How can software be a "health risk"?
By acting as a trigger for migraines, epilepsy, and several other conditions where various forms of light can act as triggers for things. In this case, Steam is affecting a surprising number of gamers (myself among them) who have never had any software app other than Steam act as a trigger for our conditions. It's honestly pretty crazy - and so is the response from Valve (which literally includes violating privacy laws in response to being asked to fix the problem).
That's your take on this? Seriously? No. There are numerous conversations (including on the Steam forums) about the problems. Valve has known it's an issue since a few days after they caused it with an update in 2019. They've done nothing to fix the various problems, and taken multiple steps which make things worse, and behaved in actively abusive ways toward the (former) customers trying to get the problems fixed.
I wish I was a troll, that would mean I wouldn't have lost $3000 worth of games which Valve have effectively stolen from me.
I have severe epilepsy, to the point I can't enjoy 90% of shooter games as unexpected flash bangs or just overall too many random lights on screen causes issues for me.
I have never heard of, nor had any issues just because I use Steam for my games, is this a real issue? I googled like crazy for a while, and was unable to find a single report of the Steam Platform causing health issues. Financial issues, all over the place, but not even 1 person saying "I use steam and it caused a seizure"
Funny, because if you type "steam migraine epilepsy" into Google, there's at least half a dozen separate discussions in the first page of results when I try it. Multiple reports of the client affecting users with either or both conditions, and a significant number of examples where specific known triggers have been identified as being added into the Steam client at the time of the update (which, again, was 5 years ago at this point).
Also, if you've actually had any measure of experience with getting professional help with your condition, you've almost certainly heard that, like most issues which are directly connected with the behaviour of the brain, every case is unique and the response to different triggers will be different from others with the same condition as you. It happens with migraines, epilepsy, mental health conditions, and various other things involving the brain. It's great that you don't personally have to deal with the problems which have forced other gamers to leave the platform, but your personal experience will never change how someone else's condition responds to the same stimuli.
I mostly use Epic and GOG (There are some issues for me with the MS store, but not anything like the issues with Steam).
And the point of posting here was that this game hadn't been confirmed to be coming to any store other than Steam. Saying "just use other stores" doesn't help when the game you're asking to be released on other stores hasn't been confirmed to be coming to any other stores yet.
If Steam can cause headaches and epilepsy problems, then why are you interested in a game were builds can cause bullets to be flickering all over the screen with a lot of colours and a bunch of noise? Seems very counterintuitive to complain about Steam causing these issues when this game itself could cause the issues.
Lets consider some facts:
-Within days after the update which caused the problem (over 5 years ago), it was confirmed that the Steam client was causing harm to users with either or both of 2 medical conditions, and has since been found to be affecting several other photosensitive conditions (the first 2 being the ones which come with a risk of hospitalisation).
-Multiple users with no prior history of any computer software behaving as a trigger for our conditions have found that the Steam client appears to be a singular exception to that since this update.
-I've directly tested it and confirmed that the Steam client itself was causing issues for me personally, and ruled out the possibility of the trigger being any other software I was running through or alongside the client.
-It's been over 4 years since I stopped trying to use the Steam client, and in that time, I've regained access to about 90% of the games I had played on Steam while it was causing problems, and none of them has caused any issues when played outside of Steam. The one game I had been playing at the time which I haven't regained personal access to, I've watched a friend play on a different platform, and also had no issues while doing so.
-In more than 30 years of computer use, I've had no instances of any game being found to act as a migraine trigger for me, nor any other computer software, except for the Steam client, in spite of playing easily 10x as many games as I ever had on my (functionally stolen) Steam account, which was worth over $3000 at the time I was forced to abandon it.
-I picked the demo of this game up before it had a Steam page, and have played well over 50 hours of it (probably more than 100, though I haven't kept accurate track). I've never tried running the game through Steam, and I've never had it trigger a migraine in that time.
-Just in the past year, I have hundreds of hours in games more flashy than this one, also without any issues.
Given that there are multiple people other than me who have confirmed they've had similar issues, and I've been involved with tests which confirmed it to be a problem for me, I think putting the blame on Steam is pretty solid. Even without that, having 50+ hours of playtime without it ever causing problems is a pretty clear indication that this game has never been the cause of my problems.
From various users I've seen discussing the issues, there's been more than half a dozen separate specific problems identified, but also a few instances (like at least 1 of my issues) where the details are harder to pin down in a definite way.
The most obvious and easily tested one requires a relatively large library, when it gets into the range of 50+ (depending on screen resolution and zoom settings), scrolling through your library can cause very obvious visible flickering effects as the app re-loads already-loaded assets instead of just keeping them in memory while off-screen. This behaviour in several parts of the app is also responsible for memory leaks which can in some instances result in entire system crashes if you leave your PC running with Steam in the background for long enough. That's extremely rare, but the app eating upwards of 4GB of RAM is fairly common on PCs which are left to run for longer periods of time without restarting.
One of the (very) few issues they actually did fix was that many game icons were animated, and there wasn't any way to disable those animations. So they added the option. Except not really, because when they first added the option, it didn't work. So they "fixed" it. And it only took about 6 months of them "fixing" it repeatedly before it ended up actually getting fixed.