I had not used Steam for a very long time, not since its early days when it bricked my brand new hard drive.
Last week I downloaded the beta for the new Amazon game, New World, which is only available with Steam. I knew I wouldn’t play the game for very long because the beta only ran for two weeks and since I don’t want to get involved in any more open-world never-ending life-ruining grindy MMOs, I was willing to let Steam bog down my computer for a couple weeks just to have a look.
The game is pretty good as grindy life-eating MMOs go. I put in several hours a day over the past five days.
And then … after I logged out of the game and was shutting down for the night … a Steam box popped up saying “Uploading screen shot”.
Say or think what you will, I have deleted Steam and New World and I am done with Steam for good this time.
You have arrived at the right conclusion (no never-ending life-ruining grindy MMOs) for entirely the wrong reasons (this is somehow Steam’s fault?!). You clearly fumbled a key sequence and saved a screenshot on your computer.
All the same, it’s still a tick in the “win” column so if you haven’t done a victory lap, I urge you to do so. I’ll be there in spirit.
Yeah, they upload the screenshots to the cloud so you don’t lose them, you can get at them from anywhere and they’re not shared publically unless you choose to. This is a convenient feature that has helped me out since I use a virtual PC. They do it for free instead of having a “steam plus” paid service for their bells and whistles.
If you’re willing to quit steam on principal, consider giving your money to services which are not walled gardens / restrictive ecosystems. GOG for example sells you games instead of ‘licensing’ them and does not burden you with DRM. This is a very good thing for a lot of reasons I won’t go into now.
I think you’ll find that’s not right. The decision on that matter rests with the publisher, not the vendor. Pretty much all commercial software, games included, work that way.
Certainly our games have the identical EULA, including that part, whether sold on GoG, Steam, Epic or anywhere else.
Screenshot key in Steam is F12 so it’s not even a “sequence”, they likely just bumped the key if it wasn’t intentional.
If that’s what it took to swear off Steam forever then I have to assume they were looking for excuses to uninstall anyway. Which, no skin off my nose so happy uninstalling. GOG might be their best option or buying indie games off itch.io since all the other major clients are worse than Steam.
Yeah, the user has to hit the screenshot key for that to happen. Perhaps by default Steam uploads them with your profile? I don’t know, my screenshot key is Scroll Lock and my Steam does not upload them by default. You can choose, look in the settings. But Steam stores the screenshots for free, and it’s handy when you want to share a screenshot online, just send the link and anyone can view it. I often go through my screenshots and upload the ones I want to share.
As a software engineer, web designer, and database administrator I’m as paranoid as anyone but I’ve been using Steam since the beginning and they don’t do anything weird that I’ve ever seen.
I quite like Steam. I mean, I can rant about various things (unfair refunds policy, annoying tray app) but these are fairly minor compared to many of the other gaming portals.
The store search functionality works reasonably well, they have good deals and generally it “just works”.
You have fairly manual control over the install files, and none of the intrusion of some other platforms (e.g. mandatory requirement of linking Facebook or Google account.)
4 stars.
Steam is great! I fired up a game I hadn’t played for over a year last night, and who knows what computer I last played it on. Came right up where I had left off because the save file is stored online.
My mini-keyboard doesn’t even have F keys; there might be some way to enable them with multiple key presses but I have no idea how. I am as certain as I possibly can be that I did not take a screen shot. The box came up after I had closed the game and was hitting “Shut down”. I hadn’t pressed any key – was clicking the mouse.
I recall that Steam had a lot of problems in their early days (it was a long time ago and I don’t recall much of it) but after one of those problems turned my brand new hard drive into an expensive paperweight I gave up on it. I am far from the only one; a lot of people won’t / don’t use Steam.
I have a lot of games through GOG and other sources that don’t use DRM or the privacy invading background tricks of many publishers, nor the horrific clients that bog down the whole system … and no online games that require being online for a single-player game.
I know many won’t care but I just wanted to alert others who may care to one of the semi-secret tricks Steam uses; I had never seen that “Uploading screenshot” message until the time I was entering Shut Down right after quitting the game. I don’t know if the screenshot was of something in the game or if it was a screenshot of my home screen. I’m too much of a privacy freak use a program that does stuff like this.
This November, it will have been 10 years since I bought a physical PC game (Skyrim was the last one).
I’ve used Steam daily in that time. If you take a screenshot during a game, when you exit a game a popup will appear showing you any screenshots you took during that session; you can jump to the drive they are in or upload them to the Cloud.
Sorry you don’t like it. Best of luck with your other platforms.
You probably have a function button that toggles your top row into F keys.
Let’s look at this realistically. Either:
A) You accidentally pressed F12.
B) Steam set up a super secret way to take a screenshot of your desktop for some nefarious reason, but also did such a bad job that they notify you that they did it.
Uses for what? If Valve wanted super-secret access to what your computer is up to, they wouldn’t do it by taking pictures of your screen and looking at them, they’d install some rootkit or otherwise access your system at a system/memory level. And, if they WERE trying to stare over your shoulder at your screen, they wouldn’t be telling you about it with a pop-up notification.
Either you took a screenshot on accident (almost certainly) or something within the game took a screenshot via some glitch (though that seems very unlikely). Don’t care if you never use Steam again or not but this is nothing to “warn” people about.
Yeah, it’s not like it’s Epic we’re talking about!
(Disclaimer: I do think Epic is a bit scummy in terms of anti-consumer tactics - I’m not a fan of Epic exclusives - but I’ve picked up some free games there).