Thanks for clarifying, in particular about the workshop. I think you're right that the service could definitely stand to be decoupled from Steam. While that might be easier said than done (you would still have to implement Valve's downloading/update checking to match the quality of the Steam client to make it as seamless), it would definitely be huge for modding. I mentioned Nexus in my post to get at the idea that modding for a lot of games is far from an ideal system and you pretty much have to pay to get around that in most cases, but an independent Steam workshop page that developers pay to opt into would be a good approach to that. Now I want them to do it...
The input thing does seem like a niche complaint, sorry to say. I don't think I've ever encountered that, and I think even if I did it wouldn't stop me from playing the game, I would just bind the controls myself. I guess this could be decoupled as well, but I don't think the reason that it isn't is necessarily lock-in; I would bet that there just aren't enough people that care about it, so to Valve it would be wasted effort. But now I'm assuming intent so what do I know, really.
That's fair, the input stuff is annoying but it doesn't get in the way of actually being able to play the game or get content -- stuff like modding and multiplayer/online storage is arguably a much bigger issue than needing to build your own controller mapping. I just think it would be really low-hanging fruit.
SDL is currently working on an Action Set equivalent, and I think their plan is to just use configuration files on disk for the most part. So in the same way that ProtonDB is mostly community maintained and outside of Steam and you can look up a game's settings and apply them to a 3rd-party game, what I think would be the easiest improvement would be allowing arbitrary search for community-supplied configs and moving that to be an independent URL that Steam hits that just downloads an encapsulated config file that Steam reads.
There is some way to do share non-Steam configs, if you link a 3rd-party game in Steam you will sometimes in community configs and then see a subset of the normal configs? I have no idea how that subset is calculated or if users need to do something to enable it though, the entire interface around sharing Steam Input configs even for games purchased from Steam is a little bit of a mess, or at least it is on Steam Deck.
I feel like I'm settling by saying this because I'd also like straight-up input binding outside of Steam, but even ignoring stuff like action sets, 3rd-party clients -- just being able to load a community config by typing a game name into a search box instead of needing to build my own would get rid of a lot of my problems, particularly for control schemes like flick stick that require me to take measurements of mouse/gyro sensitivity.
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> but an independent Steam workshop page that developers pay to opt into would be a good approach to that
My current plan for my own games I'm working on is to leverage git for modding support -- I'm not going to build a studio-specific mod hosting service or partner with a company, I similarly don't really like ModDB that much and don't think they're great community players. So instead I'm going bundle a small git client with the final game and use that to download/update mods and handle stuff like versioning, readmes, etc...
That doesn't help with discoverability or ratings, but my thought process is that a lot of games (Terraria, Celeste, Hollow Knight, etc..) are organized around Github/Gitlab/Codeberg already for the primary modding engines, so at least if people are using that they can get issue trackers and embedded wikis, there's a standard way to download, it encourages releasing the mod source, you can look at activity to see whether or not a mod is active, you can have beta branches, you can check for updates without re-downloading everything, you can have a canonical source URL without wondering if a mod is only updated on Workshop/ModDB/whatever.
At least for the moment I don't plan to enable Steam Workshop for any of the games I'm working on, I think git will give me most of the same features minus a search function and user ratings. To be fair, search and user ratings are pretty important though, so :shrug: I'll see how that goes.
The input thing does seem like a niche complaint, sorry to say. I don't think I've ever encountered that, and I think even if I did it wouldn't stop me from playing the game, I would just bind the controls myself. I guess this could be decoupled as well, but I don't think the reason that it isn't is necessarily lock-in; I would bet that there just aren't enough people that care about it, so to Valve it would be wasted effort. But now I'm assuming intent so what do I know, really.