It was a serious question, since I don't use Steam (Skyrim is pretty much the only game I miss anyway).
But now I'm surprised this didn't happen earlier.
Won't be surprised if Zenimax is currently working on a way to stop Nexus from hosting free mods. Yes...I can see a new patching coming which will only allow "approved" (read: paid for) mods to work.

i still use steam

huge amount of games on sale
including a lot that are not on gog

either i deal with steam or i dont play them

and i'd rather play them decided that its not worth fussing over drm and just deal with it
even though im not keen on origin
and even less on uplay

got enough fucking log ins as it is

*gets popcorn*

made with steam

I hope Steam goes down in flames :).

Try sticking with the "DRM-free revolution" for 7 years and your faith will be equally lacking.

The problem has never been with popular support. There are very few people who actively support Steam. The problem lies with an industry that is so arrogant and out of touch with its customer base that it simply does what it wants and pleads poverty when criticised. It seems to view itself to be above criticism and seems to be the only industry that believes that the "seller is always right". it feels much of the time that the customers have to convince the sellers to sell.

What the customer thinks or does is largely irrelevant, and we're already starting to see the first signs of wider-scale rebellion as people finally wake up. But the triple-A industry won't react - they'll just accuse gamers of being "unreasonable" and blame their customers when things go wrong.

Steam doesn't require payment for mods though, it's up to the "creator" to set that (and at the same time, the license agreement for Steam Workshop apparently says that it's perfectly acceptable to take content from free mods -- which is why "creator" is in quotes -- and incorporate into your own, which you then can require payment for).

I know fighting back might be tiresome some times. But we must keep pushing. Only by not giving up we will get back what is rightfully ours. Our rights as customers. Triple A devs are already seeing something similar to a video game crash. Everybody knows the big ones are falling because of their hubris. If we encourage more people to change the paradigm something good will come.

At the same time, the industry do recognise the smell of money and will follow the strongest such smell like blood hounds. If they recognise that the majority does not accept what they're offering, they will try something else. What they're complaining about is that the majority is shrinking (yet still being the majority by a fairly large margin).

Getting 51% of publisher's income to come from DRM-free sources is an astonishing task indeed, but if it ever gets there, I'll bet you it'll rise at least quickly as the task was difficult to begin with (how you'd compare difficulty and speed is another question that I won't even try to answer).

This paid mods thing if rolled out to the rest of the games, will kill the workshop (I don't play skyrim, so thankfully this hasn't affected me yet), every mod will be on moddb. Part of the point of mods is that they are free. They have shot themselves in the foot, I really do think this is their one biggest ever missteps (Perhaps the biggest). I still use steam, origin and uplay since signing up to GOG in January because it is the only way to play new games these days and other games that had non-steam on disc that aren't on gog. I also don't mind DRM that much, the only DRM I think is\was bad is SecuROM (And even then I have C&C RA3 on origin, which I am not sure weather or not it has SecuROM), starforce, and GFWL.

Yeah... I'm loving the #(%* out of Age of Wonders 3 since it was on sale during the Tower sales, but most of the mods are tied up in the stupid Steam Workshop crap and only available there.

*sigh*

Every one of Valve's APIs like that is a back door to lock-in to their DRM landscape. And they all have other replacements that don't require the closedness and DRM.

Nobody is going to move to GoG when they can't play games they want to play because GoG doesn't carry 2/3rd's of them.

Most people don't care about this stuff, they only care about buying and playing games. 7+ million concurrent users on Steam as I write this is proof.

I'm sorry but I believe the problem lies with the majority of the customers who, despite the fact that they repeatedly got slapped in the face by these extremely rude bad practices they continue to keep asking for it and even pay for it.
Unfortunately this is the reality and the world we live in.

It doesnt matter if they support that platform actively. What is real and 100% true is the fact that they support it pasively by buying and playing games and dlcs there and thus telling the market the direction they want it to go to. Which is, guess what, exactly towards these bad practices which get worser and worser as days go by.

I've visited an internet forum in the past that required people to use proper grammar. Whenever someone new came along and misplaced a word a moderator would jump in, give them a warning and correct the mistake. It was actually quite fun because I recall people weren't too annoyed by it, new or old members alike, plus it motivated members to actually use their knowledge of the language instead of relying on slang or quick terms like "u" instead of you. Granted, no one likes neurotic grammar nazis that don't do it because they want to teach but because they want to display their superiority complex.

You forgot Diablo III's DRM and similar persistent internet conection DRMs. Well I hate almost all forms of modern DRM. Back in the day DRM meant either a key or the need to put the disk on, that was acceptable because you could still instal it on many computers so if you got a new one or had to format your current PC you could still instal the game without worries, and you never needed internet. Now there are so many autenthication tools and instal limits it becomes intrusive.
Well, that means gamers need to re instal their dignity.

Some people just want to enjoy their hobby and play Skyrim. Dignity has nothing to do with it. There are better things in the world to worry about dignity with.

This whole thing just makes me sad. Everything nowadays is DLC this, DLC that, DRM here, DRM there, monitize every little thing and throw up restrictions everywhere. That feeling of this just being a fun hobby has gone and everything is commercialized up to your ears.

At least there's still GOG.