Buy games on GoG when you can
Comment on "what happened??"
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Question, is buying games on Steam “owning”?
Broken_Monitor@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I prefer to buy from Steam because they allow me to play my games easily and invest time and money in Linux which results in more freedom for all gamers. I’ve been very disappointed with GoG’s record on Linux.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 11 months ago
You still don’t own them. Read their ToS.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
They don’t have to provide a way to ibstall the games in perpetuity, but I’m pretty sure the ToS don’t provide a way for them to stop you from keeping a DRM copy you’ve downloaded.
Broken_Monitor@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Back them up on a hard drive and their ToS doesn’t mean squat anymore. I guess that takes a little more effort and investment but if you want to own the game without DRM that will do it.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
ToS doesn’t mean squat here if the law says otherwise. It’s insane to me that US has this the reverse way.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 11 months ago
It’s not just the US. You don’t buy games from GOG, only licences which they can revoke at any time. This is not illegal.
nehal3m@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
No, it’s not. If Valve goes belly up you can kiss your games and the infrastructure they need goodbye. Also you don’t get to resell games you already own or give them away and selling accounts is against ToS. If you die your games are gone, you can’t give your account away legally.
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Yeah, that’s what I thought. Not trying to be a smart ass, I just keep seeing things like this for Ubisoft and other companies and people just crap on them, but then Steam is almost never criticised for the same issue (or I am not seeing those memes). I guess Valve makes enough other things right so people are more happy to overlook this?
huginn@feddit.it 11 months ago
Steam is not a publicly traded company, so they don’t pull this kind of skullduggery in service of the shareholders.
They’re a company full of people who, gasp, like video games: unlike the average navel gazing, brainless, Harvard Business School CEO.
Given their track record they’ve been more consistently “pro gamer” than other companies and are given a lot of leeway for that.
SmilingSolaris@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Valve has stated that if their store was ever to be discontinued they would remove all DRM they have in place to allow for the games to be played without it. This was a long long time ago though.
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
Yeah, promises change over time. Hope they can keep their promise on that but not sure how that would even be feasible with a catalogue that large.
Pacattack57@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Steam gets a pass because their business practices are consumer friendly.
ObsidianNebula@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Eh, their business practices regarding selling games are fairly consumer friendly, but overall they have quite a few issues themselves that aren’t great. I wouldn’t hold them up as a great company but rather a better company than the competition, which is a fairly low bar.
ulterno@lemmy.kde.social 11 months ago
But you can, rite your ID and Password on a paper under your keyboard and “forget” it before death.
nehal3m@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
It’s possible, sure, but if pressed Valve will ban the account.
ulterno@lemmy.kde.social 11 months ago
Just don’t let them be pressed ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Stovetop@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Sadly no, your Steam account can be closed at any time and you have no recourse to access your purchased content if that happens. Likewise, Steam can suspend service and you lose access to your content as well.
But that’s not just a Steam thing, it’s digital media as a whole. Even a physical disc is not ownership, it’s just a license to access the content it contains.
helpmyusernamewontfi@lemmy.today 11 months ago
No. Do you prefer subscription services?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
You can run them only a limited time without Valve giving their ok.
figjam@midwest.social 11 months ago
May be an unpopular opinion but I don’t care what happens to my games when I die because I will be dead. If I want to pass something on to any kids I have it will be memories.
dan@upvote.au 11 months ago
Not unless it’s DRM-free. You don’t own games that have DRM. You just have a license to use them, which can be revoked at any time.
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 11 months ago
So in other words, no, since it’s impossible for a Steam game to be DRM-free. Some have less DRM than others, but unless they let you download an installer that you can use without connecting to their servers then there’s still DRM.
dan@upvote.au 11 months ago
It’s definitely possible for Steam games to be DRM-free, especially older ones. pcgamingwiki.com/…/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_Stea…
For those games, you can literally just make a copy of the game directory after downloading it, and back it up somewhere. Everything you need is in there.
Of course, the best idea is still to buy games on GOG instead.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Depends on the game.
There’s a surprisingly large amount of games on steam that are DRM free, meaning once downloaded, running the game doesn’t actually require steam.
FelixCress@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They should all be like this.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
GOG
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
But then, how do you keep the game for later, like reinstalling it on a system that does not run steam, that won’t work right?
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
It’s just a folder. You keep the folder.
When you want to run it, you go to the folder and double-click the .exe of the game.
If you want, you can drop a shortcut to that exe somewhere convenient.
“Installing” is just putting files in a folder somewhere, and maybe adding a shortcut to the start menu so the user can find and run whatever it was installed. There’s nothing special about it.
Unless the .exe needs some other program to be installed, or some files that need to be available somewhere else, you can just move the folder the game is in wherever you like, another PC even, and it’ll still run just fine.
fluckx@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This. I used to have a bunch of the games backed up on a hard drive because copying the files over & patching was faster than redownloading it.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Pirate magic, me boy!
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V
theneverfox@pawb.social 11 months ago
Sure, you can do that. It’s obviously on you to figure out how you want to do it, but that’s exactly what no DRM means
And I don’t mean it’s technically possible, you can backup the game files through steam and put them on a flash drive, and there you go
superkret@feddit.org 11 months ago
Is there an easy way to check which games in my library are DRM free?
fishbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Not currently in a place where I can check, but I believe pcgamingwiki.com has this info.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Steam has no built-in tool to filter them. You can try running them without steam, but the easiest way is likely to check the PCGamingWiki page for a given game. The “availability” section should list what kind of DRM the game has, if any.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I imagine it would be for older games though?
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Why do you assume that?
Any dev can decide to just not to code their game in a way that requires steam. Valve doesn’t modify whatever the studio decides to ship in any way to change that.
elvith@feddit.org 11 months ago
Wait… Half Life 2 is the game that forced me to install steam, create an account and wasn’t playable without it is “now” in this list and is DRM free?