I literally never received a spam bot invite, and didn't know they were so ubiquitous. That said, I fail to see anything unreasonable about this new restriction. In fact, it takes sheer amounts of mental gymnastics to find anything to complain about.
Fixed that for ya
I use steam daily, It's mainly a development tool for me and a web store that keeps me up to date. Also my lifelong friends are on there and stuff. I have a 5 digit accoutn and have made I think 1 store purchase. The buybuybuy culture on steam is lost on me.
So you are effectively worthless to Valve, and using their store platform as your dev work and/or marketing tool for free, and you think you're entitled to do that without contributing to the store because....? FFS you can still post on those forums, even, just not as often as before.
Valve's customers are entitled protection from spammers and scammers a lot more than you're entitled to use the forum without restriction.
Also, if you can't spare $5 for your game development budget to use something you find extremely useful to your work, then you might need to re-evaluate your budget and/or career, y'know?
In all honesty Steam doesn't have a competitor, but I find it hard to believe this is the best way to take care of the problem, and I also find it very dry and boring to actually delve into and prove that so guess I'll concede there.
"It's not the best solution, but I don't actually know what the best solution is, but really it's not the best solution!". Uh, okay...
But it's funny how taking care of their spam problem happens to make them a SHITTON of money
How do you figure? The majority of legitimate Steam users will not have to spend any more money to unlock these features, and the majority of Steam users who
would have to pay, wouldn't use these features to begin with.
Someone already gave an example. Two friends - both without Steam accounts yet - buy that new hot multiplayer game that uses Steamworks for network functionality. The game is bought at retail or in another shop and only activated on Steam. Since both of them are now users with limited access, unless one of them buys another game (that he doesn't need right now - he wants to play this new game he has just bought) they can't even add each other as friends (and thus even chat with each other via Steam).
Boo hoo. If they can afford retail games, they can afford to have one of these friends to spend $5 for DLC on one of these games (or a cool indie or whatever), or buy a $5 digital game as a gift to someone else even, and then invite everyone else.
Dunno, but this looks like a major inconvenience to me.
Major? lol
(MEANINGLESS according to rich-GAF) $5
$5.... Rich-GAF
I think I've seen it all.
Steam requires users be at least 13 years to have an account, as is obvious on the account signup page. Do you mean your 13 year-old nephew?
Hahahaha, boom!
(from a Freedom Planet thread a while back that I remembered)
Why are you even posting in this thread?
Yikes, I think this is really the purest textbook example of concern trolling, haha.