They left Steam, criticizing Valve, because they were a little fed up with Gabe Newell‘s company and its mentality.

If you’ve tried to play NieR: Automata on a PC, you’ve probably used Special K. This graphics and performance enhancement pack can be used with many games, including NieR, Elden Ring, and Persona 4, to hopefully improve their performance. Although it has been supplanted by other mods for a few titles over the years, the self-styled Swiss Army knife of PC gaming marches on. However, not so for its creator’s Steam account.

Kaldaien, the creator of Special K, announced on GitHub that they were deleting their Steam account after 20 years. They criticized the platform in eight points, including its update policy, indifference to feedback, and its overall impact on PC gaming. Kaldaien’s main frustration with Steam is its update policy. Kaldaien is frustrated that Steam extends its platform to the games you buy, so you can’t manage one without dealing with the other.

“In 2002, the client ran on Windows 98. Over the years, they added all kinds of unnecessary and undefeatable features to the DRM client that hindered software compatibility. Games purchased on a Windows 98 machine later required Windows XP, then Windows 7, and finally Windows 10. You no longer have the liberty of buying a game from wherever you want. You must consider whether the store will continue to receive patches and support your hardware and software, and whether your online friends bought the game from the same store.”

“The native Steam Input API is an abomination. Many games that use it have fallback code to use operating system input APIs. However, Valve’s unbelievably shortsighted design deliberately hooks and blocks access to those APIs as part of Steam Input’s initialization. By the end of my bitter dealings with Valve, I was simply working around bugs in the Steam client. There was zero hope, so I didn’t even waste my time reporting the bugs,” Kaldaien wrote.

Steam certainly deserves scrutiny, and many of Kaldaien’s broader points are not without merit. As for the modder’s specific complaints, perhaps the problems are much broader than a single storefront.

Source: PCGamer, GitHub, Special K