthly now, of course, both because
they are a privately owned company, both highly profitable and not at the
mercy of shareholder value, and because they'd lose a much greater tranche
of income than they'd gain.

But... I still play Doom, X-Wing, Master of Orion, etc. Those games are
all over 20 years old. I won't want to play every game I buy now in 2034,
but it's pretty clear if I'm going to buy a game from Steam now, I want
some assurance that Valve aren't going to be a problem later.

I can't have that assurance. At any time in the future, the owners of
Valve - who may not be the current owners, and indeed who may be dancing
to the tune of short-term shareholder value - may decide that squeezing
the existing Steam users with "monthly fee or lose everything", or some
other massively disadvantageous change, is worth killing the prospect of
future sales.

There are two obvious ways this might happen - either if Steam is
ultimately unsuccessful (which seems unlikely now, but who would have
predicted that the High Street videogames shop would become effectively
obsolete?) so squeezing the existing users is all there is left, or if it
is too successful; we know that when a company becomes effectively
dominant in its space, whether it does so by competence or by monopolistic
practices (sort Google and Microsoft between those categories as you
please), it tends to turn a bit nastier once it has a captive audience.

Potted summary; I would not use Steam without an irrevocable clause in the
T&Cs that guarantees that, once I have bought a game, I will face no
further costs related to it, save perhaps the (utterly trivial) bandwidth
costs of repeated downloads.

This is not an unreasonable thing to ask; as mentioned above, the idea
that Valve can change the contract between us to say anything they like is
not even enforceable under EU law. They have the legal department; they
can, just as one ordinarily does when signing a contract, agree to
something that binds them into the future.

Last of all, part of the reason I am worried about things getting worse is
that Valve is becoming a de facto monopoly. An increasing number of titles
- even, of studios - are becoming Steam-only. When a company becomes a
de-facto monopoly - even when it's not because of dubious business
practices, like Microsoft, but because of being sufficiently better than
everyone else, like Google - things tend to take a downturn once the
competition's been squeezed out.

Google had to be compellingly better than everyone else to stomp every
other search engine into the dirt, but now they just have to not be _so_
stalkily creepy that you start actively looking elsewhere, and that's why
they're now selling data to advertisers like it's going out of fashion.
The best way to keep Valve honest is for them not to be thinking that
everyone uses Steam anyway and doesn't really have a choice.