The way you EOS is legally speaking theft and/or extortion. Practical suggestions to cheaply fix it

[cvr#seco]

Dear Valve,

being a senior SW engineer for over-a-decade , I fully understand why you need to EOS old OS support.

Still, there are different ways to do EOS. The decent and legal way to do End of Support is in the name itself - just stop providing *additional* support and updates, and renounce any legal responsibility for whatever happens to the unsupported instances. That's legal, ethical and okay way to go. That's the way we do it, BTW.

But that's not what you plan to do. Instead, you are about to revoke any and all access to play games which were bought for the full price (NOT on a reocurring-payment lease), by releasing a last "update" (actually a sabotage/malware) which will actively break and block all access to download and play all licensed games on the EOS'd systems. That is theft: I have paid you for a permanent license to a product, yet you want to effectively de-license me resp. actively sabotage and deny me access.

Yes, I understand that the "Unilateral amendment" troian horse in your legal terms gives you a perverse right to alter your Terms of Service in any way, so if you decide to require us all to submit 1000 photos of clown faces to unblock access to Steam, you could try to require that. Still, that doesn't alter the essence of your actions.

Your way of EOS is also textbok legal definition of extortion. Your EU Subscriber agreement is bound to the, quote, "law of the country where you have your habitual residence." Well this is our penal code extortion section:

"Whoever forces an other to do, not do, or suffer something using violence, threat of violence or threat of other severe detriment, will be punished by incarcenation for six months to four years, or financial penalty."

Your "EOS" is effectively saying - "Either you pay from your own wallet to a 3rd party, Microsoft, to buy their newest Windows 11, OR we will sabotage/steal/block everything you've ever purchased on Steam." Certainly a "severe detriment forcing to do something" in my book!


Being a Software Engineer who has worked on EOS-ing previous versions of our product myself numerous times, I fully understand the technical ramifications and complications - and also the alternatives. So I suggest these possibilities:

Option #1 - cheapest: Fine, cut me away from all the Steam Community and UI infrastructure, including any and all Steam Multiplayer, Community, Trade etc., to protect it against possible ITSEC compromise! But retain the last released version's capability to passively start, authorize, unlock and launch licensed and locally installed games, and recover local games from offline Steam Backup files. It's even cheaper than doing your "sabotage January 1 upgrade" - just adding a few firewall rules on your servers.

Option #2 - better: Before EOS, replace the problematic full-blown, GUI, Chrome-based Steam client on EOS-ed OSes with a simple commandline utility without any GUI. Still exclusively without Steam multiplayer support if the need be - that's legit for EOS.

That commandline utility would be automatically executed instead of the GUi Steam Client whenever the end user tries to manually run a game from it's installation folder, to authorize that launch versus the Steam Copy Protection - "steamcli.exe [PathToGameExe]" as the default argument[0]. It would also re-register to handle the "steam://" protocol handle in local Registry.

If the utility would even allow to download the licensed games using some CLI, eg. referencing a URL on steam website such as
"steamcli.exe -download store.steampowered.com/app/277820 -username=xxxx -password=yyyy -mfa=2AF1BC"
It'd be perfect and I'd even happily continue buying more Steam games over the browser. (And actually, some customers could even prefer it over the GUI client.)


But extortion, theft and sabotage are no way to do a legit End of Support.


P.S.: please don't redirect/hijack the topic to the excuses about why, malware, security risk and blah blah - that is NOT relevant to the point. The point is *how* to legally and ethically handle the EOS.

(Yes I know, deploy and manage dozens of WinSrv22/Win11 systems for our Dev Env and have good reasons not to upgade personally; no Linux Steam is not a solution as it doesn't support half the games; no remote-execution/streaming is not a solution license-wise; so please really stay on the how-to-EOS-legitimately topic.)

[Start_Running]

Wow. A senior software engineer that doesn't understand how CLient ->Servers work. If you have a cklient that is out of sync with the server what happens?

[Crazy Tiger]

It *is* being handled legally (no laws broken, if so make a case) and ethically (subjective anyway).

[Spawn of Totoro]

The terms of service has not been changed on the matter. It has always been the way it is. There was always a clause about the client and changing system requirements.

The changes to the system requirements are legal.

The ethics of it are debatable, as all such things always are.

The license for the purchases is not being removed or revoked. They will still be attached to the account and accessible through a system that meets the new minimal system requirements. All one has to do is install the Steam Client and log-in.

I know many who work in IT across many different fields. They all upgrade to a new OS for their personal computer in order to learn it and keep up with the latest trends and technology. They don't want to stagnate and become irrelevant in the industry(s) they work in. They also use their systems for gaming and had left Windows 7 and 8 long ago.

