You can still play it but increasingly games are becoming very different from what you bought.
I’ve started noticing a disturbing trend. More and more games that are older being sold at steep discounts or “free to play” and simultaneously jampacked with invasive telemetry and/or ads/microtransactions. And since Steam won’t let you play older versions, those games are effectively dead.
smeg@feddit.uk 1 day ago
You can still play them on your GameCube or Wii though, or take copies of the discs and play them on anything that runs Dolphin
kadup@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
While you’re not wrong, by that logic, it’s actually fairly trivial to take my Steam downloads drive and run it on any computer even without my Steam account.
smeg@feddit.uk 22 hours ago
Does that work? I always assumed games with DRM wouldn’t work if they couldn’t authenticate to your Steam account.
kadup@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
It works in the same way that dumping your GameCube games and running them on Dolphin works… It’s quick and easy, but it’s against the ToS and requires breaking DRM.
Steam’s DRM is weak, and in some interviews some Valve developers even gave hints that this is on purpose. Many Steam games will simply run without Steam if you just double click the .exe in the install folder, and the vast majority that only rely on Steam’s DRM can be opened by running a free “Steam Emulator” software that pretends to be an active Steam account with a correct license.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
A lot of Steam games don’t have any DRM, and most of the rest are pretty easy to strip.
Give it a shot sometime. Completely quit out of Steam, turn off your internet, and try running some of your older Steam games directly from the Steam folder.
I do this somewhat often when my kids are on my other computer playing games on my account and I still want to play something. It’s a little trickier on Linux since you need something to run the Proton/WINE layer, so I mostly stick to Linux-native games in that pretty rare case.