It has long been my opinion that Steam being the premier PC gaming storefront is not a problem for consumers. Indeed, I would argue that when Steam had a higher market share years ago, it was even better – more deals, more enhancements, and the same smooth experience. Monopolies are never ideal, but with Valve (and it being a non-public company) we seemed to have lucked into one of those Philosopher-King situations that ended up better than the alternatives.

What I am slowly discovering though, is Steam’s crushing presence in the game mod department.

Project Zomboid recently came out with a new build, and seeing a spate of Youtube clips of it has renewed my interest in the game (after 6ish years). However, a lot of those clips also talked about all of the mods that are still “required” to fix some of the rough edges to the game. Seeing as I had bought the game on GOG all those years ago, I naturally headed over to Nexusmods and… huh. Definitely not the same options available on Steam. Maybe there is just not a lot of updates yet? Went to the official forums to see if mods are listed there, but that was useless. Finally, I started Googling around to see how I could download Steam Workshop mods and use them with GOG. Short answer: don’t bother.

I’m not saying this is an impossible situation. I could probably just, you know, play the game as-is. If I dedicated more time to the endeavor, I could also probably figure out a solution to how to get Steam mods working with my GOG version of the game. For a moment, I did actually consider purchasing Project Zomboid on Steam, “subscribing” to a bunch of the mods to get them to download, copying the files when they show up in my Steam folder, and then refunding the game. Or just take the L and purchase the game on Steam and start using it from there. It’s even on sale at the moment for like $14.

Here’s the thing: it’s incredibly clear to me now that if you EVER suspect you may want to mod a game, you need to buy it on Steam. Do all games have Steam Workshops? No. Are there games in which Nexusmods is the definitive place to be? Yes. But there will never be a situation in which the Steam version of the game is penalized from a modding perspective, whereas the opposite is true.

And that sucks.

Prior to this moment, I preferred having all my games on Steam because it was convenient, and easy to track time played. However, I was not opposed to taking advantage of those Epic Game Store coupons they used to have, or when something only launched on GOG or whatever. Now? I do feel trapped within the ecosystem. Well, “trapped,” with golden handcuffs and all. But I’m starting to realize that perhaps I was only looking at first-order monopoly effects, and blind to the second-order ones.

Of course, the ideal solution here would be for Steam to make it easier to download Steam Workshop mods without having to own the game. Or at least making it more straight-forward.

In the absence of that though… well, full Steam ahead.