[Mad Scientist]

No laws are bring broken, nothing unethical. The agreement states the requirement to use the client may change. If you don't agree to that, then you would have to back out of making purchases.

When reading such a portion of the agreement, that seems obvious on an always-update client that older OSs may no longer be supported like what's already happened before. Thus, don't even begin using the service if one doesn't like that portion of the agreement.

Also steams version of Linux aka proton works with almost anything. So it is another viable solution.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Wow. A senior software engineer that doesn't understand how CLient ->Servers work. If you have a cklient that is out of sync with the server what happens?

And if you make the CLI cut down enough it will depend on the operating system for protocol and certificate support. That means EOL operating systems will lose coonectivity when server certificates are refreshed and use newer root certificates not understood by the old OS.

[76561199559798421]

I like the OP's statement i think it was more professional then any of the replies, also more intelligent, we have a few very smart people on steam, however the majority of replies seem to come from the other side of the steam intellectual base.

While steam might want to try and play the legal by law card, users aren't interested in the law, they simply want to play the games they bought, if they are denied playing the games they bought, they will simply just cease to buy games on steams market place.

its not rocket science its just common behavior in a world where people expect things and when they are denied service they deny payment.

[AmsterdamHeavy]

Originally posted by Welcome, Everyone is Invited:

I like the OP's statement i think it was more professional then any of the replies, also more intelligent, we have a few very smart people on steam, however the majority of replies seem to come from the other side of the steam intellectual base.

While steam might want to try and play the legal by law card, users aren't interested in the law, they simply want to play the games they bought, if they are denied playing the games they bought, they will simply just cease to buy games on steams market place.

its not rocket science its just common behavior in a world where people expect things and when they are denied service they deny payment.

Keep pretending that isnt an acceptable loss for Valve. That it wasnt considered.

[rawWwRrr]

Originally posted by Welcome, Everyone is Invited:

users aren't interested in the law,

They should be. Much of the law is what allows there to be a service like Steam to even exist.

Originally posted by Welcome, Everyone is Invited:

its not rocket science its just common behavior in a world where people expect things and when they are denied service they deny payment.

And that is perfectly fine. No one is beholden to Steam. There are other services available. If they provide a service that is more in line with what a user expects, then by all means go shop there.

[Satoru]

It’s funny when people who obviously have no idea what they are talking about think there are “solutions” to things in their imagination

[William Shakesman]

Expecting a company that cannot code a working back button in a chrome hack interface to provide a sensible eos interface is a bit much.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Welcome, Everyone is Invited:

I like the OP's statement i think it was more professional then any of the replies, also more intelligent, we have a few very smart people on steam, however the majority of replies seem to come from the other side of the steam intellectual base.

No Steam Intelledctual base. just the side that understands how servers and clients work...which honestly is like basic IT.

Originally posted by Welcome, Everyone is Invited:

While steam might want to try and play the legal by law card,

Is there another way to be legal?

Originally posted by Welcome, Everyone is Invited:

users aren't interested in the law,

Except when they think it lets them get free stuff or evade personal responsibility :P

Originally posted by Welcome, Everyone is Invited:

they simply want to play the games they bought, if they are denied playing the games they bought, they will simply just cease to buy games on steams market place.

That's their choice. Thing is. they're gonna hit that wall at somepoint regardless. And honestly if they can't spend 60 bucks or less. they really aren't contributing that much to the revenue stream any way :P

Originally posted by Welcome, Everyone is Invited:

its not rocket science its just common behavior in a world where people expect things and when they are denied service they deny payment.

At this point STeam doesn't lose anything by losing them. They weren't spending much to begin with, and they weren't likely to spend much going forward. at this point it's just less server load for steam.

Or to put it in black and white. STeam already has your money. They already gave you your games. Whether or not you want to maintain access to them is really not their concern.

[Satoru]

Originally posted by William Shakesman:

Expecting a company that cannot code a working back button in a chrome hack interface to provide a sensible eos interface is a bit much.

So apparently Microsoft is also too dumb to make its own browser too hm?

[lsdninja]

I love how threads like this fail to realise that Valve’s own bean counters have already gone through this and what we’re looking at is the cheapest, most practical solution for them.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Originally posted by William Shakesman:

Expecting a company that cannot code a working back button in a chrome hack interface to provide a sensible eos interface is a bit much.

So apparently Microsoft is also too dumb to make its own browser too hm?

Internet Explorers and Edge

[lsdninja]

Originally posted by Satoru:

So apparently Microsoft is also too dumb to make its own browser too hm?

The irony in Microsoft adopting Chromium as the base of Edge because Google kept screwing with them will never not be funny.