If you have, at any point, attempted to wrestle the PC version of Nier: Automata into submission, odds are you’ve downloaded and installed Special K, a graphics and performance enhancement suite that you can plug into all manner of games (both Niers, Elden Ring, Persona 4, and plenty else besides) to hopefully get them running a little smoother. It’s been supplanted by other mods—at least for some games—over the years, but the self-described “Swiss army knife of PC gaming” marches on.
What doesn’t march on, though, is its creator’s Steam account. Kaldaien, Special K’s creator, took to GitHub yesterday to announce that they had “deleted my Steam account after 20 years,” posting an eight-point denunciation of the platform over its update policies, indifference to feedback, and general impact on PC gaming as a whole.
Kaldaien’s post is pretty long, but to boil it down, their frustration with Steam revolves mostly around its update policies. “In 2002, the client ran on Windows 98. Over the years, they bloated the living hell out of the DRM client with all kinds of unnecessary and undefeatable features that hinder software compatibility. Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10.”
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In other words, if you bought a game for Windows 98 on Steam and did nothing, it would eventually stop working not because the developer had updated the game or because you had changed your PC, but because Steam itself—the store you bought it from—would no longer run.
As a result, continues Kaldaien, “You no longer have the liberty of buying a game from wherever you want. You must consider whether your store is going to continue receiving patches, whether the store itself is going to continue supporting your hardware and software, and whether your friends online bought the game from the same store.”
At root, Kaldaien’s frustration lies in the way that Steam as a platform extends itself into the games you buy, in such a way that you can’t deal with one without dealing with the other. That applies to Steam Input, too: “The native Steam Input API is an abomination, many games that use it have fallback code to use Operating System input APIs… however Valve’s unbelievably short-sighted design deliberately hooks and blocks access to those APIs as part of Steam Input’s initialization.”
We could get deeper into Kaldaien’s gripes, but I think you get the gist by now—the modder doesn’t like the way Steam has developed in such a way that it’s become a quasi-insurmountable aspect of dealing with PC games and that the platform, rather than game owners, decides how and when to update games. Kaldaien writes that, although they were a Steamworks partner, “By the end of my bitter dealings with Valve I was simply working-around bugs in the Steam client, not even wasting my time reporting the bugs because there was zero hope.”
Which, okay. Frankly, I don’t think Kaldaien is entirely wrong here (though I might question the props they give to storefronts like Epic and the Microsoft Store). The fact of the matter is that PC gamers have concentrated an enormous amount of power in Valve’s hands, and—although it’s done pretty well so far, at least by consumers—I simply don’t trust any private company to use that power wisely in perpetuity. There probably will come a day when we collectively regret putting all our eggs in the Valve basket, and making Steam such a keystone of PC gaming in general.
But at least some of what Kaldaien complains about isn’t necessarily on Steam’s shoulders. It’s well within devs’ powers to provide players with access to older game versions on Steam (KOTOR 2, which I recently replayed, lets you access its pre-Aspyr version via a beta branch, for instance), but many of them elect not to. That strikes me as an issue with individual devs rather than Steam as a whole, and as for Steam Input? Well, again, if there’s a problem there it’s with developers electing to use that API over OS-native ones that’s the issue.
Steam deserves scrutiny, no doubt, and many of the broader things Kaldaien points out aren’t unreasonable. But it would seem to me that, insofar as the modder’s specific complaints are concerned, the problems are perhaps a lot broader than a single storefront.
