Steam users to be barred from community until they spend $5

[HEXUS]

Aims to curtail spamming and phishing activity and abuse of the platform.

Read more.

[crossy]

Nice to see Valve doing the restrictions, but I would have gone further and made the "unlimited" user grant lapse annually. As the article states, any serious (semi-serious?) Steam user is going to have ponied up at least $5 a year on content, especially with the Humble Bundle sales - damn them!

Where I don't agree though is that registration of boxed content should be excluded - a purchase is a purchase in my book.

Like the idea of the two-factor authentication for account changes. It's becoming more the norm, which suits me fine.

[directhex]

Third-party key activations, e.g. from Humble Bundle, don't count towards the $5

[kalniel]

They're effectively saying that if you want to use their service, you have to have paid them some money to use it. Which is fair enough, just wish they'd be a bit more open about it.

[ZaO]

It's already been like this for years, except, you just had to spend "some" money rather than a minimum amount. I made a second steam account about 4 years back and I couldn't add any friends until I'd bought a game. I bought a game for 99p and the whole service became available.

[The Hand]

About time imho. I'm sure we all get those friend requests from 0-ranked, private-profile individuals with Gabe Newell as their avatar at least once or twice a day.

[CustardInc]

It's already been like this for years, except, you just had to spend "some" money rather than a minimum amount. I made a second steam account about 4 years back and I couldn't add any friends until I'd bought a game. I bought a game for 99p and the whole service became available.

I think you were able to install a free to play game and it would unlock it.

[dturtill]

i think its a great idea im getting fed up of the invites from random scammers (not that i need to worry the amount i have spent on steam

[aniilv]

This is horrible. For instance for family sharing accounts now are limited..Unless of course you buy more stuff!

[KeyboardDemon]

For a long time I was getting a huge number of friend requests from from people that had no or very few friends on Steam, they had no games in their libraries including free to play titles or if they had any games they were only free to play titles and even then they had no history of ever playing a game or winning any achievements etc... At first I used to think that there was no harm in it and accept the invites, but then I would get requests to gift them games or send money so they could buy games, in the end I set Steam to start up in offline mode and it has been that way ever since.

I think this move on Steam's part will stop people from being able to do that sort of thing, which is great. Also I think it means imposing an annual limit would be pointless as people wouldn't set up an account to use for phishing or simply begging if they had to wait 12 months in order to start that.

[bledd]

Should make it $20

[GuidoLS]

Nice to see Valve doing the restrictions, but I would have gone further and made the "unlimited" user grant lapse annually. As the article states, any serious (semi-serious?) Steam user is going to have ponied up at least $5 a year on content, especially with the Humble Bundle sales - damn them!

Where I don't agree though is that registration of boxed content should be excluded - a purchase is a purchase in my book.

Like the idea of the two-factor authentication for account changes. It's becoming more the norm, which suits me fine.

I've got at least a couple of thousands of dollars in Steam activated games. I can honestly say I've bought exactly 2 of them through the Steam client - Half Life 2 episodes 2 and 3. With over "8 years of service" (9 in July), 100+ AAA games in my library, and scores more of freebies from Indie Gala, etc, I'd like to see them say I haven't spent enough $$. Anymore, if I'm given the choice between Steam and GOG, my money goes to GOG - which don't activate on Steam. Nothing against Steam, per se - I feel GOG deserves it more. DRM free, and all that.

[azrael-]

While I'm all for this move I think having to spend those $5 directly in the Steam store is a weasily attempt to get more business in the store. We all know by now the Steam store is usually the most expensive place to buy games on Steam.

However, as much as I generally applaud this move I'd much rather they fix the smurf and/or hacker issue in CS:GO. It's really starting to ruin the game.

[crossy]

I've got at least a couple of thousands of dollars in Steam activated games. I can honestly say I've bought exactly 2 of them through the Steam client - Half Life 2 episodes 2 and 3. With over "8 years of service" (9 in July), 100+ AAA games in my library, and scores more of freebies from Indie Gala, etc, I'd like to see them say I haven't spent enough $$. Anymore, if I'm given the choice between Steam and GOG, my money goes to GOG - which don't activate on Steam. Nothing against Steam, per se - I feel GOG deserves it more. DRM free, and all that.

"100+ AAA games"? You must have pretty large disk to store that lot on, either that or most of the 100 are Indy "pocket games". I've been doing offloads of my (tiny) Steam library because I'm having trouble fitting current titles in my (previously capacious) 500GB SSD. Then again, mainstream titles seem to need 50GB+ these days - so if you were using just these kinds of titles then you'd need a 6TB drive!

GOG is not a service I've used, but I've generally heard it praised - I really must get around to having a look. In fact, the only recent criticism I've seen is this "GOG Customer Service Rep Argues With Customer over Transphobia in Pillars of Eternity" and even there I'd say the company behaved reasonably.

[kalniel]

"100+ AAA games"? You must have pretty large disk to store that lot on,

Nice thing about Steam is you don't have to store it on a local disk - you can just pull down games that you're interested in playing and put them back again when you've not played a game for a while.

[KeyboardDemon]

Nice thing about Steam is you don't have to store it on a local disk - you can just pull down games that you're interested in playing and put them back again when you've not played a game for a while.

And with an increasing number of games providing cloud save options you don't even need to back up your game data anymore. You can uninstall a game when you are no longer interested in playing it and then install it again when you are in the mood using your cloud save to pick up where you left off.