I will not buy your steam game

It’s a weird time for video games.

Console prices are going up, not down. Nintendo wants me to stop playing games in English. Xbox has lost the plot. This week Sony announced the end of physical media. And an incredible number of video game developers are getting layed off.

Since I won’t be getting another console, I won’t be playing the next Zelda game. This, I have come to terms with (with thanks to Frank Cifaldi). It’s OK, I’ll just play desktop…

Steam has a monopoly on desktop sales. They take a 30% cut and keep all earnings of developers that make less than 140 USD in sales. You’ve seen people trying to get you to wishlist their game. It’s desperate out there.

So it’s also time for me to stop giving money to Steam. Ultimately, I don’t own anything I bought there and they could take my access from me at any moment. I can’t back them up; I can’t give them to my friends and when I open a game, Steam first shows me a sales page! I’m honestly not sure why ever I tolerated it.

Developers release on Steam because that’s where the customers are. Until the customers go somewhere else this will continue. And it’s OK, since no-one is going to buy your game anyway, this shouldn’t be a problem.

If I have a spine, the last Steam game I will ever purchase is The Wide Open Sky is Running Out of Catfish. Which is a game made with love by a lovely gay couple. It has 100% positive reviews which Steam markets only as “positive” since it only has 44 reviews.

Get fucked.

Instead I’ll be playing your weird little PICO-8 games; your PS Vita homebrews; your fan-fiction, visual novel odyssey you spent your weekends on; your game jam entries. I may even play my backlog. I’ll be on any other platform you want me to be and ideally I’d like to just send you my money directly.

But if your game is only on Steam, I won’t be buying it.

❤️

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Thank you for reading.

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