Thoughts on buying work software through Steam?
polycounter lvl 17
What do you guys make of it? Is it totally fine to you, or is it annoying starting up Steam to fire up X software? I have a few on there, I use Designer there and it's generally okay for me. I don't really like it, but there's some fun side effects like it tracking your hours in the software, imagine if I had those stats on Maya or ZBrush...
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Whenever someone receives a warning from one of us moderators, only the member can see the warning, it is completely invisible to everyone else. It’s like a DM essentially. The key difference for the moderators is that warnings are easier to keep track of, to help us moderate repeat-offenders.
Anyhow sorry everyone for the derail here, but iam717 it seems you wanted to talk about this here instead of in a DM. Fine by me to publicly explain things (except for causing a topic derail!) and as always if anything is unclear, please feel free to ask.
@iam717 I think having offline versions are great generally, but it's way easier to duplicate and distribute. The most chill licensing design I've come across is your download pings the licensing server every 7 days or something, then you could have it offline for a bit but you'd have to re-verify that you actually own it eventually. What do you think about this? Piracy VS Ownership, where's the happy middle ground in your eyes?
- setting up Steam to prevent unwanted popups or other distractions from appearing can be a chore.
- Steam hoggs up RAM, why does it need at least ~566MB up to 750MB for idling around?
- I loath the mandatory time tracking on Stores like Steam and tend to always set those stores offline whenever possible.
- Steam servers can crap out whenever a massive sale is going on, potentially barring you from accessing your Software. Some Software even has always online on it (thus I refunded/stopped using those Tools)
- Downgrading/Upgrading is often unnecessarily difficult.
- Preventing Software updates is often made difficult on Steam. Sometimes I want/need to use a specific version. Offline mode is necessary to prevent this unwanted behavior. [It might make sense for Games but imo not for Software.]
- Biggest point against Steam for Software: being limited to a maximum of one opened instance.[It might make sense for Games but imo not for Software.]
For Software, basically any other store option is preferred and actively searched for and in before reluctantly having to purchase important programs thru Steam.open up the steam console, find and type in an app id,manifest id, and so on and on.
A trick albeit costly is purchasing twice, like purchasing version 2025+2026 and to keep at specific versions to be allowed of having "two open instances".
I don't have Substance products on Steam, but if they ever planned to remove the perpetual option and I heard of that in time, I'd probably buy the latest version, just to have a more current option on hand. And then it's just hoping that Steam doesn't shut down.