Junk Store Has Been Removed From The Steam Store

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There has been a lot of controversy this week in the Steam Deck community, and the trend seems to be continuing. Recently, Junk store announced that they were going to be making a paid version of their Decky Loader plugin, which operates similarly to Heroic Games Launcher, and launching it on the Steam store. In an announcement posted on the r/JunkStore subreddit, the team acknowledged that this was going to be a challenge, but they felt justified with this rebuilt product becoming a paid application that can be purchased on Steam. Unfortunately, it seems to have hit a snag.

The team was able to get to product on Steam and even get a Steam store page available, but today, I noticed that the page is no longer available. When searching or trying to go to the direct link, it will not appear and take me back to the main store page. While this doesn't surprise me as much, I was actually more surprised that it got a store page at all, it's still worth mentioning.

I have reached out to Junk Store for comment on this development, but have yet to receive a response.

The decision to go to a paid application on Steam has been a controversial one. While some people are very excited and supportive, there are others who feel that this leaves a sour taste going from a free and open source plugin to a closed off paid application. In the Q&A section of their announcement, they do mention that the current plugin will NOT be taken down and still be usable and that GOG integration will be released as free and open source when they are ready, so you will still have the option to download it for free if preferred.

However, pricing the tool will be difficult. I have seen commenters saying anything above $10 or $15 will be too much and a lot saying they don't want to pay at all. There are plans for new features and storefronts, as well as cloud saves, that the team wants to implement, but they need the funding to hire a team and specialized programmers to help.

Here is the full Q&A from their Reddit post:

Q: Will this be free?

A: No. This is a completely rebuilt product, using different technologies. The code is not open source. We have had to reimplement everything that Decky provided and more. We need funding to hire developers to provide the features the community wants.

Q: How much will it cost?

A: This is a very tough question. Ask yourself, what is it worth and what value does this add to the user experience? What we aim to do is gauge interest in this project based on wish listed numbers. This will allow us to price it as aggressively as possible while still being able to achieve our goals of hiring a team to take Junk Store to the next level. While it would be nice to give it all away free, the reality is that hiring developers costs money.

Q: When will it be released?

A: When it’s ready. We do not want to rush a half baked product out the door. If you’ve been using Junk Store and followed the progress on the project then you will know that I take a lot of pride in my work. I will not deliver a sub par user experience because I want to get something out quickly. We are still only a team of two, so we ask that you please be patient.

Q: Does this mean that Valve has blessed the project?

A: It’s hard to officially say. It was not explicitly stated, but someone at Valve reviewed the coming soon page and said “This is good to go”. We interpret this as: “all systems go”. We have not had any official communication from Valve outside of this process. We choose to be optimistic and consider this a nod of approval. It certainly wasn’t “knock it off!”

Q: What about existing purchases made via creator platforms?

A: We have gone to great lengths to ensure your existing purchases will be compatible with the Steam version. Once we get an idea of how many users are interested in purchasing this product we can adjust our generosity towards existing supporters in kind. We will endeavour to do what is fair, and more if we can. We are gamers too, we dislike greed as much as you do.

Q: What will happen to the current decky plugin and source code?

A: This will not go anywhere. It’s free, it’s open and it’s our gift to the community. We will aim to maintain compatibility between the two versions for as long as it’s viable. We have already invested a lot of time and effort to ensure that the extensions will be compatible.

Q: What about the current Gog source code, when can we have that?

A: When we are ready to release it. Currently Gog is not free, but it is “source available”. When we are ready to release it as free and open source we will. 

Q: What about new features or store fronts?

A: As you can imagine, the rewrite and retooling has taken a huge amount of time and effort. We still have plans to add more features and store fronts, but our attention is not on that right now. We are still a small unfunded team (two people) doing all of this on our own time and money. We hope that with the Steam release it will allow us to hire the team we so desperately need to improve production speed.

Q: Will this have cloud saves?

A: This is still the same can of worms we have been talking about all along. There is currently super experimental support with huge risks associated with it. We aim to provide this at some point as a stop gap measure while we build up our resources to hire specialised programmers to help with this task.

Q: Will I be able to migrate from the decky version to the Steam version?

A: Yes, this is already functional in the alpha version we are testing on steam. It will require a lot of testing because we do not want users to lose any data through this process.

Junk Store team - Subreddit Post

This is going to be an uphill battle though, and we will follow up on this story once we have some answers from the Junk Store team.

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