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?
Comment on "what happened??"
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 10 months agoDepends 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.
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 10 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 10 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.
vulture_god@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Same - I used this tool which worked great for that workflow:
Lemminary@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Pirate magic, me boy!
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V
theneverfox@pawb.social 10 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 10 months ago
Is there an easy way to check which games in my library are DRM free?
fishbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Not currently in a place where I can check, but I believe pcgamingwiki.com has this info.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 10 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 10 months ago
I imagine it would be for older games though?
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
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 10 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?
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
FelixCress@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They should all be like this.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
GOG