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 2 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 2 months ago
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 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 2 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 2 months ago
Same - I used this tool which worked great for that workflow:
Lemminary@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Pirate magic, me boy!
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 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 2 months ago
Is there an easy way to check which games in my library are DRM free?
fishbone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Not currently in a place where I can check, but I believe pcgamingwiki.com has this info.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 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 2 months ago
I imagine it would be for older games though?
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 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 2 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 2 months ago
FelixCress@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They should all be like this.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
GOG