What I don't like about steam:
- Summaries have 4000 character limit.
- Offensive words are censored by default as hearts (♥♥♥♥). The option in the Language preferences to "never filter strong profanity or slurs" doesn't work and it's by design. To uncensor the hearts for real you need to add a regex rule below "*." without quotes which equates to "any word"
- Valve implemented "off-topic review bomb filter" which hides drm- and censorship-related reviews along many others. F.e. Skullgirls' censorship was handled extremely poorly where legitimate reviews were hidden as off-topic.
- The entire suggestion/ideas forum section is a very hostile toxic place with no diversity of opinion allowed. Personal suspicion: the entire global forum is filled with Steam Support members pretending to be regular users. They have a simple job of tanking all the inconvenient ideas people suggest and fallate valve 24/7 to the degree to openly praising lack of consumer rights and all the authoritarianism they engage in. They are not particularly smart about their cover either.
- In 2024 changed ToS to prohibit arbitration cases so people would drop current arbitration case valve is losing (Zaiger vs Valve)
- They changed "What's new" section to hide the News from games they deem you didn't play long enough, or didn't play recently. Most likely to avoid situations like Skullgirls where a game was censored 10 years after release, to keep the customer in the dark next time. It's a dirty and dishonourable play by valve, nothing to admire here. I do love when old games release news, when devs shows signs of life, that's awesome, you shouldn't keep customer in the dark just because of your heavy investment in culture war.
- 7/01/2025 - Steam has kernel access now to show CPU temp in overlay. It's unknown if kernel access will not be required if you disable overlay or set overlay to show fps only, but reasons for demanding kernel access are highly suspicious. They didn't mention kernel access thing in the news nor in the Steam Support article presenting the feature, because they love you, obviously.
- 07/16/2025 - Implemented rule 15 that allows Payment Processors to regulate content here directly. It is a case of PP blackmail but there was no need to give up so easily without a fight especially when other stores fought in a similar situation.
- 8/20/2025 - In addition to 'off-topic' review bomb filter they implemented region/language-based review bomb filter (turned on by default). Yay, more censorship on top of more censorship!

My last purchase on steam was in August 2023 when I saw how poorly Valve handled skullgirls censorship incident. All the usual (unconfirmed but most likely) valve undercover agents were spreading the same narrative on the forum about "toxic gamers engaging in culture war" even though hiding reviews just because censorship was deemed a "culture war issue for gamers" would never make censorship complaints any less relevant. Hiding reviews is highly immoral and should be illegal.
I used to be Valve fanboy before that.

If you don't care about any of that - that's cool, I'm happy that you're happy.
But if you're like me and want to avoid giving Valve money for evil actions they're engaging in, then:
1) Consider not buying games on steam
2) If you must buy a game on steam, consider buying steam keys on other websites instead. Steam keys are keys that allow you to activate a product on steam by pressing "Games -> Activate product on steam". Buying steam keys on other websites you still give dev/publisher money, and avoid giving money to Valve.
3) If developer doesn't sell steam keys on other websites, consider asking developer to sell steam keys on other websites.
4) Consider donating money straight to the dev

You may read more about steam keys here - https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys/
The list of websites that sell steam keys - https://www.isthereanydeal.com/