Steam denying a great program

[heythereu]

Hello, I wanted to bring up a topic that's been confused me lately. Steam is notorious for allowing almost anything on their platform, but programs that heavily revolve around gaming don't pass? I recently stumbled upon a video with around 500 views.

The video is about someone who contacted Steam with an exact description of what they wanted to provide: a tool called LANviaSteam, which allows playing LAN-only Steam games over the internet with your Steam friends. Steam's response was basically "no guarantee, but we don't see why not." The creator spent around 6 months working on it, only to be denied from the Steam store because it supposedly doesn't fit any of the categories, even though it clearly does. (Ex. in video: Player Tools)
 

What's sucks about this is that since LANviaSteam uses Steam's networking and friend system, it can't just easily be ported to something else. This leaves the creator with nowhere to turn and their hard work put down the drain.

This whole situation leaves me with a sense of confusion and frustration. Why does Steam allow so much on their platform, yet deny something that clearly is directed towards gamers? Wanted to hear some opinions on this cause the only one I come up with is them wanting to make something similar.

[Mark Kaine]

Steam online is already terrible as is, this prob just would make it worse (even though its not a bad idea per say)

 

23 minutes ago, heythereu said:

the only one I come up with is them wanting to make something similar.

entirely possible,  look up where gabe n worked before,  what he did, it wouldn't be surprising *at all*

[dilpickle]

Be honest. You're the creator right . 

[Erioch]

Makes me wonder if the creator researched this before wasting all this time on the project.

[Erioch]

3 minutes ago, dilpickle said:

Be honest. You're the creator right . 

OP has one post.  You're probably right.

[heythereu]

44 minutes ago, dilpickle said:

Be honest. You're the creator right . 

Nah, was looking for Mercenaries 2 co-op methods and it popped up in my recommended. Wouldn't work for my case either way sadly

[xAcid9]

20 minutes ago, heythereu said:

Nah, was looking for Mercenaries 2 co-op methods and it popped up in my recommended. Wouldn't work for my case either way sadly

Hamachi?  https://vpn.net

[Biohazard777]

~6:00
"So actually I paid the German TÜV to do a security review of the code because I wanted to really make sure that everything is good and works fine... I wanted it to be secure and safe for players to use..."
Shows a screenshot of the code score:

Spoiler

Looked it up: https://www.tuvit.de/en/innovations/code-matrix/

https://www.tuvit.de/fileadmin/Content/TUV_IT/pdf/Bestellbedingungen/TUEViT-General-Ordering-Conditions-Codematrix_20210311.pdf
It is a program / tool (which only works on Windows, C/C++ code only)...
From the video I was under the impression an actual team from TÜV did a review...
Don't get me wrong, any kind of code review is better than none, but tools like that (code analyzers) simply aren't good enough for a project like this.

[heythereu]

2 minutes ago, xAcid9 said:

Hamachi?  https://vpn.net

I got it working, PC servers are down and you need EA servers to get online. Used a community server emulator with Hamachi, worked well. Game sucks but it was still fun to mess around

[Seccedonien]

This for sure sounds like something that would bypass allot of game devs that have their games on Steam, Steam also supplies something like this already called Steam Remote Play Together which devs can decide to implement or not where this app sounds like the devs have no say in it like with Hamachi (which also isn't on Steam). Steam (or the dev) might not be truthful about why this app is not allowed to be released.