A few days ago I wrote about the Junk Store coming to Steam, a special plugin for Steam Deck to bring GOG and Epic Games compatibility unofficially - but it seems to be a short lived idea.
It is already available as a free and open source plugin for the Decky Loader plugin system, but this was going to be completely standalone, and a paid product for the convenience of just having it right on Steam.
Even though Valve had clearly reviewed the Steam page, and so would have seen what it actually was to even allow the page to go live, it seems Valve may have backtracked on that. It's not clear though if this was done by Valve, or by the developer, the Steam page is just gone. Looking on SteamDB the note mentions "This app has been retired and is no longer available on the Steam store."
Pictured - Junk Store
Perhaps not really surprising. While Valve do allow a lot of weird stuff on their store, a launcher that has a primary purpose of launching other games from other stores might have been a bridge too far.
I've reached out to both Valve and the Junk Store developers to find out exactly what happened, and will update if I get any reply from either party.
Update - 16/10/2024 - 07:20 UTC: the Junk Store developers posted on Reddit that it was Valve who took it down. It was taken down not due to the Epic or GOG features, but specifically because it modifies Steam itself.
Here's what Valve support said to them:
That's not how the world works, easier access being sold is still access being sold.
It also doesn't work the way you seem to think it does. It's not access that's sold, it's a client. Do you think Google can sue Hey for "selling access" to GMail?
First time hearing of Hey, from what I can find out it's an email service? Gmail (as well as every other email service probably) allows you to get/send email from other client software. Mainly used for Thunderbird/Outlook but gmail too allows you to get emails from other services in itself, is that the feature you mean? That feature was required in the early 90s & earlier, for email services didnt have webpages back then, and that feature stuck over time. Mainly thanks to Outlook probanly
No company in their right mind would allow a store to have paid access and not see a dime from it.
Last edited by based on 18 October 2024 at 10:40 am UTC
...but Valve's official response doesn't even come close to talking about such worries.
It's plain to see they were only acting on the most obvious and glaring issue... any game dev publishing a game that modifies steam itself poses a serious security risk to steam (and qualitity/stability too).
Valve can't take this lightly given the sheer amount of money people put into their steam accounts, how much effort some crooks put into steam account hijacking attempts, etc.
And if they open an exception to one dev, they might be pressed to accept others, and then Pandora's Box would open up.
Maybe somewhere in the future Valve will develop a Steam API for apps that want to dinamically expose multiple Steam Library entries for a single steam app, but honestly this looks unlikely.
It's more likely that people will have to go to a steam app entry, this opens up a third-party games list and lets you launch whatever third-party game. If that steam app can be installed from gaming mode, can be launched and navigated fullscreen and can launch 3rd-party games still in fullscreen in gaming mode without breaking any steam integration features, that's friendly enough for most people looking to enjoy 3rd-party game stores on a Steam Deck
Also any attempt to legaly pressure Valve into allowing 3rd-party games into their main games list on gaming mode is doomed. The law everywhere is ok with the PS4/5, Xbox and Nintendo consoles which completely prevent 3rd-party apps, why would it have an issue with what's already the most open console ever?
ps: plenty 'normal' users have actually gone into Desktop Mode a couple times, as is plain to see from years of posts in the "Steam Deck" Discussions Forum in Steam (i'm talking windows joe who never touched linux and doesn't even usually mod his games here, not just the more engaged gamers that poke at everything when need arises)
Last edited by Marlock on 19 October 2024 at 10:58 pm UTC
I never cared for these stores, but from what I picked up, a normal user(*) does not have access to Epic store on Steam Deck, and would get access by buying this thingy.But that is just a distinction you are making. Everyone has the option to access the store on any machine. If you are intellectually capable is an entirely different matter.
(*) A normal user never goes into a thing called "desktop mode" on a handheld console. And yes, I do think that's the "normal" (usual) behaviour.
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