The flip-flopping by Valve in regards to TF2 is strange – first they tell various TF2 standalone mods to stop distribution due to licensing issues with Havok, then they DMCA the TF2 Source 2/s&box conversion and incidentally scare an unrelated VR mod from distribution as well. Those were sad times for TF2 fans.

Today they release the full game code to the Source SDK allowing mods to easily release on Steam and even access all official game APIs while they're at it. What a heel-face turn with that whole debacle...

Just wanna leave that here since I did so much complaining about the bad stuff, I should also note when they actually do better

Outside of my responsibilities in the Denuvo Games group I've started distancing myself from the Steam forums some time ago. Valve simply can't protect their users.They have several lawsuits in that sense ongoing by the way. Hate groups just flourish here.

That ♥♥♥♥♥ started stalking me by the way but the Steam moderators just looove protecting gremlins like that while punishing their victims

I'd like to say that past self-hosted game company forums used to be overly and often unfairly critical of everything the developers did. I wasn't really a fan of that either but it was much better than this giant circle-jerk of corporate bootlickers on the Steam forums, while we have this massive grift happening where people pay good money for software and the developers can and often do use a killswitch to remotely deactivate it for everybody.

Which is something that's demonstrably illegal in every European country I'm aware of, it's just that the situation is not too dissimilar to the US where it's not financially feasible for an individual to hire a lawyer and go to court against a company over a €30 to €60 purchase some-odd years ago. Thus the grift is essentially just allowed to continue for the foreseeable future. The gaming industry in general has turned into a monster and the Steam discussions only seem to serve to feed it at this point

Eventually I call them out for being a clown who fabricates lies about me since everything falls on deaf ears, all the while I feel completely powerless and humiliated for having this type of person mischaracterize me in order to control the narrative and paint me a bad person. At that point I get my posts removed and issued this "you am disrespectful you be banned 1 day byeee" copy-paste message

This never happened on SPUF or any other vBulletin board I used to frequent before they all got killed off. Not only is the moderation terrible and biased in a way that allows trolls to thrive and suffocates genuine and insightful disccusions, but Valve even implemented systems that directly reward people for trolling. Looking at the front pages of any Steam game forum it looks like half of them are ragebait posts that are trying to farm these jester awards for Steam points, all to complete apathy from the moderators. These threads don't typically get locked for a long time if at all either

This then results in a long back and forth and circular argumentation which never amounts to anything, both because at some point they just repeat themselves and state things you've already responded to so you basically have to either go insane repeating yourself ad nauseum or quote your previous posts in response which then gets you banned for spamming by the way (ironic). And then they start lying about you. One is completely powerless against people strawmanning since the moderators have never cared about that, ignoring any and all context

Though in this case of course it was not even strawmanning, but rather a complete fabrication of things I didn't say and they straight up told me I should prove were lies, completely disregarding burden of proof – absolute clown show.