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Valve faces a £656 million lawsuit in the UK for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers'
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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I think the DLC point is the one valid argument, although nontrivial to implement.
How do you think DLC works on DRM-free games works, like GOG? The game is just gonna check if you have the DLC installed, without any real DRM.
The main issue is, this is entirely possible right now for games to do, but it won't be integrated with steam, and needs to be done by developers themselves. I don't know how feasible it would be for Steam to realistically do something about it, but it'd definitely be nice if you could buy a game on steam, and later decide you want to buy DLC on another platform and install it onto your steam game.
I think DLCs are becoming a thing of the past in general. Usually the data for the DLC comes with the main game, you just buy a license to unlock it. I can't remember the last time I bought a DLC and hat to download something additionally or update my game. I'm not a fan of it, but this is where we are going. This just means that wherever you bought the main game from, you will also have to buy the DLCs, since companies will never accept to share licenses between each other. This is not a Steam issue, this is a developer issue.
Well, some games that come to mind are Stellaris, RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, and I think the upcoming Factorio expansion. And from those, I think it might be possible to buy RimWorld DLC off-steam and install it in a steam copy.
Fun fact, you can check - on steamdb, you can check depots for a game, and see if it has one for a DLC. If it does, then it is downloading extra files for it.
All that said, I wouldn't say it's 100% a developer issue. The way I see the accusation, Valve is very comfortable providing convenient libraries for various things, including working with DLC, that only work on their platform, making it hard to release the game elsewhere in the future.
I'm generally fine with that for a simple reason - Steam really does have great features that just work. However, if somebody forced Valve to make features like Steam Input available independent of Steam, it could be a great boon for gaming.