Crestwave

SO did go overboard at times; I’ve seen quite a few instances where posts were locked for being “duplicates” of completely unrelated problems. Oftentimes they were accompanied with unnecessarily rude messages as well.

But yes, the unwillingness of some (most?) people to use the search function baffles me. They’d prefer to write a narrative essay in SO for their FizzBuzz assignment and argue with mods rather than type a few keywords to instantly get the solution.

Less games actually use Steam’s DRM than people think. Even the ones that require Steam to run often just use their API for stuff like multiplayer functionality or displaying leaderboards.

There’s an open source library that you can sub in to emulate the API and run the games on LAN without Steam. I believe there’s no decryption involved so it should be 100% legal, just like how Proton reimplements Windows APIs.

Valve does seem to contribute substantially to the development of their games, at least. Turtle Rock’s Evolve and Back 4 Blood had nowhere near the success of L4D/2, which is still going strong 15 years later.